Trump tours ‘Alligator Alcatraz’, wants such deportation facilities in ‘many’ US states
The remote migrant detention centre is located in the Florida Everglades, in a wetland teeming with alligators, crocodiles and pythons
The facility sits some 60km (37 miles) from Miami in a vast subtropical wetland teeming with alligators, crocodiles and pythons, fearsome imagery the White House has leveraged to show its determination to purge migrants it says were wrongly allowed to stay in the country under former president Joe Biden’s administration.
Trump raved about the facility’s quick construction as he scanned rows of dozens of empty bunk beds enclosed in cages and warned about the threatening conditions surrounding the facility.
“I looked outside and that’s not a place I want to go hiking any time soon,” Trump said at a round table event after his tour. “We’re surrounded by miles of treacherous swampland and the only way out is really deportation.”
The complex in southern Florida at the Miami-Dade Collier Training and Transition Airport was estimated to cost US$450 million annually and could house some 5,000 people, officials estimate.