It started in Florida with “Alligator Alcatraz.” Then came news of the “Speedway Slammer” in Indiana. Most recently the Trump administration announced plans for yet another immigration detention center, this one in Nebraska, to be called the “Cornhusker Clink.”
The alliteration, borrowed from the science of selling, goes down as easy as a Krispy Kreme for some Americans, for whom it is all in good fun. Memes have been made. T-shirts have been touted. The president has joked that detainees in Florida should learn the best way to run from an alligator, in the event of an escape from the center that opened last month in the Everglades.
“It’s got a ring to it,” Ron Buschelman, 66, said of the name “Cornhusker Clink” as he stood on Monday outside a farm supply store on the outskirts of Omaha, Nebraska. Referring to President Donald Trump, he added, “He’s got a very good sense of humor. And there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s a clink. It is. And we’re the Cornhusker State. I like it.”
For other people, though, there was something repugnant about a government that would make light of an expanding mass deportation program that has sent immigrants to countries that they are not from, separated parents from their children, and deployed masked officers in unmarked cars to grab people off the streets.
“It’s not a reason to joke around,” said Roxana Cortes-Mills, legal director of the Center for Immigrant and Refugee Advancement, a nonprofit group in Omaha.
Still, ginning up indignation appears to be the point, at least in part, in this new era of government by troll. It is a strategy that the administration is leaning into in Trump’s second term — one that his administration is particularly fond of deploying in the realm of immigration enforcement.
The names given to the detention centers are only part of it. The official X social media accounts of the White House and the Department of Homeland Security make heavy use of the new style — an irreverence synced to the fast-moving ironic currents of the chronically online, detached from concerns about impropriety.
In February, the White House posted a video of immigrants boarding a deportation flight, their shackles clanking, and labeled it ASMR, a type of video that is popular online for delivering pleasant sounds. A number of other mocking posts have followed.
Some of the administration’s posts have veered into white nationalist territory. Earlier this month, Homeland Security posted an Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruitment appeal asking “Which Way, American Man?” A number of observers took it as a reference to a 1978 book, “Which Way, Western Man?,” written by white supremacist William Gayley Simpson.
In a subsequent news release, Homeland Security officials accused news outlets of failing to report on victims of immigrants in the country without legal status who commit violent crimes, and of claiming that the department’s social media posts were “appealing to ‘white identity’” online.
Asked by reporters last week about the post, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for DHS, replied, “Where are we quoting a white supremacist?”
In the same news release, Homeland Security said that its “social media reach” had exploded in the last six months, “from 3.5 million weekly impressions in February to 46.1 million in July 2025.” The growth was the result, officials said, of the department’s “enhanced ability to effectively communicate critical information to the American public.”
The flippantly named detention facilities are all state-federal partnerships, part of an effort to expand detention capacity around the country as the Trump administration works to meet a goal it has set of 1 million deportations a year.
James Uthmeier, the Florida attorney general, was the first to speak publicly of “Alligator Alcatraz,” announcing in an online video in June that it would be built on a former airstrip in the middle of the Everglades.
Detainees at the facility have complained that the lights stay on throughout the night, and that the tents that house them leak during the area’s frequent rainstorms. Last week, a federal judge ordered that much of the facility be dismantled, and that no more detainees be sent there. The state of Florida is appealing the decision, and Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has said his state will soon open a second detention center, to be called “Deportation Depot,” in an empty prison west of Jacksonville.
Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, said the branding of the detention centers reflected Trump’s knack for affixing catchy nicknames or descriptions to political opponents and to legislation like the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the tax and spending plan that he signed into law last month. Among many other things, that bill provides funding for 80,000 new immigrant detention beds.
“It’s more populist,” Brinkey said of Trump’s tactic. “It’s something where people will read it and remember it, where having arcane legal language or talking in more than a quick sound bite gets lost in a culture with so much content.”
Brinkley saw some loose precedents in American politics. During the administration of President Herbert Hoover, a Republican, Democrats popularized the label “Hooverville” to both describe Depression-era homeless encampments and to pin the blame for them on Hoover, who turned out to be a one-term president.
Rick Perlstein, a progressive historian of American conservatism, said the jokey names reminded him of language used to denigrate opponents in war.
“It’s quite plainly intended to humiliate and dehumanize the people who are sent to these places,” he said.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement that “highlighting the dangerous criminal illegal aliens the Trump administration is deporting is not dehumanizing,” adding, “We won’t apologize for deporting illegal aliens or for sharing our successful efforts with the American people.”
In interviews, some Trump supporters said they thought the names were clever and effective.
Referring to “Alligator Alcatraz,” Michael Alexander, 60, of Altamonte Springs, Florida, said the name “spells out the fact that we’re taking this seriously.”
“If you remember Alcatraz, when it was open, before they closed it down, you didn’t want to go there,” Alexander said, speaking of the former prison on an island in San Francisco Bay. He had nothing against legal immigration, he said, noting that his wife was an immigrant.
“I adore my wife,” he said. “A lot of my best friends are immigrants. We want you here. But we want you to be here legally.”
In Omaha on Monday, Alberto Lopez, 62, whose parents moved to the mainland United States from Puerto Rico, chafed at the names “Alligator Alcatraz” and “Cornhusker Clink.”
“That’s not good leadership,” he said. “If you’re going to be a good leader, you have to know your boundaries and how to talk to individuals.”
The Nebraska facility, a partnership between Homeland Security and the state, is to hold as many as 280 detainees in McCook, a small town between Omaha and Denver. In announcing the partnership last week, Homeland Security posted an illustration on X of corn cobs wearing ICE baseball caps. Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, wrote that the facility would “help remove the worst of the worst out of our country.”
The name immediately generated controversy. Roger Garcia, a Democrat who chairs the Board of Commissioners in Douglas County, Nebraska, wrote on Facebook that “Cornhusker Clink” had been devised as “something to laugh about, just like ‘Alligator Alcatraz’.” He continued, “But woe to you who laugh now and to those who use your power to harm instead of nurture harmony and compassion in our society.”
Sen. Megan Hunt, a progressive in the state’s nonpartisan Legislature, called on the University of Nebraska, whose sports teams are known as the Cornhuskers, to enforce its trademark rights.
“Using ‘Cornhusker’ to brand an ICE detention camp is a disgrace,” she wrote.
Bret Younkin, the chair of the Republican Party in Brown County, Nebraska, said he thought it made sense to open a detention center in the state, and that previous administrations had let the immigration issue grow out of control. But he was of two minds about the name “Cornhusker Clink,” and its power to offend.
He said the country had generally grown overly worried about hurting people’s feelings, and that the oversensitivity might have helped fuel the influx of immigrants without lawful status.
Yet Younkin also said he would prefer that detention centers be built “without the names,” even though he saw them as a masterstroke of branding.
"Anybody talks about ‘Alligator Alcatraz,’ and everybody knows exactly what they mean,” he said.
Beth Zacharias, 63, an Omaha resident who was leaving a Walmart store on Monday afternoon, expressed similarly mixed feelings. She said that opening a detention center in the state was a good idea, and that immigrants should not enter or stay in the country illegally. But when asked about the name “Cornhusker Clink,” she wrinkled her nose.
“To me, it sounds harsh,” she said. “I want everybody to feel like they’re a person, you know? They might have broken the law, and they need to fix it, but, you know, they shouldn’t be laughed at for it.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2025 The New York Times
