Wikipedia Deep Dive

Alligator Alcatraz

15 min read

In the summer of 2025, the state of Florida opened an immigration detention facility in one of the most improbable locations imaginable: a half-built airport in the middle of a protected swamp, surrounded by alligators, panthers, and the ancestral lands of Indigenous peoples who never surrendered to the United States government.

They called it Alligator Alcatraz.

The name wasn't a joke or a media invention. Florida's attorney general, James Uthmeier, announced it himself in a video posted to social media. The Republican Party of Florida began selling merchandise—hats, shirts, and koozies featuring AI-generated images of the facility. When reporters asked if this was really the official name, a spokesman confirmed: yes, it is.

President Donald Trump, visiting for the opening ceremony on July 1, 2025, praised the facility by comparing it to the infamous federal penitentiary that once held Al Capone. "It might be as good as the real Alcatraz," he said. "A little controversial, but I couldn't care less."

A Runway to Nowhere

To understand how a detention camp ended up in the Everglades, you have to go back more than fifty years, to a very different kind of ambition.

In 1968, construction began on what was supposed to become the Miami Jetport—a massive international airport that would serve as a hub for supersonic travel. The site was Big Cypress Swamp, a vast expanse of subtropical wetlands in southern Florida, home to cypress trees, sawgrass prairies, and an ecosystem found nowhere else on Earth.

The project was a product of its time. America was racing toward the future, and supersonic passenger jets seemed inevitable. Boeing was developing the 2707, a plane that would carry passengers across the Atlantic faster than the speed of sound. Miami needed an airport big enough to handle them.

But the future didn't cooperate. Environmental concerns mounted. Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the legendary conservationist who had written "The Everglades: River of Grass" in 1947, founded a new organization called Friends of the Everglades in 1969 to fight the project. Native Americans, including Buffalo Tiger of the Miccosukee Tribe, joined the opposition. Hunters, environmentalists, and scientists warned that the jetport would destroy the delicate hydrology of the Everglades.

Then Boeing canceled its supersonic program. The economics no longer made sense. By 1970, construction stopped.

All that remained was a single runway—10,500 feet of concrete stretching across 39 square miles of seized wetland. The runway sat there for decades, an expensive monument to abandoned dreams, occasionally used for pilot training and emergency landings.

In 1974, Congress designated the surrounding area as Big Cypress National Preserve, one of the first national preserves in the country. Unlike national parks, preserves allow certain traditional uses to continue. For the Miccosukee, Seminole, and Traditional peoples who had lived in these lands for centuries, this meant permanent rights to occupy and use the land in their customary ways. They could hunt, fish, and maintain their villages. They had first rights to develop tourism businesses like guided airboat tours.

In 2016, the preserve received another distinction: it became the first national preserve in America to achieve "dark sky" status from DarkSky International, recognizing its freedom from light pollution. On clear nights, the Milky Way stretches overhead in a way that's increasingly impossible to see in modern America.

This is the land that Florida decided to turn into an immigration prison.

Emergency Powers

Governor Ron DeSantis didn't go through normal channels to build the facility. He didn't conduct environmental reviews. He didn't collaborate with local officials. He didn't ask permission from the county that owned the airfield.

Instead, he invoked a "state of emergency" that he had declared back in 2023, ostensibly related to immigration. Using emergency powers, he simply seized the county-owned property and fast-tracked construction, bypassing the procurement processes and competitive bidding rules that normally govern how governments spend money.

Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava wrote to state officials pointing out an uncomfortable irony: federal and state governments had spent more than ten billion dollars since 2019 trying to restore and protect the Everglades. Now the state was building a detention camp in the middle of that same ecosystem without so much as an environmental impact assessment.

The legal justification for this extraordinary action rested on the claim that Florida was experiencing an immigration emergency. But demographers at Florida State University had studied the actual numbers and found the opposite: the population of undocumented immigrants in Florida had been declining since 2018. The researchers warned that policies discouraging immigration could actually harm Florida's economy and population.

None of this slowed the construction.

Inside the Facility

The first detainees arrived on July 3, 2025—just two days after the opening ceremony with President Trump.

What they found was a hastily constructed camp in one of the most inhospitable environments in the continental United States. The Everglades in summer are brutally hot, with average temperatures around 90 degrees Fahrenheit and a heat index that regularly exceeds 100 degrees. The humidity is oppressive. Mosquitoes and other insects swarm constantly. The land floods regularly, and hurricane season brings the constant threat of catastrophic storms.

Detainees lived in tents. According to members of Congress who wrote to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, the facility had "inadequate sanitation facilities" and exposed people to "deadly pathogens, constant threats from unpredictable flooding and extreme weather events."

State officials had a different perspective on these conditions. They argued openly that the facility's harsh location and vulnerability to hurricanes would encourage undocumented immigrants to "self-deport"—to leave the country voluntarily rather than risk being sent there.

In other words, the cruelty was the point.

