Alligator Alcatraz: week ending July 18, 2025
Introduction
Last week two people at church asked me some combination of how I've been doing what I've been up to. In both instances, my response was the same, "Well, you know, trying to deal with this whole Alligator Alcatraz thing, taking photos and what not."
In both cases their reactions were the same and, frankly, shocked me given my church is sort of renowned for being what some might call "woke" and others might say, into social and environmental justice: both asked, "Alligator Alcatraz, what's that?"
So, this week, I thought I'd focus on making sure I've got a post that's able to answer that question whenever I'm asked it again. I'm sure that this is getting old to some.
That said, it's an existential crisis to the Miccosukee, whose land the facility sits on and drains into. It's also an existential threat to the people being detained there and, frankly, to the people who work there.
Still, I'll try to keep it fresh and as brief as possible!
Presently, my news clippings folder on the topic is nearing 150 entries (and I'm not using a bot or crawler, these are all stories I've clicked on and clipped), so there's plenty to say, but, admittedly a lot of it has been said better than I can say it.
And, I frankly am having trouble keeping up with it all myself.
So, I'll try to keep this concise (I know, not my strength), highlight the best reporting I've seen on what it is and why people are so upset about it and to give an on the ground perspective that may or may not add to the narrative.
Overview of Alligator Alcatraz
Standing on the shoulders of a vile, racist trope, "gator bait," which promoted the horrific notion that Black children were best used as bait to attract alligators, on June 19, 2025, former Governor DeSantis Chief of Staff turned Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier pitched the idea of an immigration detention center in the Everglades where, "You don't need to invest that much in the perimeter. People get out, there's not that much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide."
Philip Cardella
My coverage of the FIRST protest on June 22, 2025.
By July 1, 2025, just two weeks later, after days of protests with thousands gathered over that time, President Donald J. Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem toured the operational site. It was designed to initially hold 1,000 people with expansion to potentially 5,000.
How did they build it so fast? By using tents and trailers designated for natural disaster relief through FEMA and by Florida taxpayers essentially loaning the Federal Government $450 million a year--expecting, or perhaps hoping, they'll be reimbursed.
According to Reason's Autumn Billings, leaked documents show that the cost of the facility has already skyrocketed to $600 million.
As for who is building it (it is an ongoing process even as detainees are moving through it), it is a collection of GOP donors and backers funded by the governor dipping into disaster funds set aside for hurricane response.
And potentially money reallocated from a Baltimore, Maryland, non-profit for use on the facility.
Meanwhile, many of the contractors actually building site are covering their company logos and illegally obscuring their truck id numbers.
Hurricane season won't peak until September. However, the heat index was expected to hit as high as 111 degrees on Friday, 18-July 2025.
The Florida GOP wasted no time in selling merchandise off of the racists trope that is Alligator Alcatraz.
Alex DeLuca
Minutes after the President left it started to rain causing the facility to flood.
It accepted its first detainees the next day.
Now Florida is planning to deputize national guard soldiers to act as immigration judges. From a story in The Conversation:
The DeSantis plan includes a proposal to deputize Florida’s nine National Guard Judge Advocate General’s Corps officers to serve as immigration judges. JAG officers are attorneys who serve as legal advisers, prosecutors, defense counsel and military judges in a wide range of matters specific to the armed forces. That includes courts-martial and civil matters involving the military.
DeSantis himself was a JAG accused of improprieties while serving in Guantanamo Bay at the peak time of torture allegations at that facility, which he denies.
Historic Interlude
If you want to understand the history of the National Preserve System in the National Parks System and/or the history of the location at the heart of the controversy, there's no better thing than this to read.
Too few of you click on the stories (lol) so here's the tl;dr: by the late 1950s Americans thought that supersonic flight was the future. Developers, who remember, played a crucial role in the Great Depression and Great Recession with their focus on shady deals in Florida, dreamed about not only an airport in the Everglades, but an expansion of Greater Miami essentially across the 100 mile wide peninsula.
