Trump Administration Will Help Fund Florida's $450 Million 'Alligator Alcatraz' and Other Migrant Detention Facilities
The Florida attorney general stated that the facilities will add 5,000 beds and be operational as early as the first week of July.
The Trump administration has approved funding for Florida to build migrant detention centers to house 5,000 detainees. Among the projects approved is "Alligator Alcatraz," a proposed facility located on a 30-square-mile abandoned airfield in the Everglades. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced on Monday that the facility will start receiving detainees by the first week of July.
But not everyone is on board. Democratic Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava has opposed Uthmeier's plans to build Alligator Alcatraz on the Miami-Dade–owned portion of the property. "Due to the location of this parcel in a critical area, the conveyance of this parcel requires considerable review and due diligence," Levine Cava said in a letter to Florida's emergency management director, reports the Miami Herald. The mayor's letter outlined concerns about the project, requesting a detailed analysis of potential environmental impacts on the Everglades ecosystem and an updated appraisal of the land. State officials offered to purchase the site for $20 million from Miami-Dade County and Collier County, but county appraisals from May valued the land at $195 million. The appraisal also "lays out development challenges for the property, which it describes as almost entirely wetlands," according to the Herald.
While negotiations continue, companies and state officers have already entered the property and begun construction. Under emergency powers extended by Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis over illegal immigration since 2023, the governor can commandeer the country-run airfield, as conceded by Levine Cava.
Officials want the centers up and running as quickly as possible to ease the bottleneck limited Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention bed space has created in reaching the Trump administration's deportation goals. "Under President [Donald] Trump's leadership, we are working at turbo speed on cost-effective and innovative ways to deliver on the American people's mandate for mass deportations of criminal illegal aliens," Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement to CBS News.
Uthmeier has touted the site as an "efficient" and "low-cost opportunity to build a temporary detention facility" by using tents and the natural perimeter full of alligators and pythons in a video posted on his X account. However, the centers will cost an estimated $450 million a year to run.
Noem said that the approved Florida immigration detention facilities will be funded "in large part" by $625 million set aside by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Shelter and Services Program. The program was created in 2019 to reimburse state and local governments and nonprofits in certain areas, including Florida, to provide temporary housing, food, and emergency medical care for new migrant arrivals released by DHS while awaiting immigration court hearings.
The choice to use FEMA is interesting considering that Trump signed an executive order in January to investigate whether the agency should be eliminated after criticizing FEMA for failing in its core mission of providing natural disaster relief to Americans. In May, Cameron Hamilton, the agency's acting administrator, was ousted by Noem after disagreeing with the president's calls to eliminate the agency.
Alex Howard, a former Biden administration DHS spokesperson, told the Herald that the Everglades facility is "Desantis' Little Guantanamo in the swamp," and described the plan for "a taxpayer-funded detention center for migrants" as "a grotesque mix of cruelty and political theater."
"You don't solve immigration by disappearing people into tents guarded by gators," said Howard. "You solve it with lawful processing, humane infrastructure, and actual policy—not by staging a $450 million stunt in the middle of hurricane season."