When members of Congress toured the facility on July 12, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz described seeing detainees "essentially packed into cages, wall-to-wall humans, 32 detainees per cage." Lawmakers heard cries of "libertad"—freedom in Spanish—from the people held inside. They were not permitted to see the entire facility.

A population breakdown obtained by journalists revealed that more than 95 percent of detainees came from Latin American countries. About 20 percent were from Guatemala, another 20 percent from Mexico, and roughly 10 percent from Cuba. Some were recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)—people brought to the United States as children who had lived in the country legally, sometimes for decades.

The facility's director testified that everyone held there was detained solely for immigration violations. None faced state criminal charges. Critics pointed out that this made the "Alcatraz" branding particularly cruel: these weren't convicted criminals. Many hadn't even seen a judge.

The Conditions Worsen

As summer wore on, reports from inside the facility grew darker.

Detainees described limited access to drinking water, insufficient food, and restrictions on practicing their religion. They reported wastewater overflows, insect infestations, and inadequate medical care. Some claimed they found maggots in their food. Others said they had to dig fecal matter out of blocked toilets with their bare hands because the plumbing didn't work.

The Florida Division of Emergency Management denied these accounts, but they also refused to allow independent inspections that might have settled the question.

On July 22, detainees began a hunger strike to protest what they called inhumane and dangerous conditions.

The Guardian newspaper, reporting in late July, described the facility as being at the center of "a succession of alleged abuses" at immigration detention facilities across Florida, documenting accounts from detainees through advocacy groups like Human Rights Watch, Americans for Immigrant Justice, and Sanctuary of the South. A month later, the outlet reported that accounts of "inhumane treatment and brutality" at the camp had become "commonplace."

Then came the incident of August 29.

Three detainees called Miami's Spanish-language news channel, Noticias 23, to report what they described as an uprising at the facility. According to their account, it started when several detainees shouted "freedom" after one of them received news that a relative had died. Guards responded, the detainees said, by indiscriminately beating people with batons and firing tear gas.

The Florida Division of Emergency Management denied that any such incident had occurred.

Perhaps most troubling was what the Miami Herald discovered when it tried to track the detainees: by late summer, the whereabouts of about two-thirds of the more than 1,800 people who had been held at the facility in July could not be determined. Their families didn't know where they were. Their lawyers couldn't find them. They had simply disappeared into the system.

The Money Trail

Running an immigration detention center is expensive. Running one in the middle of a swamp, with tents and temporary infrastructure, is even more expensive.

The original estimate was $450 million per year in operating costs. The federal government promised to reimburse Florida $608 million in expenses. Each bed was projected to cost $245 per day—significantly more than the $187 daily average that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) typically pays for detention.

By late August, Florida had already incurred $218 million in costs for construction alone.

The process by which contracts were awarded raised its own questions. Using emergency powers, the Florida Division of Emergency Management and the governor's office bypassed normal procurement rules. They selected a company called IRG Global Emergency Management for a $1.1 million contract, followed by two more contracts totaling over $5 million.

IRG had made a $10,000 donation to Florida's Republican Party on June 24, 2025—just five days before receiving their first contract. The company was an offshoot of Access Restoration Services US, Inc., which had donated nearly $400,000 to Republican campaigns, including to DeSantis himself.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party of Florida was raising money by selling Alligator Alcatraz merchandise. Critics found this fundraising campaign particularly disturbing: the state was essentially monetizing the detention of people who hadn't been charged with crimes, marketing their incarceration as a political brand.

The Miccosukee Fight Back

For the Miccosukee Tribe, this was a familiar battle.

The Miccosukee are one of the Indigenous peoples of the Everglades, descended from Creek peoples who migrated to Florida in the 18th century and from Seminoles who refused to leave during the brutal Indian Removal campaigns of the 1830s. They never signed a treaty with the United States. They never surrendered. They survived by retreating deep into the swamps, into land that European Americans considered worthless.

The Big Cypress is central to their identity and their survival. Fifteen traditional Miccosukee and Seminole villages remain in the preserve, along with ceremonial grounds, burial sites, and other sacred places.

"We live here. Our ancestors fought and died here. They are buried here," Talbert Cypress, chairman of the Miccosukee Business Council, testified before Congress in 2024. "The Big Cypress is part of us, and we are a part of it."

When the detention facility was announced, Cypress pointed out that no environmental impact research had been conducted and that some Native villages were within 900 feet of the camp's entrance.

Betty Osceola, a Miccosukee tribal judge and member of the Everglades Advisory Committee, organized Indigenous-led prayer gatherings and public demonstrations. The Seminole Tribe of Florida also opposed the facility, citing the presence of sacred lands.

In late June, the Miccosukee Tribe joined environmental groups—including Friends of the Everglades, the organization Marjory Stoneman Douglas had founded more than fifty years earlier—in filing suit in federal court. They were represented by Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization, and attorney Paul Schwiep.

