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President Donald Trump has reportedly mused about bolstering the wall at the southern border with a trench filled with snakes and alligators to deter immigrants from entering the U.S.
This week, Florida state officials, with the blessing of the Department of Homeland Security, seem intent on bringing the spirit of that idea to fruition, announcing the construction of a new immigration detention facility in the Everglades that they’ve dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.”
The detention site is expected to include tents and trailers, and it will be based at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, which is located in a remote part of the Everglades. In a video posted to X, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier suggested that immigrants imprisoned at the facility will have to face pythons and alligators in the nearby wetlands if they try to escape.
Uthmeier has claimed that the facility will be open by early July and have 5,000 beds. The detention site was described by DHS as a way to “expand facilities and bed space in just days.” Florida will have DHS’s financial backing for the facility, which is expected to cost $450 million a year annually.
Immigration advocates have decried the detention site as an “absolute horror show,” calling out a lack of oversight and likely poor conditions given the difficulty of building habitable temporary shelters that can withstand Florida temperatures.
“The fact that the administration and its allies would even consider such a huge temporary facility on such a short time line, with no obvious plan for how to adequately staff medical and other necessary services, in the middle of the Florida summer heat is demonstrative of their callous disregard for the health and safety of the human beings they intend to imprison there,” Mark Fleming, the associate director of federal litigation at the National Immigrant Justice Center, told The New York Times.
As the ACLU has previously explained, detention facilities in remote locations also make it much harder for immigrants to reach legal counsel and to report potential abuses.
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