Trump Administration Used Florida to Build and Run "Alligator Alcatraz," a State-Fronted Federal Immigration Detention Center, Then Closed It Within a Year

Details

On June 25, 2026, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the closure of the Everglades immigration detention center branded "Alligator Alcatraz," less than a year after it opened. The facility was nominally a state project — built and run by the Florida Division of Emergency Management — but it operated as part of the Trump administration's immigration enforcement effort: it was created at federal request, filled with federal immigration detainees moved in and out by DHS and ICE, and funded in large part by a promised FEMA reimbursement. President Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem personally opened it and urged other states to copy the model. The state had begun emptying the site in early June, transferring all detainees to facilities in South Florida, California, Arizona, Louisiana and Texas while citing hurricane season. DeSantis called it an "emergency solution" that was always temporary, saying the federal government now had the capacity to detain people on its own.

The shutdown ended one of the most contested parts of the administration's immigration crackdown: the first state-owned and operated immigration detention center in the United States, stood up in days as a federal-state workaround, run outside the normal federal detention system, and challenged from the start by lawsuits, allegations of abuse, and a cost that climbed toward $1 billion. It was also a test of a novel legal theory — that a state could front a federal immigration facility and thereby place it beyond the reach of federal oversight law — which the administration and Florida defended all the way to a federal appeals court.

At a press conference weeks earlier, DeSantis defended the spending, telling onlookers "we've saved taxpayers money" and that he would "rather do what's right." Supporters cast the project as a model of state-federal cooperation; critics called it a costly and inhumane arrangement that let the federal government detain people without being held to federal standards.

How the Facility Was Built

The project moved from idea to operation in a matter of weeks. On June 19, 2025, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier — credited as the architect of the plan — publicly unveiled it in a video on X, calling it "Alligator Alcatraz" and pitching the remote Everglades airstrip as a low-cost site where the surrounding swamp would serve as the perimeter. DeSantis invoked a long-standing immigration "state of emergency" to seize the county-owned Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport and fast-track construction without the customary environmental reviews or coordination with local officials.

President Trump and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem toured the half-built site on July 1, 2025, and the first detainees arrived on July 3. State and federal officials promoted the imagery, suggesting that alligators and pythons would deter escapes; Trump remarked during the tour that the only way out was deportation. The Republican Party of Florida sold branded merchandise, including T-shirts and beer koozies, off the facility's name.

The official designations were more sober — the state called it the South Florida Detention Facility, and ICE listed it as the "Florida Soft Sided Facility South." It was built as a complex of tents and trailers on an airstrip inside Big Cypress National Preserve, with planned capacity ranging from 3,000 to as many as 5,000 beds. Most funding was expected to flow through FEMA's Shelter and Services Program, which Noem said would cover the costs "in large part," with the operation projected at roughly $450 million a year.

The Federal Role

Although Florida built and staffed the facility, it functioned as an arm of federal immigration enforcement, with the federal government involved at every stage. Federal and state officials, including DHS and the DeSantis administration, began coordinating on the site as early as June 2025. Everyone held there was a federal immigration detainee; people were funneled in through the federal 287(g) program that deputizes local police for ICE, and DHS controlled who was sent there and physically moved everyone out at the end. The money was federal too: DeSantis said FEMA had already approved $608 million in reimbursement. And the administration publicly championed it: Trump opened it, called the population "the worst of the worst," and urged other states to build their own.

That federal nexus became the central legal question. To defeat a lawsuit brought under the National Environmental Policy Act — a federal statute requiring environmental review before major federal actions — Florida and DHS argued that the facility was a purely state project beyond the law's reach. A divided 11th Circuit accepted that argument, with Chief Judge William Pryor writing that the state built and funded the site and had received no federal money when the trial court intervened. In dissent, Judge Nancy Abudu countered that immigration is uniquely and exclusively a federal responsibility and that the facility could not have existed without the federal government's request.

Conditions Inside

Within a week of opening, the Miami Herald and other outlets reported poor conditions, and the accounts grew more serious over the following months. Detainees and their attorneys described worms in the food, toilets that did not flush, flooding waste, swarming mosquitoes, and extreme heat. One attorney accused guards of severely beating and pepper-spraying detainees.

In December 2025, Amnesty International published a 61-page investigation, Torture and Enforced Disappearances in the Sunshine State, based on a September research trip and interviews with men who had been held at the facility. The report concluded that conditions at Alligator Alcatraz and the federal Krome center in Miami amounted to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and that some practices crossed the line into torture. Investigators documented overflowing toilets seeping into sleeping areas, 24-hour lighting, cameras above toilets, inconsistent medical care, and routine shackling. The most serious findings concerned "the box" — described as a roughly two-foot-square cage-like structure where detainees were restrained on the ground as punishment, exposed to the elements with little water.

