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- 'Alligator Alcatraz': What to know about Florida's new controversial migrant detention facility</p>
<p>Chelsea Bailey, Isabel RosalesJuly 1, 2025 at 4:00 AM</p>
<p>Deep in the marshy wetlands of the Florida Everglades – less than 50 miles west of President Donald Trump's resort in Miami – sits the latest battleground in his administration's immigration enforcement efforts: A makeshift detention facility dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz."</p>
<p>In a matter of days, workers have transformed the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport from an 11,000-foot runway into a temporary tent city that Trump is expected to visit Tuesday.</p>
<p>When completed, it will house up to 5,000 migrants as they await deportation, officials told CNN.</p>
<p>"We had a request from the federal government to do it, and so 'Alligator Alcatraz' it is," Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a news conference last week, adopting the nickname coined by his attorney general for the Everglades facility.</p>
<p>"Clearly from a security perspective, if someone escapes, there's a lot of alligators you're going to have to contend (with)," DeSantis said. "No one is going anywhere once you do that. It's as safe and secure as you can be."</p>
<p>But while Republicans are touting it as a "low cost" facility fortified by Mother Nature, the project has already sparked a backlash, not only from immigration rights activists and environmentalists but also members of the state's Indigenous community, who see the project as a threat to their sacred lands.</p>
<p>Here's what we know:</p>
<p>An Everglades 'Alcatraz'</p>
<p>Trump has long been enamored with the idea of reopening Alcatraz, the famed island prison just off the San Francisco Bay known for being virtually inescapable.</p>
<p>Now, Florida officials aim to open their own Alcatraz, at least temporarily.</p>
<p>Trucks leave the Dade-Collier Transition and Training Airport as demonstrators protest the construction of an immigrant detention center on June 28. - Giorgio Viera/AFP/Getty Images</p>
<p>An unassuming airstrip, once built to serve supersonic jets but quickly relegated to a training facility, thrummed with activity Monday as tractor trailers unloaded supplies and construction crews worked in the thick humidity to finish building the detention facility.</p>
<p>"Alligator-Alcatraz," according to the governor's office, is designed to be "completely self-contained." Migrants will be housed in repurposed FEMA trailers and "soft-sided temporary facilities," a Department of Homeland Security official told CNN.</p>
<p>The same tents are often used to house those displaced by natural disasters, like hurricanes, DeSantis' office said. Indeed, they will provide the only shelter from the elements, as temperatures soar into the 90s and powerful storms move across the Everglades.</p>
<p>State officials said they are developing evacuation plans for the facility in the event of severe weather, during what forecasters said may be a busy hurricane season.</p>
<p>The facility is expected to be able to house up to 5,000 beds, the DHS official said, at a cost of $245 a bed per day.</p>
<p>Utilities like water, sewage and power will be provided by mobile equipment, according to the governor's office.</p>
<p>During a tour of the site for Fox News last week, DeSantis pointed out a number of large portable air conditioning units he said will be used to cool structures on the site.</p>
<p>DeSantis stressed the facility is both temporary and necessary to alleviate burdens on the state's law enforcement agencies and jails, which have seen an influx in migrants amid the Trump administration's immigration crackdown.</p>
<p>The governor added he hopes the facility will be a "force multiplier" in the administration's increasing efforts to detain and deport undocumented migrants.</p>
<p>Immigrant rights activists decry 'dehumanizing' facility</p>
<p>"Alligator Alcatraz" is expected to cost $450 million to operate for a single year, according to one DHS official who told CNN Florida will front the costs of the facility and then "submit reimbursement requests" through FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security.</p>
<p>As of last week, more than 58,000 immigrants were in ICE custody, according to internal data obtained by CNN. Many are detained in local jails because ICE has funding to house an average of 41,000 people.</p>
<p>But arguments about capacity have done little to quell the backlash from local immigration rights advocates who have accused the DeSantis administration of creating a facility "engineered to enact suffering."</p>
<p>"We've been down this road before with Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County in Arizona where he had a tent city," said Thomas Kennedy, a policy analyst for the Florida Immigrant Coalition.</p>
<p>Environmental advocates and protesters at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport on Saturday, June 28, 2025, object to the "Alligator Alcatraz" being built at the facility. - Mike Stocker/South Florida Sun-Sentinel/AP</p>
<p>"The fact that we're going to have 3,000 people detained in tents, in the Everglades, in the middle of the hot Florida summer, during hurricane season, this is a bad idea all around that needs to be opposed and stopped."</p>
