Footage has shown what appears to be the first group of handcuffed detainees being led into Trump’s ‘alligator Alcatraz’.
Days ago, Trump visited the makeshift facility at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in Ochopee, Florida, which received federal approval to house thousands of undocumented immigrants.
The president said that ‘some of the most vicious people on the planet’ will be held at the detention centre.
Today, the Florida Division of Emergency Management wrote: ‘The first group has arrived at Alligator Alcatraz. Florida is proud to help facilitate Trump’s mission to enforce immigration law.’
It will cost an estimated £330,000,000 to operate each year when it’s fully established.
Deep in the Florida Everglades and surrounded by miles of swampland, the facility has been likened to early-stage concentration camps by some.
‘Alligator Alcatraz’ was coined by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who shared a video about it on X (formerly Twitter) a week-and-a-half ago and called it ‘the one-stop shop to carry out President Trump’s mass deportation agenda’.
It has 3,000 beds and was built in eight days after DeSantis authorised its construction. The Trump administration said it will eventually hold up to 5,000 people.
It is slated to become the biggest migrant detention facility in the country in the heart of the Everglades, which is home to alligators, pythons, mosquitoes and other dangerous wildlife.
The 11,000-foot runway at the airport has recently been used for training, but officials indicated that it could soon be used for deportation flights.
But the facility isn’t without concerns.
In an opinion article for MSNBC, author Andrea Pitzer, who researches concentration camps, wrote: ‘When people think of concentration camps, they think of more than a million people murdered at Auschwitz.
‘But extermination camps appeared only after nearly a decade of Nazi rule and several evolutions in wartime detention. We’re still in the early stages of this arc, but Americans aren’t helpless before the administration and its allies.’
In addition to humanitarian concerns, historic worries and environmental issues have been brought up.
The Miccosukee Tribe of Indians has also gotten involved in the matter, slamming the use of its ancestral lands in the Big Cypress National Preserve for detention purposes.
Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, pointed out that the site posed an ‘existential threat’ to the national park.
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