Amnesty also found that because the site was state-run and not integrated into ICE's tracking systems, families and lawyers were often unable to locate detainees, a situation the organization characterized as enforced disappearances. The report noted that, of at least 25 people who died in ICE custody nationally during fiscal 2025, six died in Florida facilities, including four at Krome — deaths that occurred within the broader state detention system Amnesty examined rather than at the Everglades site itself.

The DeSantis administration rejected the findings. A spokesperson called the report "a politically motivated attack" and described its specifics as fabrications, warning that publishing the allegations could endanger staff and detainees. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said her office fielded near-daily media questions based on what she called false allegations about the facility.

Concern reached Congress. U.S. Sens. Jon Ossoff of Georgia and Dick Durbin of Illinois opened an investigation into abuse allegations, and after an unannounced April 2026 visit, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida Democrat, said everything about the camp "screams inhumane and unnecessary." The ACLU separately sued over what it described as a lack of access to legal counsel; attorneys reported that clients were transferred out of the facility and effectively vanished from contact for about a week before families or lawyers were notified.

Who Was Held There

DeSantis said at the closing that more than 20,000 people had passed through the facility, and that "there is no question this mission has made the state of Florida safer." Trump had earlier described the population as "the worst of the worst."

Available federal data complicate that characterization. According to court records cited by the Center for Biological Diversity, only about 1.79% of new immigration cases in fiscal 2026 sought deportation based on any alleged criminal activity by the immigrant — meaning the large majority of people detained or facing removal nationally during this period had no criminal record. Demographers at Florida State University also found that the number of immigrants without legal status in Florida had been declining since 2018, and cautioned that policies forcing migrants out could harm the state's economy.

The Cost

The price tag became one of the most persistent lines of criticism, including from some Republicans. State spending records reviewed by Florida Phoenix showed Alligator Alcatraz consumed roughly $370 million in its first three months alone, burning more than $1.2 million per day. The single largest vendor bill — about $92 million — went to Doodie Calls, a portable-toilet and sanitation company.

By mid-2026, total spending across Alligator Alcatraz and "Deportation Depot," Florida's other state-run detention site, had reached at least $460 million, with another $45 million in invoices disclosed in May. The Florida Division of Emergency Management had projected in November 2025 that the facility would cost roughly $1.1 billion by June 2026. The state has long expected FEMA to reimburse $608 million — which DeSantis said was already approved with "no negotiations" — but those dollars have not arrived, and Florida drew heavily on its emergency-preparedness fund to keep the operation running. Newsweek reported the fund had fallen to about $25.6 million by mid-May, prompting the legislature to impose new guardrails on emergency spending.

Transparency was itself a flashpoint. State Rep. Anna Eskamani, a Democrat, told Newsweek that her requests for total costs were repeatedly ignored or met with heavily redacted files. In October 2025, Friends of the Everglades sued the state for withholding records related to funding and federal control and won a court order in January 2026 requiring disclosure.

DeSantis defends the spending as money well spent. He has argued the state saved taxpayers from the cost of providing medical care and schooling to undocumented immigrants, pointing to a 2025 state report estimating that undocumented immigrants cost Florida about $660 million in 2024. The facility's own projected cost approached or exceeded that annual figure, however, and much of the state's spending may never be reimbursed.

FEMA's Entanglement — and the Toll on Disaster Readiness

The disaster agency that was supposed to bankroll Alligator Alcatraz was, at the same time, being drawn deeply into the immigration crackdown itself — at a measurable cost to its core mission, according to a congressional investigation released two weeks after the facility closed. On July 10, 2026, House Democrats on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee published a 34-page investigative report, "Stretched Thin: The Erosion of FEMA's Core Mission Under DHS," led by subcommittee Ranking Member Greg Stanton of Arizona, who had launched the probe in May 2026. Based on interviews with 15 current and former FEMA employees and policy experts, the report concluded that the administration's immigration agenda "has used FEMA resources and personnel to aid in carrying out large-scale immigration enforcement operations, distracting the agency from its statutorily required responsibilities, jeopardizing its workforce levels and expertise, and reducing its ability to respond to disasters and aid survivors."

