Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz detention center closes amid cost, rights backlash

Alligator Alcatraz is being shut down after becoming Florida’s most visible immigration experiment and one of its most expensive. The state-run detention center in the Everglades, built on an abandoned airstrip at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in Ochopee, had been promoted by Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump as a model for deportation policy.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency said detainees had been transferred to other facilities, citing hurricane-season safety concerns. By June 22, companies hired to operate the site had been told to begin full demobilization, signaling that the temporary operation was winding down. The facility had opened in July 2025 and was widely described as a 5,000-bed site, even as critics warned it had been rushed into an environmentally sensitive part of the Everglades.

The collapse came after months of backlash over cost and conditions. Operating expenses were estimated at nearly $1 billion, with other reporting putting the figure at about $1.2 billion, while earlier documents obtained in March showed spending of roughly $1 million a day. For Florida officials, the numbers turned a hard-line enforcement project into a fiscal liability almost as soon as it became a political trophy.

The center also drew legal fire from immigrants’ rights advocates and environmental groups, who sued over lack of access to legal counsel, due process concerns and damage to the Everglades. Families and lawyers said detainees were mistreated, sharpening scrutiny of a facility that sat near Big Cypress National Preserve and was built in one of the most fragile parts of South Florida’s wetland system.

The shutdown marks a sharp reversal for DeSantis and Trump, who had held up Alligator Alcatraz as a symbol of state cooperation with federal immigration crackdowns. Its closure now leaves behind a drained airstrip, transferred detainees and a record of expensive detention politics that collapsed under legal pressure, public criticism and the cost of keeping the site open.