This great story should be told by the author, Bill Kearney so I'll put in a section of it:
Bipartisan outrage over those dreams (or nightmares) united an odd cross section of Floridians: birder watchers, hunters, native tribes, blue-collar plumbers and Republican advisers.
This David-and-Goliath battle pitted them against heavy hitters: the Dade County Port Authority, the Federal Aviation Administration, the state of Florida, the air transport industry and eager chambers of commerce.
The ensuing fight over the jetport, which eventually drew in then-President Richard Nixon’s administration, was the catalyst for creating Big Cypress National Preserve, and helped shape the environmental movement we know today.
And the bipartisan outrage of the 1960s echoes through today’s protests about that same piece of land.
In order to get the coalition to come together to stop the jetway, the coalition came up with the idea of a preserve, rather than a National Park. This would allow airboats to continue to glide through the Everglades while hunters could hunt, locals wanting a new home and people wanting to preserve the beauty of the area could all get what they wanted.
Again, it's an excellent read that has one major positive takeaway for those opposed to the detention center in the heart of the Everglades: the people, united, stopped the "inevitable" on that site before. They can do it again.
I emailed Mr. Kearney about the piece and he told me how the book, An Everglades Providence by Jack E. Davis, a biography of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, was a source he highly recommended.
Who is upset about Alligator Alcatraz and why
The Miccosukee and Seminole Tribes
To say the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians are upset about Alligator Alcatraz would be an understatement. As far as I know, there have been members of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians standing, protesting and/or praying every day since it was first announced. The Miccosukee are joining legal action brought by the Friends of the Everglades and against the state and Federal authorities to stop the detention camp, or at least to pause it long enough for an environmental review, which the state bypassed.
The Miami New Times ran a piece on 18-July 2025 about how Alligator Alcatraz had sparked indigenous led resistance
Environmentalists, tourists, hunters and fishers
Uncle Pappy, a local of the Everglades, breaks down what's going on at Alligator Alcatraz in a unique video full of charm, anger and detail.
Other environmentalists took to the national media to state their concerns with the development in the middle of the Everglades.
Friends of the Everglades, a group founded by the legendary journalist and activist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who popularized the term "river of grass" to describe South Florida's wetlands, sued the Federal Government to stop the detention center. Fittingly, Friends of the Everglades was founded to stop the airport that is at the center of all of this in the 1960s. While the government then rushed to build a runway--the first of six--Friends of the Everglades and others, including the Nixon Administration, successfully stopped the project in the early 1970s before any more runways or buildings could be built.
Joining the Friends of the Everglades are the Center for Biological Diversity and Earthjustice. The Miccosukee Tribe of Indians has filed a petition to join that lawsuit. According to the Miami Herald, "The groups are accusing both the state of Florida and various federal agencies of dodging federal environmental regulations to build the facility, built hastily within the Big Cypress National Preserve."
admin
Meanwhile, award-winning, multiple US President approved photographer Clyde Butcher, whose main photo gallery is just six miles west of the entrance to Alligator Alcatraz, attracted hundreds to his gallery to hear him speak on the subject.
, Naples Daily News
"We need to tell people how beautiful it is, how wonderful it is, how clean the water is, I think telling people (about the Everglades) is the best thing you can do other than vote for the right people," Butcher said at the event.
Added his daughter, Jackie Butcher Obendorf, "We're here to spread the message that the Everglades is not a scary, horrible place. It's beautiful, it's wonderful. This has been absolutely heartbreaking for our family."
Pro-immigrant groups and politicians
US House of Representatives member from Florida's 10th Congressional District (Orlando area) is interviewed by COURIER DC correspondent, Camaron Stevenson on what he saw in Alligator Alcatraz. Produced by Courier DC.
Stories of maggots in food, limited access to running toilets and showers and broken air conditioners abound, as well as stories of horror movie worthy mosquitoes. Several detainees have already died while in ICE Custody in South Florida in 2025.
