2025-09-26
34 分钟This is The Guardian.
So it was a searing hot day in the middle of summer.
And I went to this very small rural town of Alexandria, which is in the center of Louisiana.
Oliver Lachlan is the Guardian's US Southern bureau chief.
He lives in Louisiana and knew that there was something unusual about Alexandria's airport.
So I turned up at the airport and you have commercial flights up on the gates,
as you would see in any normal airport, from Delta,
from American Airlines, there's a baggage claim desk.
But actually, when you walk over to the left-hand side of the airport,
that's where you see there's a restricted access road,
there are all these unmarked jets sort of lining up on the tarmac.
Ollie needed to get a closer look.
He and a photographer figured out that the only way to see what was happening on the runway was to go to the golf course next door.
We went into the clubhouse,
we hired a golf cart from them and we ended up landing at the 13th hole where we could see the panorama of what was going on there.
It was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit,
the tarmac was kind of shimmering in the humidity and you just see these lines of people shackled at the feet and at their hands being loaded onto planes.
and only a few hundred feet away are people obliviously getting on with their rounds of golf.
To me, it was this kind of extremely telling image of where America is at the moment right now.
When Donald Trump returned to the White House in January,