The Washington Post, which reviewed the report along with previously unreported Government Accountability Office documents, found that beginning in August 2025 DHS reassigned about 125 FEMA employees from its security and human resources offices to ICE — some detailed until May 2026, with assignments stretching past 200 days despite a 120-day guideline from FEMA's own Office of Chief Counsel. Another 41 FEMA employees volunteered for southern border and interior enforcement missions, and as of July 9, 2026, 13 were still supporting the DHS volunteer force. FEMA staff worked inside detention centers, reviewed applications and issued job offers for the surge of new ICE officers, and helped oversee Defense Department civilian volunteers whose duties, per one GAO document, included planning support for arrests, raids and patrols and "managing the physical flow of detained noncitizens from arrest to deportation." A former agency official told the investigators that "ICE could not have done this work without FEMA... FEMA created that structure for them." The report also raised legality concerns: FEMA leaders had warned about using disaster-funded resources — including Disaster Relief Fund-paid CORE (Cadre of On-Call Response/Recovery) employees — for immigration details without reimbursement agreements, questions the report frames in Anti-Deficiency Act terms, but "they still were sent over," a former senior official told the Post.

The diversions hit an agency already hollowed out. Since January 2025, FEMA has lost roughly 30 percent of its staff — about 5,000 people, per the probe — and it has lacked a Senate-confirmed leader since Trump returned to office. A current official said immigration work meant "basically all human resourcing actions ground to a halt" at FEMA. During the Texas floods that killed at least 137 people in July 2025, call-center contracts that then-Secretary Noem had let lapse left hundreds of disaster survivors waiting in exceptionally long phone queues. Federal News Network's coverage of the report noted a former employee's assessment that ICE hiring consumed "nearly all of FEMA's hiring and personnel administration capacity." House Homeland Security Ranking Member Bennie Thompson separately warned about "dangerous FEMA staff reassignments during peak hurricane season" — the same hurricane-season rationale Florida cited when emptying Alligator Alcatraz. Stanton demanded the immediate recall of all FEMA employees detailed to ICE or CBP, and the report recommended making FEMA an independent, Cabinet-level agency and requiring DHS to reimburse it for immigration work.

DHS disputed the framing. Spokeswoman Lauren Bis told the Post there "are NO, and have been, NO FEMA employees coordinating or supporting massive raids, arrests, or deportations," that standard reassignment processes were followed, that no first responders were assigned to ICE, and that the administration "ensures that Disaster Relief Fund (DRF) resources are not used for border security missions and seeks reimbursement for any non-disaster-related activities." She noted that prior administrations, including Biden's, deployed FEMA to the border for humanitarian missions. But former FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell and five other current and former officials told the Post there was a stark difference between past humanitarian support and staffing an enforcement and deportation apparatus, calling it a new precedent; Pete Gaynor, who ran FEMA in Trump's first term, said the findings "raise serious questions that deserve honest answers." Even two officials who thought some findings were mischaracterized agreed that FEMA's primary mission "has been measurably undermined by DHS' policy goals surrounding border security."

For the Alligator Alcatraz ledger, the report deepens a double irony: FEMA committed $608 million in disaster-program money to the facility that has never been paid out, while Florida drained its own emergency-preparedness fund to about $25.6 million running it — and all the while FEMA's national disaster workforce was itself being redirected into the detention system the facility served.

The Environmental and Legal Fight

The site sits inside Big Cypress National Preserve, on an airstrip originally cleared in the late 1960s for a jetport that environmentalists defeated half a century ago. Friends of the Everglades, the Center for Biological Diversity, and Earthjustice sued in June 2025 to enforce the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to study environmental impacts before major projects; the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida later joined to protect tribal lands.

In August 2025, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams sided with the plaintiffs, issuing an 82-page ruling that barred further construction and ordered the state and federal government to begin removing fencing, lighting, generators and waste systems within 60 days. Florida immediately appealed, and the 11th Circuit stayed the order in September before reaffirming in April 2026 — on the "state project" theory discussed above — that the facility fell outside federal environmental law. Crucially, the appellate court noted that once Florida accepted the federal reimbursement, the law would apply, and it sent the case back to Judge Williams. Environmental groups argued the closure's timing was no coincidence. Attorney Paul Schwiep said the defendants were "effectively waving the white flag" rather than face the judge who had already ordered the site shut down. The Center for Biological Diversity separately sued in May 2026 over Clean Air Act violations from the facility's diesel generators.

The groups say the legal fight is not over. Even with detainees gone, advocates reported that generators, lighting, fuel storage and other infrastructure remained on site, posing continuing risks to endangered species including the Florida panther and the Florida bonneted bat. They are demanding a full environmental assessment and remediation; WLRN reported cleanup and repair costs are expected to exceed $40 million. Eve Samples of Friends of the Everglades called the project "a boondoggle to taxpayers and a flagrant assault on the Everglades." Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava has asked county commissioners to sell the underlying jetport to Everglades National Park, citing risks to the more than $23 billion Everglades restoration effort.

