WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump will attend Tuesday’s official opening of a migrant detention center dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” that has been built in a reptile-filled Florida swamp.
Critics of Trump’s harsh immigration crackdown have called the idea inhumane, while environmental protesters oppose its construction in a national park.
But the White House has openly embraced the nickname comparing it to the notorious former Alcatraz prison on an island in San Francisco Bay — which Trump incidentally also wants to reopen.
“There is only one road leading in, and the only way out is a one-way flight. It is isolated and surrounded by dangerous wildlife and unforgiving terrain,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Monday.
Asked if the scaly-skinned predators were a “design feature,” Leavitt replied: “When you have illegal murderers and rapists and heinous criminals in a detention facility surrounded by alligators, yes I do think that’s a deterrent for them to try to escape.”
While Trump administration officials routinely highlight the targeting of violent criminals, many migrants without any charges have also been swept up in the crackdown.
Florida, the southeastern state governed by conservative Republican Ron DeSantis, announced last week that it was constructing the site at an estimated cost of $450 million dollars.
It sits on an abandoned airfield in the heart of a sprawling network of mangrove forests, imposing marshes and “rivers of grass” that form the Everglades conservation area.
The Everglades National Park is particularly known as a major habitat for alligators, with an estimated population of around 200,000. They can reach up to 15 feet in length when fully grown.
Attacks by alligators on humans are relatively rare in Florida.
Across the entire state there were 453 “unprovoked bite incidents” between 1948 and 2022, 26 of which resulted in human fatalities, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
But authorities have played up the risk.
“If people get out, there’s not much waiting for them, other than alligators and pythons,” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said recently as he described the detention camp.
He also described the site as a “low-cost opportunity to build a temporary detention facility, because you don’t need to invest that much in the perimeter.”
The White House’s Leavitt said it would be a 5,000-bed facility, but Florida authorities have said it would house about 1,000 “criminal aliens.”
Trump’s administration is playing up “Alligator Alcatraz” as it drums up support for a huge tax and spending bill that the president is trying to push through Congress this week.
The “One Big Beautiful Bill” contains funding for Trump’s immigration crackdown including an increase in places in detention centers.
“I can’t wait for it to open,” Trump’s immigration czar Tom Homan told reporters on Monday when asked about “Alligator Alcatraz. “We’ve got to get the Big Beautiful Bill passed — the more beds we have, the more bad guys we arrest.”
The deportation drive is part of a broader campaign of harsh optics on migration, including raids in Los Angeles that sparked protests against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.
