‘Cartoonish’ depictions of ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ among criticisms of Florida immigrant detention center

Florida is moving to solidify its renaming of the training airport where the 3,000-person capacity detention center in the Everglades is located to “Alligator Alcatraz.”

Workers covered the sign at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport Wednesday night with a replacement bearing the moniker Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier publicly rolled out two weeks ago, when he announced plans for the facility, according to a photo published in the Miami Herald. Uthemeier announced Wednesday that hundreds of immigrants were set to arrive that night.

“It’s definitely our official title,” said Bryan Griffin, the governor’s communications director, to reporters on Wednesday morning. But immigrant and environmental advocates and indigenous leaders have criticized the name.

During President Donald Trump’s visit to the detention center on Tuesday, Uthmeier told the president he’d been inspired by his quest to reopen California’s Alcatraz Island, which served as a maximum-security prison from 1934 to 1963 and is now a public historical landmark.

Trump applauded the name when he visited the detention center on Tuesday, and the press release announcing the presidential tour had “Alligator Alcatraz” in the dateline.

“It’s known as Alligator Alcatraz, which is very appropriate because I looked outside, and that’s not a place I want to go hiking anytime soon,” Trump said. “But very soon, this facility will house some of the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet.”

While the identities of those who arrived at the detention center Wednesday night is not yet known, approximately 71% of immigrants detained nationwide have had no criminal record, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

The rebranding of the airport prompted the Republican Party of Florida to sell shirts, beverage coolers, hats, and mugs, and the official U.S. Department of Homeland Security and White House X accounts have posted AI-generated images of alligators wearing “ICE” hats.

Both the Seminole Tribe of Florida and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida have denounced the opening of the detention center. William “Popeye” Osceola, secretary of the Miccosukee Tribe, said he considered the portrayal of alligators and pythons as guards to the detention center as contradictory to the environmental harms.

“It’s just, again, not an accurate framing of the actual issues out there, and, you know, adding more stress to this ecology that’s not gonna help anything when we still need a lot more resources to address what’s going on out there,” he said. “People aren’t gonna be aware of that because they’re gonna be focused on this idea of like, ‘Oh Alligator Alcatraz, what a fun name.’”

Thomas Kennedy, a policy analyst for the Florida Immigrant Coalition, called the merch ugly and criticized the media’s adoption of the DeSantis administration-given name.

“It’s like a cartoonish name that’s supposed to sort of normalize the center, diminish its negative impact in the minds of the public while also associating immigrants with crime through the name Alcatraz — which in Americana and history is associated with one of the most nefarious prisons in American history,” Kennedy said in a phone interview with Florida Phoenix.

“So, I do think the name is regrettable, and so many people just kind of regurgitate it.”

Responding to a suit filed in federal court to halt the detention center, the federal government tried to distance itself and referred to the site as the temporary detention center or TNT Detention Facility.

Elise Bennett an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups suing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, said her group opposes the harm to the environment in the Big Cypress National Preserve.

“The name itself really shows that this is a political stunt,” she told the Phoenix.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and Twitter.

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This article appears in Jul 2-8, 2025.