Part of a National Build-Out — and Retreat

Alligator Alcatraz's arc — detention infrastructure stood up fast at enormous cost, then abandoned within a year — was not unique. In June 2026, The New York Times reported that ICE plans to offload seven of the eleven empty warehouses it had bought for about $1 billion during the same 2025 detention build-out, either transferring them to other federal agencies or selling them outright. The warehouse purchases — a signature initiative of then-Secretary Noem, made quickly and funded by the congressional appropriation that ballooned ICE's budget from $8 billion to $28 billion a year — were meant to be converted into large soft-sided, dormitory-style detention centers to supercharge mass deportation. Most were never used to hold anyone. The seven being unloaded, purchased for more than $700 million, are in Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Utah and New Jersey; individual sites cost as much as roughly $145 million before renovations, and one in Hamburg, Pennsylvania cost $87 million. The DHS inspector general is investigating the purchases.

The parallels to the Everglades site are striking. Like Alligator Alcatraz, the warehouses ran into local opposition — including from Republican communities worried about utilities and protests — and, above all, into the same National Environmental Policy Act litigation: federal judges blocked or froze work at warehouse sites in Maryland, New Jersey and Michigan over the absence of environmental review, the very requirement Florida and DHS had structured Alligator Alcatraz to evade. Claire Trickler-McNulty, a senior ICE official in the Biden administration, told the Times the plan "seemed questionable from inception, and the only thing saving it is probably the endless blank check ICE has for detention." A former Trump administration official, John Fabbricatore, defended the warehouses as "a quick concept to scale up mass deportation" that opponents managed to stall in court. Despite border czar Tom Homan's stated goal of 100,000 detention beds by the end of 2025, ICE's detainee population topped out around 70,000 in early 2026.

The retreat also reflects a changed posture at DHS. Noem's successor as homeland security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, had privately expressed skepticism of the warehouse plan and has said publicly he wants ICE to be quieter about how it enforces immigration law. In its statement on the warehouses, DHS said detainees "should be removed at lightning speed, not housed on American soil at the taxpayer's expense," and that it was "moving swiftly to utilize EXISTING detention space with our state and county partners" — the same rationale, in effect, that DeSantis offered for closing Alligator Alcatraz. AP reported the offloading plan as well, and NBC News noted the agency was eyeing outright sales of the mega-warehouses. Taken together, the state-fronted Everglades camp and the federal warehouse program represent well over $1.5 billion committed to detention capacity that was shuttered, never opened, or put up for disposal within roughly a year.

How It Fits Florida's Broader Approach

Alligator Alcatraz was the most visible piece of a wider push that placed Florida at the front of the national immigration debate. Under DeSantis, the state opened two detention centers, revived a World War II-era civilian force in part to support border enforcement, expanded local police cooperation with ICE through the federal 287(g) program, and passed first-in-the-nation state laws targeting undocumented residents. The federal government separately operates five detention centers in Florida, the largest being the Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami.

At the closing news conference, White House border czar Tom Homan praised DeSantis and said Florida would continue playing a key role in immigration enforcement through its other facilities even with the Everglades site shut. DeSantis, for his part, signaled he was glad to step back: he said that ideally he "wouldn't want to be involved in this business at all" if the federal government could handle detention without state support. Uthmeier said the facility was "no longer necessary" and was never intended to be permanent, and that the airstrip would revert to a pilot-training site.

Reactions to the Closure

Immigrant-rights advocates welcomed the shutdown but said it does not address what detainees already experienced. The Florida Immigrant Coalition argued the only winners were the contractors who profited, while families endured months of separation. Carmen Iguina González of the ACLU's National Prison Project said the conditions documented at the site were not unique but reflected systemic abuse across ICE detention nationally — a caution that the closure of one facility leaves the larger system in place. Katie Blankenship, an immigration attorney, said her clients were moved and "disappeared into the system," typically unreachable for about a week.

Polling throughout the facility's life showed it was broadly unpopular. A July 2025 YouGov survey found 48% of Americans opposed the center and 33% supported it, while a late-July poll of Florida voters found 34% viewed it favorably and 59% unfavorably.

Supporters maintain the facility achieved its purpose: DeSantis points to the roughly 20,000 people processed and says Florida filled a federal capacity gap. Critics — including environmental groups, the ACLU, and Amnesty International — point to the conditions documented for detainees, the cost approaching $1 billion, and the environmental damage to Big Cypress. With lawsuits over records, cleanup, and remediation still pending — and with congressional investigators now probing FEMA's role in the immigration crackdown and the DHS inspector general examining ICE's detention real-estate spending — the final accounting of the nine-month operation, and of the build-out it exemplified, remains open.