President Donald Trump is expected to visit a controversial new migrant detention center in South Florida this week – nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz” – alongside U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, according to multiple reports. The visit, scheduled for Tuesday, July 1, comes as Trump ramps up deportations and hardline immigration enforcement early in his second term.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) appeared to tease the center’s opening on Saturday, June 28, with a post on X featuring an AI-generated image of alligators wearing ICE hats outside a detention facility, captioned “Coming Soon.”
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Deportation targets rise
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) leadership has set deportation quotas of at least 3,000 people a day, and budget documents obtained by Reuters show plans to remove up to one million undocumented immigrants annually.
Protests over facility in the Everglades
The planned site – deep in the Florida Everglades – has drawn fierce opposition from a wide range of groups including environmentalists, Native American activists and immigration advocates.
The center is expected to house thousands of detained migrants and reportedly cost roughly $450 million a year.
Over the weekend, hundreds of protesters gathered on a highway leading to the site as convoys of dump trucks hauled in construction materials.
Ecologist Christopher McVoy told The Associated Press he saw a convoy of trucks entering the airfield as he demonstrated against the planned detention center for hours on Saturday.
Environmental groups say the massive construction threatens the fragile Everglades ecosystem, and Native American leaders argue it violates ancestral land rights.
One Florida city commissioner who joined the protests said recent immigration raids in his community led him to oppose the center.
“People I know are in tears, and I wasn’t far from it,” he told The Associated Press.
Construction moves forward
Despite opposition, Florida officials are moving forward. The DeSantis administration has fast-tracked the project under emergency powers invoked by the governor, who calls it a necessary response to illegal immigration.
The compound will include temporary structures, including large tents and trailers, with Florida officials saying they expect to have 5,000 beds at the facility by early July.
Supporters argue the site’s location reduces escape risk. “Clearly, from a security perspective, if someone escapes, you know, there’s a lot of alligators,” Desantis said on Wednesday, June 25. “No one’s going anywhere.”
Noem has also thrown her support behind “Alligator Alcatraz,” which is in part funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Legal challenges mount
Environmental and human rights groups filed a lawsuit on Friday, June 27, seeking to stop the project.
“The Everglades are a vast, interconnected system of waterways and wetlands, and what happens in one area can have damaging impacts downstream,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades. “So it’s really important that we have a clear sense of any wetland impacts happening on site.”
DeSantis administration defends location
A spokesperson for DeSantis said in response to the lawsuit that the center is a “necessary staging operation for mass deportations located at a preexisting airport that will have no impact on the surrounding environment.”
But environmental groups argue that until the area has a comprehensive environmental survey and public comment period, the construction of the facility should stop.
They note the center’s expedited construction is “damning evidence” that the DeSantis and Trump administrations are banking on it being “too late” to reverse course on the planned facility even if ordered to do so by a court, said Elise Bennet, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.
