Is President Donald Trump returning to his home state to visit the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration detention center? If so, it would be his first visit back to Florida in two months.
Alligator Alcatraz is a proposed immigrant detention center in the Florida Everglades championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis and State Attorney General James Uthmeier.
According to the Palm Beach Post, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a “VIP Movement Notification” for Tuesday, July 1, for Ochopee, Florida. The alert is for a 30/10 NMR, which stands for a protective inner core radius of 10 nautical miles and an outer ring radius of 30 nautical miles.
Those distances are reserved for the U.S. president.
Ochopee is the site of Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport. It has been in the news for more than a week as the location of a planned immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades that has been dubbed Alligator Alcatraz.
DeSantis did offer the president an invitation to visit the facility during a cable news network interview. He even said Air Force One could land at the Everglades airstrip, once envisioned as an airport site. The first detainees from what Trump has promised will be the biggest immigration deportation crackdown in U.S. history are to arrive at the holding facility July 1.
Overall, since Inauguration Day, Trump has visited Florida 11 times, with 10 trips to his home and private club, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. A visit to tour Alligator Alcatraz would be his first trip back in two months.
Below is what to know about Alligator Alcatraz, Trump’s potential visit and a list of his visits to Florida and Mar-a-Lago since his second term began.
What is Alligator Alcatraz? Where is Alligator Alcatraz in Florida?
On June 19, Uthmeier posted a video to X suggesting that the “virtually abandoned” Miami-Dade Collier Training and Transition Airport, a 39-square-mile airport facility in the Everglades with a 10,500-foot runway, could be easily converted into a temporary immigrant detention center to aid in Florida’s efforts to locate and deport “criminal aliens.”
“I call it Alligator Alcatraz,” he said. “It’s (sic) 30 square-mile-area is completely surrounded by the Everglades. It presents an efficient low-cost opportunity to build a temporary detention facility because you don’t need to invest that much in the perimeter. People get out, there’s not much waiting for ’em other than alligators and pythons.
“Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide,” he added.
Within days, trucks were seen bringing in materials, the Department of Homeland Security gave its approval and said FEMA money would be used to help fund it, and the governor’s office announced the state would use emergency powers to take control of the land away from Miami-Dade County.
“This is gonna be able to have more than 3,000 illegals, can be processed through here,” the governor told “Fox and Friends” co-host Steve Doocy as he showed off construction at the facility. “We’ve got a massive runway right behind us where any of the federal assets, if they wanna fly these people back to their own country, they can do it one-stop-shop.”
The move comes as both DeSantis and the Trump administration ramp up efforts to seize and deport 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.”
Uthmeier told Newsmax’s Carl Higbie that he’d like to have 5,000 beds “up and running” by the end of July.
Map of ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ in Florida
The “Alligator Alcatraz” facility is in Ochopee, Florida, just north of Everglades National Park and about 36 miles west of the Miami business district, CNN reported.
According to the Miami International Airport, the Dade-Collier Airport is 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 the plan.
In 1974, President Gerald Ford established Big Cypress National Preserve in the area, the nation’s first national preserve. The Alligator Alcatraz site is about six miles from Big Cypress National Preserve.
How many times did Trump visit Florida and Mar-a-Lago since his second term started?
As of Monday, June 30, Donald Trump has returned to his home state of Florida 11 times, with 10 visits to his private club, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, since Jan. 20. According to Palm Beach Post reporting, neither Barron Trump nor Melania Trump have accompanied the president on board Air Force One to Mar-a-Lago or Florida since Inauguration Day. However, other celebrities, Trump family members and well-known public figures like Elon Musk and Little X Musk have.
From January to the first week of May, Trump spent all but three weekends of his second presidency in Florida, skipping out on Easter weekend at Mar-a-Lago for the first time in years. On two of the weekends that he returned home, there were nationwide Donald Trump-Elon Musk protests, with some down the road from Mar-a-Lago.
Since Jan. 20, Trump has visited his home state of Florida 11 times and his Mar-a-Lago estate 10 times. Here’s a recap:
Sangalang is a lead digital producer for USA TODAY Network. Follow her on Twitter or Instagram at @byjensangalang. Support local journalism. Consider subscribing to a Florida newspaper.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Will Trump tour ‘Alligator Alcatraz,’ proposed ICE detention center? List of his past Florida visits
Reporting by Jennifer Sangalang, Antonio Fins and C. A. Bridges, USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida / Palm Beach Post
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
