Laura Loomer Suggested That Trump Should Feed 65 Million People to Alligators

When Donald Trump was elected, everyone who had paid attention to his campaign knew that its core objective was mass deportation. Trump wanted to round up immigrants and send them out of the United States, arguing that these undocumented people were responsible for all of America's ills.

Of course, deportation doesn't have to be done maliciously. You can deport people for good reasons with a heavy heart. Trump and his camp, though, have decided to go in a different direction. Their new budget bill has lots of funding for new detention facilities, and recently, Trump and his allies have been celebrating a makeshift prison camp in Florida they are calling "Alligator Alcatraz." Well, Laura Loomer posted on X about the camp, and here's what she said.

Laura Loomer is a far-right activist who has been known to meet with President Trump, even though she does not have any formal role inside his administration. In celebrating "Alligator Alcatraz," a makeshift prison that is set to hold up to 5,000 prisoners in cages with bunk beds, Laura posted: "Alligator lives matter. The good news is, alligators are guaranteed 65 million meals if we get started now."

Laura did not clarify where she was getting the 65 million number from, but according to Pew, there are 65.2 million Hispanic people in the United States as of 2023. It seems, then, that Laura was suggesting that every Hispanic person in the United States should be fed to alligators.

It was a celebration of overt racism, and one that has been encouraged by the policies of this administration.

If accused of racism, Laura might suggest that she didn't say anything about any particular group of people. The implications, however, are impossible to ignore. Laura is not an official member of the Trump administration, but Trump's affiliation with and encouragement of her are enough reason to believe that her positions are generally aligned with those of the administration, if a little bit more extreme.

What we know, though, is that the administration has already spent some of its time and attention on people of Hispanic origin who have committed no crimes, in spite of their promise that they would be going after criminals. Instead, people who are in this country legally have been rounded up and held without explanation, sometimes for months at a time.

Now, Trump's administration is gearing up to make deportations an even more central portion of the administration's efforts, even as Trump himself suggests that he might denaturalize Democratic nominee for New York City Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, a naturalized citizen of the United States. Laura's post might seem like a one-off, but it's indicative of a broader worldview.

The post itself is undeniably racist, an attack on Hispanic people of all backgrounds. What's less clear, though, is whether Laura is wrong about Trump's ultimate goals and about whether he really cares whether his deportation campaign is focused on people who are undocumented.