Federal and State Officials Consider Closing Florida's 'Alligator Alcatraz' [View all]
Source: New York Times
May 7, 2026 Updated 11:22 a.m. ET
Florida is in talks with the Trump administration to shut down a high-profile immigration detention center that opened last summer in the Everglades and has cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars to operate, according to a federal official, a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, and a person close to the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis. The shutdown talks are preliminary, the people said. But officials at the Department of Homeland Security have concluded that it is too expensive to keep operating the center, known as Alligator Alcatraz.
Homeland security officials have also come to consider the center ineffective, the federal official said. All three people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal talks. The DeSantis administration has been spending more than $1 million a day to run the center, which is in a swampy, isolated area between Miami and Naples. Some private vendors hired by the state to operate it have been struggling to front costs, according to the person close to the DeSantis administration.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did the Florida Division of Emergency Management, which operates the center, nor Mr. DeSantis’s office. Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, has repeatedly called the Everglades detention center a success, saying it has helped the Trump administration by providing more beds to house federal detainees. He has also said that the facility was intended to be temporary.
But the center’s shutdown would be hailed by immigration lawyers, activists and many detainees and their families as a huge win. Critics have denounced what they describe as unsanitary and inhumane conditions at the center since it opened 10 months ago; state officials have consistently dismissed such descriptions as false. As of last month, the center held nearly 1,400 detainees, all of them men, according to ICE data. The agency classified about two-thirds of the detainees in the center, which it calls the Florida Soft-Sided Facility South, as noncriminal.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/us/federal-and-state-officials-consider-closing-floridas-alligator-alcatraz.html
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