Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier is calling it “Alligator Alcatraz.”
He told Fox Business on Tuesday that Florida is proposing to build a massive immigrant detention center in the Everglades on a large parcel of land owned by Miami-Dade County.
The facility, says Uthmeier, would house suspected undocumented immigrants, process immigration cases and easily put them on deportation flights because the county-owned land includes an air strip.
“If somebody were to get out, there's nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Only the alligators and pythons are waiting. That's why I like to call it ‘Alligator Alcatraz,’” Uthmeier told Fox News correspondent Danamarie McNicholl on Fox Business.
If approved, Uthmeier told Fox Business, it would become the state’s largest immigration detention facility and help ease the pressure on local jails and federal facilities used to hold immigrants accused of being illegally in the country.
The facility could be up and running within 60 days if local, state and federal agencies approve it, Uthmeier told the cable TV network.
The proposal comes at a time when the Trump administration has said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers would target at least 3,000 arrests daily, up from about 650 daily during the first months of Trump’s second term.
The crackdown on undocumented immigrants is an issue President Donald Trump campaigned on during the 2024 presidential race.
In March, during a speech to a joint session of Congress, Trump told lawmakers he was going “to protect our homeland and complete the largest deportation operation in American history.”
