Donald Trump visits new deportation prison “Alligator Alcatraz”

US President Donald Trump has visited a new deportation prison in the state of Florida, which is surrounded by swamps full of alligators. Here are dangerous reptiles the watchdogs, Trump said on Tuesday in the town of Ochopee. The right-wing government of Florida calls the facility “Alligator Alcatraz”, alluding to the notorious Alcatraz prison on an island ahead of San Francisco.

Trump had recently said that he wanted to put AlcaTraz back into operation and incorporate immigrants there. Experts think this a good 60 years after closure, however, is completely unrealistic because it would cause extremely high costs. Today Alcatraz is a museum with around 1.6 million visitors annually.

Instead, Trump welcomed Florida’s initiative. In the Everglades swamps there are “many police officers in the form of alligators,” he said on his tour of the former airfield. “You don’t have to pay them so much.”

According to its own statements, Florida’s government wants to lock around a thousand migrants until its deportation in the detention center. The White House had spoken of 5,000 places shortly before visiting the president. The remote terrain is isolated with high fences and barbed wire, there are numerous surveillance cameras. The migrants are to be accommodated in large tents that include barred cells with double -stick beds.

Trump met Florida’s governor Ron Desantis for the first time in the visit for a year for a year. The Republican had also applied for the party’s presidential candidacy, but gave up in January 2024. Desantis said he wanted to help Trump with the deportation prison to “remove this illegal without bureaucracy”.

The president again used the subsequent press conference for a general statement with the immigration policy of his predecessor Joe Biden, which he called “disgusting”. Biden let it into the country “sadistic” criminals. On the only access road to the center, dozens of people demonstrated against Trump’s immigration policy. The sometimes masked demonstrators carried signs with inscriptions such as “Hands away from our Everglades”.

Before his departure in Washington, Trump had said who wanted to flee from here, in view of the alligators and snakes in the swamps, only had a chance of survival of one percent. “It’s not a nice thing. Snakes are quick, but alligators … we will teach you how you can run away in front of an alligator, okay?”

In the election campaign, Trump announced “the largest deportation program in the history of the United States”. The White House repeatedly published videos of migrants, which are harassed by the ICE border police or are browned out with handcuffs and chains. Some of them are brought to countries such as El Salvador or Sudan who criticize human rights activists as injustice. The highest US court had recently approved this practice.