The lawsuit argued that the facility threatened the habitat of endangered species, including the Florida panther—one of the most endangered mammals in North America, with fewer than 200 remaining in the wild—and the Florida bonneted bat. It alleged violations of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires federal agencies to assess environmental impacts before taking major actions, as well as tribal cultural-resource protections.

The Courts Intervene—Briefly

On August 7, 2025, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams temporarily halted construction at the facility for two weeks while she considered whether it violated environmental laws.

Witnesses had testified about the scope of what had already been built: 20 acres of new asphalt laid over wetland, plus temporary tents, trailers, and heavy equipment scattered across the site. The infrastructure and sewage systems threatened to pollute both the water and the night sky that had earned the preserve its dark-sky designation.

Two weeks later, on August 21, Judge Williams went further. She issued a preliminary injunction that prohibited the government from transferring any additional detainees to the facility or performing any more construction. She ordered the Trump administration to remove temporary fencing, industrial lighting, generators, and sewage and waste receptacles within 60 days.

Florida Attorney General Uthmeier announced that the state planned to keep the facility running anyway.

Then the case went to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. In a 2-1 decision in early September, the appeals court stayed Judge Williams' injunction—meaning the facility could continue operating while the appeal proceeded.

The reasoning was technical but consequential: because the federal government was only reimbursing Florida's costs rather than directly funding the facility, the court suggested that federal environmental laws might not apply. This was, in effect, a legal innovation—states could potentially bypass federal environmental protections by spending their own money first and seeking reimbursement later.

A second stay followed, this one citing the federal government shutdown that was underway at the time.

Constitutional Questions

The environmental lawsuit wasn't the only legal challenge.

On July 16, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU of Florida, and Americans for Immigrant Justice filed a class action lawsuit raising constitutional concerns. They alleged that the Trump administration was violating the First Amendment and Fifth Amendment rights of people being detained.

The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, religion, and assembly. The Fifth Amendment—perhaps more crucially in this context—guarantees that no person shall be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Note that the Constitution says "person," not "citizen." The protections of due process apply to everyone on American soil.

The civil rights groups argued that detainees were being held without charges and without access to their attorneys. They also argued that legal service organizations and law firms were being prevented from representing their clients.

U.S. District Judge Rodolfo Ruiz, considering this lawsuit, requested all written agreements and contracts showing who had legal custody of the detainees. This was a significant question: if lawyers couldn't determine who was responsible for their clients, they couldn't file the proper legal challenges to secure their release.

Immigration attorneys described the facility as operating under an "alternate system" where "the normal rules don't apply." Internal data showed that the vast majority of detainees did not have final orders of removal from a judge before entering the facility. They were, in other words, being detained without any judicial finding that they should be deported.

And yet many of them appeared to be deported anyway. By late August, the facility's population had fallen below 400, down from more than 1,800 in July. Where did those 1,400-plus people go? The government wasn't saying, and families and lawyers often couldn't find out.

The Bigger Picture

Alligator Alcatraz didn't emerge in a vacuum. It was part of what observers have called a "maximalist" deportation policy during President Trump's second term.

Trump had called publicly for "huge camps" where migrants would be held in internment prior to deportation. On May 31, 2025, the Supreme Court approved ending humanitarian legal status protections as part of mass deportation efforts—though the Court also emphasized that the Constitution's guarantee of due process still applied.

Federal funding for this policy came through a budget reconciliation bill passed by the Senate on July 1, 2025. The bill included $45 billion for immigration detention centers—a 265 percent increase to ICE's annual detention budget.

Sixty-seven members of Congress, led by Senator Jeff Merkley and Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, questioned whether the entire operation was legal. State Representative Anna Eskamani and State Senator Shevrin Jones from Florida sued Governor DeSantis to gain access to the site. After visiting, Eskamani called it "a political stunt with environmental damage and everyday lives being harmed. It needs to close immediately."

But as of October 2025, the facility remained operational.

What It Means

The story of Alligator Alcatraz is many stories at once.

It's a story about immigration policy and the lengths to which governments will go to deter migration, including deliberately creating harsh conditions.

It's a story about emergency powers and how executives can bypass normal legal protections by declaring emergencies that may or may not reflect actual emergencies.

It's a story about environmental protection and how decades of conservation work can be undone with a few months of emergency construction.

It's a story about Indigenous rights and about peoples who have been fighting for their land since before the United States existed, who are still fighting today.

It's a story about due process and what happens when the normal rules don't apply—when people disappear into a system that their own lawyers can't navigate.

And it's a story about branding, about how a government decided to name a detention facility after a famous prison, sell merchandise celebrating it, and describe its deliberately punishing conditions as a feature rather than a bug.

In the middle of one of America's most unique and protected ecosystems, under skies once dark enough to see the Milky Way, on land that Indigenous peoples have inhabited for centuries, the state of Florida built a camp and filled it with people who had never been convicted of crimes. They called it Alligator Alcatraz.

And they couldn't care less.