Florida has begun building a new detention center for undocumented migrants on a former airfield deep in the Everglades that has been nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz.”
The facility is scheduled to open in July, consisting mainly of tents, and is estimated to cost $450 million per year to operate, according to The New York Times. However, the state will receive some funding support from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), according to Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Trisha McLaughlin.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, an ally of President Donald Trump, has boasted in a social media video that the center will require minimal additional security due to its remote, swampland location, which is home to dangerous wildlife, including alligators and pythons.
“Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide,” he declared.
The idea recalls Trump’s own suggestion during his first term that a medieval moat be built alongside his still-unfinished southern border wall, inhabited by deadly creatures.
Trump also proposed that the wall be painted black and lined with spikes to increase the intimidation factor.
In his second term, the president has already had undocumented migrants picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents sent to Guantanamo Bay and a maximum-security megaprison in El Salvador, among other locations, and even proposed reopening San Francisco’s original Alcatraz, now a tourist attraction, for similarly symbolic reasons.
The administration pledged to deliver the biggest mass deportation push in American history, but has expressed frustration at the slow pace of developments on the ground, despite holding some 55,000 people, up from 40,000 under Joe Biden’s preceding administration.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, we are working at turbo speed to deliver cost-effective and innovative ways to deliver on the American people’s mandate for mass deportations of criminal illegal aliens,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement supporting the Florida scheme.
However, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava stated on Monday that she required more time to assess the state’s plans for the land being used to host the 5,000-bed Alligator Alcatraz.
“There has not been sufficient time to fully discuss these matters, and we thank you for your attention to these concerns given the rapid pace of the state’s effort,” she wrote in a letter to the Florida Division of Emergency Management, which will have primary oversight of the center.
Rachel Johnson, Levine Cava’s deputy chief of staff, told CBS News that the county has “significant concerns about the environmental impacts on the Everglades which is the source of our clean drinking water and the cornerstone of our regional economy” and called for a more detailed analysis of the project’s cost-effectiveness.
Mark Fleming, the associate director of federal litigation at the National Immigrant Justice Center, also expressed concern, saying the facility could amount to an “independent, unaccountable detention system.”
“The fact that the administration and its allies would even consider such a huge temporary facility on such a short timeline, with no obvious plan for how to adequately staff medical and other necessary services, in the middle of the Florida summer heat is demonstrative of their callous disregard for the health and safety of the human beings they intend to imprison there,” he said.
“It simply shocks the conscience.”
Friends of the Everglades Executive Director Eve Samples likewise opposed the development on environmental grounds, calling it “a terribly bad idea.”
But panellists discussing the matter on Fox News’s Gutfeld! with the former wrestler Tyrus on Monday night relished the prospect.
Comedian Joe Devito characterized it as “The Shawshank Redemption meets Jurassic Park” and went on to suggest that the government go further and staff the facility with grizzly bears and an “evil squid” to frisk inmates with its tentacles.
