All the Details on the New Migrant Detention Center in Florida’s Everglades Dubbed Alligator Alcatraz

President Donald Trump’s fight against America’s illegal border crossers now has serious teeth with a new migrant detention center slated for Florida’s Everglades — and state Attorney General James Uthmeier has already dubbed the facility Alligator Alcatraz.

The federally approved 5,000-bed tent and trailer compound, which is intended to be temporary, is being constructed on 39 square miles of land in Ochopee that had previously served as the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport.

“The perimeter’s already set by Mother Nature,”  Uthmeier explained on the Benny Show podcast,  estimating that the project could be operational in as little as 30 days. “People get out. There’s not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.”

According to the National Park Service, the Everglades wetlands are rife with predatory gators and slithering serpents.

The AG’s nickname for the off-the-grid holding area harks back to the notoriously inescapable and grim Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, which for decades sat on an inhospitable island of the same name in California’s San Francisco Bay.

Department of Homeland Security–approved plans will allow the new pen to hold immigrants arrested in Florida, as well as out-of-state transfers collared by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.

In a statement obtained by the Miami Herald, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem claimed the state-run immigration detention center will be a “cost-effective and innovative” way to deliver on “the American people’s mandate for mass deportations of criminal illegal aliens.”

The administration of Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis pitched the partnership to the federal government earlier this year in a 37-page Immigration Enforcement Operations Plan outlining the state’s requests for reimbursements and looser restrictions on addressing unauthorized immigration.

The Hill reports that the governor’s office proclaimed, “Utilizing this space and/or others around the state, Florida will continue to lead in immigration enforcement.”

Speaking to the press in Tampa, DeSantis said the facility’s capacity will help Trump’s overall mission to increase the existing nationwide beds for detained migrants from 41,000 to at least 100,000 — in addition to relieving the burdens of state and local jails.

The governor also recently shared that he’s considering an additional migrant detention area at the Florida National Guard training center known as Camp Blanding, about 30 miles southwest of Jacksonville.

Alligator Alcatraz is projected to cost about $450 million per year to operate, which will come from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Shelter and Services Program that was used to house asylum-seekers during former President Joe Biden’s administration.