The Shuttering of Alligator Alcatraz Doesn't Mean That Trump's Terror Campaign Against Immigrants Is Ending

He relishes the performative cruelty because it keeps the salience of the issue alive

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Dear Readers:

Here lies “Alligator Alcatraz,” a governing catastrophe on every front. In the video below, I deliver the eulogy, offering some words on what this facility was, what it reveals about Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s ongoing anti-immigrant crusade, and why, unfortunately, its closure won’t ultimately change much about how they pursue that agenda.

After the video, in a short reflection below, I point out the profound wastefulness and moral disaster that Alligator Alcatraz has been—and why its closure is far from the end of the story.

Berny Belvedere
Senior Editor

My home state—Florida—burned through $1.2 million per day to run “Alligator Alcatraz,” a $1.1 billion immigrant detention hellhole in the Florida swamplands, with a peak “daily burn” rate of $3 million a day. The state’s primary contractor got its deal after donating $10,000 to the Florida GOP days before the contract was awarded, without any competitive bidding. Now the facility is being shut down, with relevant parties notified that detainees will be gone by June and the detention center dismantled in the weeks that follow. Gov. Ron DeSantis acknowledged at a news conference that the facility had “served its purpose.” But the financial costs this insane project inflicted on Florida taxpayers are dwarfed by its moral ones.

At the facility’s July 2025 opening, President Donald Trump called the detainees “some of the most vicious people on the planet” and “deranged psychopaths.” DeSantis assured the public that everyone held there had already been issued a final order to be removed from the country, a claim PolitiFact rated as false, finding that nearly 70% had no such order from a judge. When the Trump administration was confronted with evidence that many detainees had no criminal record, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson called that “an irrelevant measure.” She then claimed that many detainees faced charges “for rape, assault, terrorism, and more” in other countries, but offered no evidence for her claim.

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Inconveniently for Trump, ICE’s own data confirms that two-thirds of the nearly 1,400 detainees held there as of April 2026 were classified as noncriminal. The facility’s own director testified that “detainees were there solely on immigration violations, none on state criminal charges.” This was not a population of dangerous criminals requiring extraordinary containment. It was, overwhelmingly, people whose only offense was being undocumented—a civil infraction (not a crime) akin to overspeeding for detainees who did not enter the country unlawfully. Yet they were held in conditions—including being stuffed into 2-by-2-foot cages for hours as punishment—that Amnesty International deemed to be torture. Among those detained:

• a 15-year-old boy with no criminal record

• DACA recipients

• Cuban nationals with pending asylum cases

• parents of U.S. citizen children

• lawful permanent residents, including at least two Canadian citizens

One Canadian green card holder in particular told reporters: “They’re treating people like animals. Alligator Alcatraz is like Germany in 1939, updated with 2026 rules.”

In October 2025, The Miami Herald reported that the whereabouts of roughly two-thirds of over 1,800 detainees held at the facility in July could not be determined. Were they transferred to another facility or released without a paper trail? No one knows. When congressional observers visited in July, they heard detainees crying “libertad” (freedom) from their cages. The lawmakers described people packed 32 to a cage, wall to wall. The disappearance of human beings into a system so chaotic it cannot track its own detainees points toward something beyond mere operational failure and toward the actual logic of the enterprise.

This administration is using performative cruelty to advance its immigration purge. But don’t mistake that word, performative, for the idea that this is all for show. They do it because they enjoy it. Miller would want Alligator Alcatraz even if there were no cameras around, no way to fundraise from it, and no way to use it to project indecency toward immigrants as a campaign theme. But it also functions—and this is its performative aspect—as a way to keep immigrants fearful and feeling legally vulnerable, and above all to signal to their base that the purge is real, ongoing, and merciless.

Miller has spent his entire adult life working to forcefully expel immigrants—documented or not—from America. For Miller, this is no mere performance; he is as committed as they come. The family separation madness, the utilization of John Adams-era legislation to preposterously claim that undocumented immigrants are invaders, the deportation flights to El Salvador and other places to which the deportees have no connection, the gutting of asylum protections ... none of these are mere “stunts.” They represent this administration’s actual immigration policy. And they are pursued with genuine ideological fervor by people who mean every word of what they say.

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Trump and Miller understand that immigration is most valuable to them as a source of perpetual outrage and political mobilization. A humane, functional immigration system would be a liability, not an achievement, because it would deprive them of the issue. Trump literally instructed his party to back away from immigration legislation—legislation that included everything his side had been asking for—so that the issue would retain its political salience and he could continue to campaign on it. The Alligator Alcatraz cruelty thus satisfies the ideological commitment while simultaneously keeping the cameras on how Trump is steamrolling the undocumented, one merch push and viral image at a time. The facility’s name, the Alligator Alcatraz themed apparel, the deliberate choice of a location teeming with predators, the White House’s explicit acknowledgment that the imagery was the point—all of it by design.

This is precisely the pattern: an ongoing campaign of maximally visible and commodifiable cruelty, each iteration replaced by the next before public attention can fully settle on any one of them. The detainees from Alligator Alcatraz are already being transferred to other facilities. (Florida alone has explored, announced, or already built successors to Alligator Alcatraz: “Deportation Depot” near Jacksonville; “Panhandle Pokey” in the state’s northwest; a facility at Camp Blanding, a Florida National Guard training center; and another one in South Florida.) The cycle continues, because the goal was never to solve an immigration problem. The goal was to have one, permanently, and to be seen fighting it with ferocity.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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