Five state lawmakers, all Democrats, were denied access to the facility on July 3rd and are suing the state. Per the Miami Herald, "Sens. Shevrin Jones and Carlos Guillermo Smith, and state Reps. Anna Eskamani, Angie Nixon and Michele Rayner say denying them unannounced access to the facility is against the law, because members of the Florida legislature are supposed to have the ability to inspect state correctional institutions “at their pleasure.” The state argues Alligator Alcatraz is not a correctional institution because it’s not being run by the Department of Corrections."
Part of this is based on Florida's disproportionate number of deaths in ICE facilities in 2025. The Krome Detention Center in Miami-Dade County, which is literally one of the closest buildings to Alligator Alcatraz, has already had three people die under suspicious circumstances since January. As of July 1, 2025, eleven people are known to have died while in ICE custody nationwide. Another person died in a facility in Downtown Miami and a fifth person died in South Florida ICE custody, this time in Broward County.
Read that again, of the eleven people that have died in ICE custody in 2025, five have died in South Florida, mostly in Miami-Dade County.
Former State Senator, a Colombian born politician who was the first Democrat Latina elected for the Florida Senate, Annette Taddeo, wrote in the Miami Herald this week, "Four years ago, Cubans shouted “Patria y Vida” in defiance of tyranny. Some of those freedom fighters now languish in ICE detention cells, detained by the very country that once stood as a beacon of hope...Let’s honor the legacy of Patria y Vida by standing up for those who still stand for freedom — on our soil and beyond."
On Friday, 18-July, 2025, eight members of Florida's congressional delegation , all Democrats, introduced a bill that would close Alligator Alcatraz.
“Our bill would shut down this atrocity, strengthen oversight of detention facilities nationwide, and mandate public reporting on costs, conditions, and the treatment of detainees at this detention site, as well as report on any harms to the environment and nearby tribal lands,” Wasserman Schultz, who represents Florida's 25th Congressional District, said in a statement.
Alligator shit: rumors, lies and other misconceptions floating around Al Gore's Internet (and a 4,000 tons of burning garbage a day)
There have been a lot of lies, gross errors and otherwise just negligent ideas floating around the Internet regarding Alligator Alcatraz. The flow of alligator shit appears to be happy to head towards the right or the left.
One of the most alarming stories out there is that there are incinerators at Alligator Alcatraz to dispose of bodies. Clearly built on the idea that rather than Alligator Alcatraz, the facility may better be known as Alligator Auschwitz due to some apt comparisons between US immigration policy today and Nazi Germany's, the incinerators in the Everglades story in fact has no substance. It was a lie built on a video from a place outside of Florida shot in 2024, well before Alligator Alcatraz was announced. Classic confirmation bias bait. To be very clear--there are no incinerators at Alligator Alcatraz. As a woman quoted in the story says:
There are real tragedies happening every day to immigrants, and claims like this honestly make it feel like they're trying to deter us from what is actually happening. Misinformation is a distraction and it hijacks our outrage and gives power to those who thrive on confusion.
Naomi Feinstein
Except, the Miami-Dade County Commission is considering putting an incinerator there after Alligator Alcatraz closes. One of This Week in Florida's first big stories was on the trash incinerator in Doral that was, ahem, incinerated. With the landfills full, the county is looking for a new site to place the largest trash incinerator in the country--which would burn 4,000 tons of garbage a day--and that's coincidentally in the news this week. From the link in the previous sentence:
"The proposed sites include the former Opa-locka West Airport, Okeechobee Road between NW 178 Street and NW 182 Street, the previous Doral location and a location in Medley."
Betty Osceola of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians--a prominent activist for the Everglades who is at the Alligator Alcatraz gates almost daily--posted on Facebook on Wednesday:
You have got to be kidding me. That Miami-Dade County Commissioners would even propose putting a trash burning incinerator at the Jetport Site as an alternative location. After the state is finished with “Alligator Alcatraz”. See what did i say, this move by the State opens the door to future development. More reason it needs to be shutdown.