<p>Democrats and other immigrant-rights activists have also decried the detention facility as "dehumanizing."</p>
<p>"It's like a theatricalization of cruelty," Maria Asuncion Bilbao, Florida campaign coordinator at the immigration advocacy group American Friends Service Committee, previously told The .</p>
<p>Kennedy said he's been angered by Florida's Attorney General James Uthmeier – who coined the phrase "Alligator Alcatraz" – boasting in a video posted to X "if people get out, there's not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons." White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt similarly said at a White House press briefing Monday the alligators were "a deterrent for them to try to escape."</p>
<p>"When we talk about people as if they're vermin … The location, the manner in which it's done, the dehumanizing language … there's nothing about this detention camp that is not cruel and inhumane," he said.</p>
<p>DeSantis promises 'zero impact' on environment. Advocates are skeptical</p>
<p>When it first opened, the Dade-Collier airport, originally known as the Everglades Jetway, was meant to be five times the size of New York's JFK and an international hub for supersonic jets.</p>
<p>But today, it remains a little-used runway in the heart of the Everglades, only open during business hours. Environmental concerns have long hampered plans to expand the airport, as efforts to preserve the marshlands, which are a crucial source of freshwater for South Florida, have routinely clashed with business interests.</p>
<p>The Miami-Dade Aviation Department has used the runway as a training facility for years. But it changed last week when the DeSantis administration invoked the governor's emergency powers to combat "illegal immigration" to begin immediately building a detention facility on the site.</p>
<p>Construction is seen taking place at Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport on June 30. - WSVN</p>
<p>The administration initially proposed purchasing the site from Miami-Dade County for $20 million. In a lengthy response to the proposal, reviewed by CNN, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava noted the figure was "significantly lower than the most recent appraisal" value of $190 million.</p>
<p>She also signaled concerns about the environmental impact of housing thousands of people so close to a key source of Florida's drinking water. Indeed, environmental advocacy groups appear to share her concerns, and several, including Friends of the Everglades, sued the DeSantis administration on Friday in an effort to halt the project.</p>
<p>At a news conference last week, the governor downplayed the lawsuit and touted his administration's efforts to restore the Everglades, saying the facility would have "zero impact" on the environment.</p>
<p>"I think people are just trying to use the Everglades as a pretext just for the fact that they oppose immigration enforcement," he said.</p>
<p>Tribal members are 'standing up for our home'</p>
<p>Betty Osceola stood at the gates of the Dade-Collier airport Monday and glared at the bustling construction site.</p>
<p>The environmental activist has been documenting the rapid construction of "Alligator Alcatraz" for her followers on social media, and she was among those protesting along Highway 41 last week as construction crews began making their way to the site.</p>
<p>But for Osceola, this fight in particular feels personal. She's a member of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, whose lands are adjacent to the airport and runway.</p>
<p>Osceola told CNN the temporary detention facility is being built on land sacred to her people, calling it an affront.</p>
<p>Betty Osceola, a Miccosukee tribe member, and Brad Keehn, from Ochopee, discuss the potential impact to the local ecosystem as a result of the incoming development of a new migrant detention center. - Ricardo Rolon/USA Today Network/Imagn Images</p>
<p>"When I first heard about it, I thought, 'Is this a joke?'" But then construction crews began arriving in droves less than 2 miles from her home.</p>
<p>"I was particularly upset when they said, 'Nobody lives out here, it's not going to inconvenience anybody,'" she said, adding she has relatives who live even closer to the site. "What about me? What about the tribe?"</p>
<p>Osceola, who is a prominent local environmental activist, said the governor's insistence that he has spent billions to protect the Everglades rings hollow after green-lighting a project which could threaten the delicate ecosystem of the area.</p>
<p>"Signing a bill or signing a check doesn't mean you understand anything," she said. "What's going to happen to all that sewage if a hurricane hits? … This is the drinking water aquifer for 8 million South Floridians, not just the Miccosukee Tribe.</p>
<p>"This is our ancestral territory. I come out here to pray. This is our home. We are standing up for our home."</p>
<p>CNN's Priscilla Alvarez and Devon M. Sayers contributed to this report.</p>
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<p>- 'Alligator Alcatraz': What to know about Florida's new controversial migrant detention facility<...
