MIAMI — President Donald Trump plans to visit “Alligator Alcatraz,” the newest illegal immigrant detention center in Florida’s Everglades on Tuesday, the same day that the government had planned to move its first detainees into the site, the Washington Examiner learned Sunday evening.
Trump will travel to a remote, alligator-filled part of South Florida, roughly 50 miles west of coastal Miami, where he will see firsthand a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center that the state of Florida has allowed the federal government to erect in a matter of days, according to a senior administration official.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) announced late last week that he had taken executive action to remake a mostly abandoned airfield in Miami-Dade County into a federal detention site.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier had proposed the project and touted that the tent facility would not require much of a barrier surrounding the site because if immigrants were to escape, “there’s not much waiting for them, other than alligators and pythons.”
Trump’s visit on Tuesday comes after weekend protests on U.S. Highway 41, known as the Tamiami Trail, which connects Miami and the Gulf Coast city of Naples.
Highway 41 is likely to see further protests Monday and Tuesday as Secret Service prepares the vicinity for the president’s visit.
DeSantis first showed off the site in a media walk-through late last week and warned that “if a criminal alien were to escape from here somehow, and I don’t think they will, you’ve got nowhere to go.”
“What are you going to do? Trudge through the swamp and dodge alligators on the way back to, 50-60 miles just to get to civilization? Not going to happen,” DeSantis told Fox News host Steve Doocy.
The site will be run by the federal agency ICE, not state authorities. DeSantis said the government plans to use the airport runway to fly in migrants brought from other parts of the state and country. Illegal immigrants who are deemed deportable may be flown out of the country.
The property is nearly identical to structures that the Border Patrol erected amid the record-high influx of illegal immigrants who came over the southern border during the Biden administration. The tents are massive in size and include large rooms for families, adult men, and adult women to be housed.
NOEM APPROVES MONEY FOR FLORIDA’S ‘ALLIGATOR ALCATRAZ’ DETENTION CENTER
The facility also includes laundry machines, bathrooms and showers, and a dining area.
“This is being done by the Division of Emergency Management. So when we have a hurricane, we would actually have people stage here for hurricane response normally, anyways,” DeSantis said last Friday. “When we have all the linemen come in to do the power, we have to set up little little areas for them, and so you have all this type of stuff. So this is not our first rodeo.”