‘Alligator Alcatraz’: An Innovative Approach to Migrant Management Under President Trump
On 1 July 2025, just as his One Big Beautiful Bill was being debated in the Senate, President Trump chose to visit an abandoned public airport in South Florida, once intended as an intercontinental hub for supersonic jets, to bless a new initiative in America’s burgeoning mass deportation campaign. Trump was accompanied on this occasion by his “elegant” Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, and by Florida’s Governor, Ron DeSantis, who had stood against him in the 2024 Presidential campaign.
The 39-acre site of the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport at Ochopee, off the Tamiami Trail (US 41) and 36 miles west of downtown Miami, has a 10,500-foot runway. It is to become a detention centre for “illegal aliens” awaiting deportation from the US, in an inglorious end to what was once the Everglades Jetport (1968-1970) and then went on to “provide a precision-instrument landing and training facility…for commercial pilots” before its current reassignment. The largest ICE detention centre in the US is located within the Big Cypress National Preserve (established in October 1974 as America’s first national preserve), six miles north of the Everglades National Park boundary, in hurricane-prone, hot and humid swamplands, infested with swarms of mosquitoes, lurking alligators, and Burmese pythons. It was chosen with a singular purpose-to create an extremely inhospitable environment for deportees. According to Trump, the alligators will serve as “bodyguards” and “cops” for the most “menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet.” He is on record as having proposed, back in 2018, the introduction of crocodiles in the Rio Grande to police the boundary between Mexico and its northern neighbour.
James Uthmeier, Florida’s Attorney-General since February 2025, and a former Chief of Staff to Governor Ron DeSantis, is reported to have promoted the potential of the site as a “temporary” detention centre and named it “Alligator Alcatraz” after the legendary fortress-like prison in San Francisco Bay. This Alcatraz of the East Coast is being designed to hold 3,000 detainees (eventually 5,000), to be housed at an estimated annual cost of $450 million in repurposed Federal Emergency Management (FEMA) trailers, air-conditioned heavy-duty tents housing cages with bunk beds, and enclosures surrounded by chain-link fences. The facility is to be mostly funded by FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program-an agency that has recently been subjected to DOGE-style cuts. Governor DeSantis rapidly mobilised forces to set up the camp, within just eight days, and suggested that Florida National Guard Judge Advocate General Corps officers could deputise as immigration judges to expedite removals from American soil.
Prior to his visit, Trump even had some advice for future detainees. He said “we’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator if they escape prison. Don’t run in a straight line. Run like this (as he indicated a zig zag movement). And you know what? Your chances go up about 1%.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt even described it as “an efficient and low-cost way to help carry out the largest mass deportation campaign in American history.”
This initiative has been opposed by Democrats and other anti-Trump politicians, as would be expected, as well as by environmentalists; human rights activists; Native American members of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, and the Seminole Tribe of Florida; and humanitarians- among many others. On the other hand, Trump would “like to see them in many states…. A system of detention camps.” A second detention centre is being planned at a National Guard facility near Jacksonville in Florida, while other Republican states are expected to follow suit.
What Trump is setting out to do is by no means original. A precedent has already been set, with as many as 57 million deportations from America between 1920 and 2018. Many Mexicans, in particular, were repatriated during the Great Depression of the 1930s and Operation Wetback in the 1950s. Within the confines of the US, major internal shifts of the Native American population were enabled by the infamous Indian Removal Act of 1830. Mass incarceration is also not new, as demonstrated by the internment camps for Japanese-American citizens during the Second World War. It is interesting to note, in this context, how American citizenship engenders such intense patriotism and such contempt for undocumented immigrants among relatively recent legal immigrants, including a second-generation German-American President and a third-generation Italian-American Governor of Florida.
On this occasion, the US government is harnessing the powers of nature in pursuit of its unrelenting agenda. While the move seems popular within President Trump’s fan base, and has already encouraged the production of “made in America” celebratory memorabilia (T-shirts, baseball caps, buttons, beverage coolers, bumper stickers, etc) by Florida Republicans, others can feel free to draw their own conclusions based on what they observe. What is most noticeable is a total lack of empathy for one’s fellow human beings, albeit from varied backgrounds and the victims of different circumstances. Whether history will absolve the second Trump administration’s latest anti-migrant initiative remains a matter for conjecture.
Ashis Banerjee