“‘Alligator Alcatraz’ opened in July 2025 with the capacity to detain around 3,000 people. Amnesty International’s research concludes that people arbitrarily detained in “Alligator Alcatraz” are being held in inhuman and unsanitary conditions, including overflowing toilets with fecal matter seeping into where people are sleeping, limited access to showers, exposure to insects without protective measures, lights on 24 hours a day, poor quality food and water, and lack of privacy.” – Amnesty International, 2025[1]
Introduction
The controversial opening of Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center and the murder of
Geraldo Lunas Campos have sparked discussion surrounding the exceedingly brutal conditions of ICE detention. Dr. Miron Clay-Gilmore’s racism-as-war thesis provides a theoretical basis for conceptualizing the racialized and gendered logics of ICE’s apparatus of detention. This comes into sharp relief in relation to longstanding hypersexual characterizations of Latino men in America. Using the racism-as-war thesis and understanding the carceral state and immigrant detention as a literal and conceptual locale conspicuously reflecting and reproducing racialized phobics and imaginaries, I understand ICE detention as a form of carceral counterinsurgency. I aim to illustrate how ICE’s detention apparatus functions as a technology which operationalizes gendered and racialized imaginaries: Wherein longstanding characterizations of the libidinous, sexually threatening Latino man help constitute the social imaginaries which render his subjection intelligible. I will first elucidate Clay-Gilmore’s racism-as-war thesis, its theoretical synthesis, and its insightful framing and empirical emphasis on counterinsurgency. Then, I will contextualize Latino male characterizations within the theory of phallicism before drawing historical parallels in framing ICE detention and operations as a form of carceral counterinsurgency. Ultimately, arguing that the case of ICE detention underscores the generalizability of the racism-as-war thesis and its insight into counterinsurgent forms of governing the racialized male target.
Theoretical Framing: Phallicism, Social Dominance Theory, and Racism-as-war thesis
In conceptualizing counterinsurgency, I draw from Clay-Gilmore, who understands counterinsurgency as essentially any actions governments take in suppressing or neutralizing targeted populations,[2] and as the endeavor of socially engineering racialized and formerly colonized populations.2 This definition is not limited to conceptualizing “insurgents” as direct political threats; rather, it emphasizes the theoretical and structural relationship between the state’s modes of social governance and those socially prefigured as threats that necessitate suppression. Latino/a people in America, especially immigrants, have historically been constructed as social threats who, as a result, remain systematically targeted; in this sense, they occupy a position analogous to those subjected to counterinsurgency. For this reason, I understand ICE’s apparatus of dominion as a form of counterinsurgency warfare. Clay-Gilmore’s racism-as-war thesis utilizes counterinsurgency as a framework and empirical anchor in illustrating how this social engineering comes to target specifically racialized males. Clay-Gilmore draws on social psychologist Jim Sidanius in utilizing Social Dominance Theory (SDT). SDT simply refers to how societies are organized based on group-based social hierarchies where dominant groups benefit, and subordinate groups suffer negative social effects.[3] SDT is an essential presupposition to understanding the Subordinate Male Target Hypothesis (SMTH). SDT posits that social hierarchies based on age, gender,...