Quote (Commissioner) McGhee: “Well, if the state and federal government have already decided that that site may be used for other purposes, then we should consider it as well” – consider it for a SOLID WASTE FACILITY!
Commissioner Gilbert said: “If we are thinking about old airports, there is one that we own out there that is not near any of our districts. It’s being used now, but my understanding is it won’t be used this way forever. So I think we should think about that.”
The substance of that was confirmed in a Miami Herald story that published a few hours later.
Meanwhile, people responding to Osceola on Facebook seemed to believe that the incinerator--ten years in the future, if that--was meant for people.
I tried to point out to one person responding to Betty Osceola that the incinerator story is about trash, not people, and she scolded me for being more or less naive. I tried to respond that this week alone there are two stories of mass graves in the news. One in Ireland and the other, ironically, about Irish railroad workers in the United States.
If ICE wants to dispose of bodies (and there's no evidence they do– they'd have to care about people dying to try to cover it up) they don't need incinerators to do it.
Another misconception that is out there is that this site is remote. It is isolated, to be sure, but it's also 41 miles from my door and I don't exactly live in the far west of Greater Miami. It's really only about 30 miles from the edge of the Miami metropolis--and my wife is planning on running just over 26 miles in a few months. You know, a marathon. It's also about 30 miles from the edge of the Naples area--there's even a fire station just a bit further than 30 miles away.
It is also 1000 feet away from a school bus stop and within a mile of several Miccosukee Indian Villages.
Of course, the misconception that personally burns me up is the idea that alligators attack people all the time and so do pythons. Fatal alligator attacks happen less than once per year, despite every state with alligators needing to put up signs telling people to not feed them as if they were squirrels or pigeons. As for pythons--there's never been a fatal wild python attack in the United States, though the Miccosukee are, from what I hear, teaching their children what to do if a python were to attack them.
Bear the History Hound Finds
Brightline Train is the deadliest in America and its not even close
The Miami Herald and WLRN, the local NPR and PBS stations, worked together to produce a Pulitzer worthy piece on the high speed train from Miami to Orlando and its clip of killing someone every thirteen days. That's a little over once every two weeks. The name of the story is "Why Florida's Brightline passenger train is the deadliest in the US," and it has seven authors in the by-line. They worked hard on this.
You really need to read this one, wherever you live.
Or, if you prefer, check out the NPR podcast.
Hosted by Daniel Rivero , Brittany Wallman
Clyde Butcher Black & White Fine Art Photography
Bear says you owe it to yourself to check out Clyde Butcher's work.
Infinite Hope
The Everglades
As renowned photographer Clyde Butcher's daughter, Jackie Butcher Obendorf, said so eloquently, "We're here to spread the message that the Everglades is not a scary, horrible place. It's beautiful, it's wonderful." It is a place where I find peace and serenity and, of course, infinite hope.
A few of my favorite pictures of the greater everglades.
Peafowl
In 2023, overrun by peafowl (that's the name for the species), the city of Pinecrest petitioned the Miami-Dade County Commission to endorse their plan to keep the peacocks (the males) strutting, but with less peachicks as a result.
You see, the peacocks spread their legendary feathers to attract peahens, which leads to peachicks.
The plan? Peacock vasotomies to "save this Florida town."
Apparently, in nearby Coconut Grove, a neighborhood in Miami proper, didn't peacocks weren't all, ahem, clipped, and, well, The Kampong National Botanical Garden in Miami has several broods of peachicks. Like the Martians Marvin the Marvin creates to harass Bugs Bunny, peachicks have adorable little feathers atop their heads, even from a young age.
Anyway, the little peachicks in particular bring me a sort of peace and joy and I wanted to share them with you!
Peafowl at The Kampong in Coconut Grove on July 15, 2025. Philip Cardella