READ: Trump once asked us for a reptile pit from hell. Now it's real.

Scandal erupts at Trump’s alligator prison in the Florida Everglades.

New court filings allege that detainees at Florida’s controversial “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration facility are enduring squalid conditions, including disease, flooding, lack of basic hygiene and food, and coercion from staff. The reports revive memories of Donald Trump’s bizarre fixation — one I witnessed firsthand — on using alligators as part of U.S. border security policy.

The filing alleges truly repulsive conduct, as detailed by the Wall Street Journal. For instance, detainees claim that officials have used simple necessities as bargaining chips. In one instance, a man was pressured to drop his legal case (challenging his detention) in exchange for a blanket; in another, a woman was denied hygiene products for menstruation, forcing her to stay in blood-soaked clothes throughout her detention.

Detainees are also reportedly sleeping in dirty clothes on the floor next to open toilets, where sickness is spreading quickly. DHS denies the poor conditions. But in my experience, this is precisely what the president hoped to achieve.

Credit: Rebecca Blackwell / AP

The reports stirred an old memory.

One morning, years ago, I was in the middle of briefing the Secretary of Homeland Security on a national security threat when the president called. Trump’s voice came in hot and thick with frustration.

“Kiiiirstjen,” he said in his distinctive New York accent, “I can’t believe what I am seeing at the border.”

He’d been watching footage of migrants crossing into the United States, and he wanted “creative options” for stopping them. And he had an idea: we should build “a big, deep moat.”

The Secretary muted the line. “Did he just say what I think he said?”

When she unmuted, Trump elaborated. “I want you to figure out how deep you can dig it, okay Kirstjen? Fill it with snakes and alligators to eat people alive if they fall into it. How much would this cost, honey?”

The president wasn’t making a joke, and we weren’t laughing. He was completely serious. In fact, we’d come to realize he fantasized often about the levels of cruelty he could implement to deter migrants from coming to America. This included everything from sharp spikes on the border wall (he once described how the bloody scene of an impaled migrant might scare others away) to the prospect of shooting some of these travelers in the legs as a way to send a message.

On this particular day, it took a more surreal turn. Snakes and alligators. Could we line the whole border with them? He wanted to know.

DHS staff were sent off to do a back-of-the-envelope cost estimate for a two-thousand-mile, reptile-filled trench. Telling him it was ridiculous wouldn’t make it go away. Neither would appealing to his sense of humanity. He didn’t have one.

To kill the idea, we knew there was only one thing that would dissuade him: a giant price tag. Even the roughest estimates confirmed what I suspected. It could cost tens of billions of dollars to build a man-eating zoo along the Southern border. Only then did the president drop the concept of the alligator-snake moat.

At the time, the suggestion seemed like a grotesque one-off. A bizarre presidential impulse that died in the West Wing. But as anecdotes like this piled up, I came to a different conclusion. If he won re-election, I thought, he would hire a team that would bring his visions to life, one way or another.

Now he has. And the results are just as you’d expect.

Trump’s “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Everglades has literal predators patrolling its perimeter, a feature designed to produce the same result as his original idea: fear, misery, and deterrence. And now we know that, even if it began as gallows humor, it’s lived up to the inhumane conditions of its namesake.

It’s not hard to trace the line from that phone call to today’s Everglades camp. The cruelty wasn’t a byproduct. It was the point. And now, minus the cartoon absurdity, the nightmare has become all too real.