“Alligator Alcatraz” is official.
It sounded like a nickname June 19 when Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier posted a video on X with a pounding rock beat and a proposal for a temporary immigrant detention center in the Everglades with the promise that migrants arrested by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or local law enforcement had “nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.”
After some whirlwind construction and the installation of tents and FEMA trailers, a wide variety of branded merchandise, a site visit from President Donald Trump and some confusion over how official the marketing was, “Alligator Alcatraz” is now the name of the facility as far as the U.S. government is concerned.
“Yes, it is the official name,” Jeremy Redfern, a spokesman for Uthmeier, said in an email to the Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times.
The Department of Homeland Security posted a picture of alligators in front of chain link fencing, barbed wire and an observation tower wearing ICE hats on June 28. “Coming soon!” it said.
On July 1, the day the detention facility opened and the day before the first detainees were brought in, the official White House account on X posted a mocked-up photo of Trump standing next to three alligators wearing U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) hats.
“ALLIGATOR ALCATRAZ: MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN!” the post said.
Alligator Alcatraz sign goes up
By July 2, workers had installed a blue “Alligator Alcatraz” sign in place of the former sign for the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport that it was just weeks ago, along with multiple green ones pointing the way on local roads.
Almost immediately, people were seen taking selfies in front of the sign.
GOP leans into ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ merch
Before the detention facility opened, Florida Republicans added themed shirts, hats and coolers to their online store featuring the “Alligator Alcatraz” name surrounded by claw marks.
Uthmeier, who was DeSantis’ former chief of staff before being appointed attorney general, is running for the post in 2026 and has loaded up his election campaign site store with “Alligator Alcatraz” merchandise. Items include hats, shirts with different Alligator Alcatraz logos and “NOWHERE TO RUN NOWHERE TO HIDE,” and buttons, stickers and can coozies with a logo of a two-headed alligator-python creature.
There is no campaign merchandise on the site as of July 8.
Protesters, critics have different name for Alligator Alcatraz
Within hours of the initial announcement, critics on the social media site Bluesky quickly dubbed it “Alligator Auschwitz,” referring to the notorious Nazi concentration camp due to the conditions detainees are likely to experience in the Everglades in South Florida.
U.S. Representative Maxwell Frost, D-Orlando, called it “an internment camp.”
“Detainees will be kept in tents with inadequate sanitation facilities and will face unbearable living conditions,” read a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem signed by 24 members of Congress, including Frost, “including exposure to deadly pathogens, constant threats from unpredictable flooding and extreme weather events, and daily temperatures averaging 90 degrees, with a heat index often over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.”
State officials had said the site was rated to withstand a Category 2 hurricane, but within a day of Trump’s visit a summer rainstorm caused flooding in the facility, according to the Miami Herald. The Florida Division of Emergency Management told the Herald that the problem had been addressed.
What is Alligator Alcatraz?
Alligator Alcatraz is a temporary migrant detainment site in the Florida Everglades. Apparently, the brainchild of Uthmeier, the site was seized by the state, rushed into development and opened in under two weeks.
Previously, it was the Miami-Dade Collier Training and Transition Airport, a 39-square-mile airport facility with a 10,500-foot runway.
Now surrounded by more than five miles of barbed wire, the tent city is scheduled to hold up to 3,000 detainees and is staffed by 1,000 workers and 400 guards.
The facility was necessary to avoid overcrowding in county jails and state prisons, state officials have said. Critics point out that along with the harsh conditions, the remote location makes it more difficult for visits from family members or legal representatives.
Almost immediately, protests sprang up against the new facility and have continued throughout its construction from activists concerned about cruel migrant treatment, environmentalists and conservationists concerned about what housing 3,000-5,000 people will have on the environmentally precarious Everglades, and from the Miccosukee and Seminole Tribe of Florida who have denounced the development of detainment camps on indigenous land.
The move comes as both DeSantis and the Trump administration ramp up efforts to seize and ship out undocumented immigrants in Florida and across the country, and weeks after President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to reopen the original infamous Alcatraz, long a San Francisco tourist attraction, to “house America’s most ruthless and violent offenders.”
On June 26, DeSantis said the state is also looking at another site at Camp Blanding, southwest of Jacksonville.
Where is Alligator Alcatraz?
The “Alligator Alcatraz” facility is in Ochopee, Florida, just north of Everglades National Park, about six miles from Big Cypress National Preserve and about 36 miles west of the Miami business district.
According to the Miami International Airport, the Dade-Collier Airport was used as a training facility for “commercial pilots, private training, and a small number of military touch-and-goes.”
It’s also around the ancestral homelands of the Miccosukee and Seminole Tribe of Florida. Tribal members have denounced the development of detainment camps on indigenous land.
The facility was constructed in 1968 and originally known as the Everglades Jetport, according to the National Park Service, before an environmental study and activist protests killed plans for it to be developed into the largest airport in the world.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Is Alligator Alcatraz the official name of the Florida immigrant detention center?
Reporting by C. A. Bridges, USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida / Palm Beach Post
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
