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The Brew: Beware of Gators

Bilanol / iStock / Getty Images Plus

By Gayle McQueary Published on July 2, 2025

If you thought Alcatraz was hard to break out of, Florida just raised the bar.

A new immigration detention facility funded mostly by FEMA at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in the Florida Everglades, officially named “Alligator Alcatraz,” opened yesterday with President Donald Trump, Governor Ron DeSantis, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem attending the dedication ceremony. The facility was rapidly constructed — in about a week — and is designed to hold around 5,000 undocumented immigrants as part of Trump’s mass deportation initiative.

The impressive detention center earned its nickname due to its remote location surrounded by alligators and pythons — a natural deterrent to anyone thinking of trying to escape.

During a press conference at the facility, a reporter asked Trump whether this will be the new model for stemming America’s illegal immigration problem.

The new detention center comes with some controversy, though: Two environmental groups, Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity, filed a federal lawsuit last week alleging that its construction violates the National Environmental Policy Act, as the Everglades is home to endangered species. DeSantis has defended the construction, telling Fox news during a pre-opening tour, “It isn’t like we are going to start doing permanent sewer and all the other things. It’s all temporary. We’ll set it up and we’ll break it down.”

Since the airport on this land was developed in 1968, something tells us these environmental groups may not be as worried about the endangered species as they are Trump’s agenda.

Tie-Breaker Vote

It didn’t take long for a news item in yesterday morning’s edition of “The Brew” to become old news: In the afternoon, the U.S. Senate narrowly passed Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” on a 51-50 vote. Vice President JD Vance delivered the tie-breaking vote after a 27-hour “vote-a-rama” session.

GOP leaders secured the final votes by convincing Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska to vote “yes” despite her initial opposition concerning Medicaid cuts and rising deficits due to tax cuts — a sentiment shared by her colleagues Rand Paul (R-KY), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and Susan Collins (R-Maine) who voted “no” with every Senate Democrat, including two independents. The bill is now back in the House of Representatives for a final approval vote currently scheduled for today; at least six House Republicans oppose changes made by the Senate.

RFK Jr. Bombshell

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped a bombshell during an interview with Tucker Carlson yesterday when he shared details from a buried 1999 CDC study linking the hepatitis B vaccine to an 1,135% increased risk of autism. Kennedy alleges the CDC manipulated data to hide the connection by only including children too young to be diagnosed with autism in the study.

He also found the CDC was dismissing evidence from its own vaccine side-effect tracking system, VAERS, after a 2010 study by researcher Ross Lazarus revealed that fewer than 1% of the vaccine injuries where being reported. Ross clearly stated that the CDC needs to develop and deploy new surveillance methods.

The whole 90-minute interview is worth your time to watch if you can spare it.

The Final Takedown Has Begun!

Last week, the Supreme Court hit the disgusting website Pornhub with a fatal blow by upholding a Texas law requiring it and other sexually explicit websites to implement age-verification measures to ensure that no one under the age of 18 can access them. After the 6-3 ruling, the owners of Pornhub announced that starting June 30, they would remove a significant portion of the content still remaining on Pornhub and all the other free, user-generated porn sites they own — many of which are among the world’s most popular.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a 36-page opinion dismantling the idea that sexually explicit sites enjoy First Amendment protections. “The power to require age verification is within a State’s authority to prevent children from accessing sexually explicit content,” he wrote. “Any burden experienced by adults is therefore only incidental to the statute’s regulation of activity that is not protected by the First Amendment.”

Pornhub has already had to shut down in 17 states and even in some European countries such as Britain and France, thanks to new child-protection laws requiring age verification. We can all thank the Traffickinghub movement‘s legal actions, which led to 91% of Pornhub’s content being removed by the beginning of this year. More than 50 million of those videos and images contained innocent victims.

Along The Stream…

John Zmirak drives the point home about who the real victims are in the illegal immigration crisis in “The Face of Immigration Chaos: 300,000 Kids Lost in the Wind to Abusers and Porn Merchants.”

Later this afternoon, political satirist C.J. Hopkins joins Dr. Simone Gold to talk about his new book and the lawfare being waged against him in “The New Normal Reich.”

 

Gayle McQueary is The Stream’s social media specialist. She has a background in production and an opinion on most news headlines.