A new poll has found that almost half of Americans disapprove of the new “Alligator Alcatraz” set up in the Florida Everglades to house undocumented migrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
In all, 48 percent of the 2,983 people who responded to the YouGov survey on Thursday said they were not in favor of the facility while just 33 percent said they supported it, with another 18 percent unsure.
While Republicans and Democrats were largely split along party lines, just 26 percent of respondents who identified themselves as independent voters said they backed the idea while 53 percent were against it.
Another noteworthy finding from YouGov’s poll was the revelation that 47 percent of Americans believe detainees are being treated too severely by ICE while 23 percent said they were being treated appropriately, 10 percent they were not being treated harshly enough, with the remainder unsure.
The “Alligator Alcatraz” was announced last month by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who explained in a social media video that it was being built over 39 square miles on the site of the disused Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, which lies west of Miami.
The facility consists largely of tents, will have the capacity to house up to 5,000 people and cost $450m a year to run.
Uthmeier gloated in the video that it would require minimal additional security due to its remote location, which is home to such dangerous wildlife as alligators and pythons. “Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide,” he beamed.
He has since appeared on Newsmax to boast that Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other “communist members of Congress” would not be able to protest outside the center because they would not be able to find it.
Trump himself visited it in person on Tuesday, accompanied by Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and seemed particularly taken with the threat the local wildlife posed.
“You don’t always have land so beautiful and so secure,” he observed. “We have a lot of bodyguards and a lot of cops in the form of alligators… I wouldn’t want to run through the Everglades for long.”
He recalled joking about running a moat populated by vicious creatures along the base of his U.S.-Mexico border wall during his first term.
“It was meant more as a joke, but the more I thought of it, the more I liked it,” he said.
Trump also used the trip to threaten to arrest New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and Noem’s predecessor Alejandro Mayorkas, call his own predecessor Joe Biden “a son of a b***h”, suggest deporting American citizens who commit crimes and hint, even more darkly, that the “Alligator Alcatraz” could be the first of many more detention centres.
“We’d like to see them in many states,” the president mused. “And at some point, they might morph into a system.”
The detention center has been equally well received by conservatives on Fox News, with Laura Ingraham telling DeSantis during a recent interview that she “loved” the idea and panellists discussing it on the same network’s Gutfeld! chat show saying they too relished the prospect.
Comedian Joe Devito was particularly enthusiastic, telling guest host Tyrus, an ex-wrestler, that it amounted to “The Shawshank Redemption meets Jurassic Park” and going on to suggest that the government go further and staff it with grizzly bears and an “evil squid” to frisk inmates with its tentacles.
Far-right activist Laura Loomer got into hot water by talking up the facility in a social media post on Monday in which she wrote: “Alligator lives matter. The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now.”
The figure appeared to be a reference to the total number of Latinos in the United States, chiming with U.S. Census data for the demographic, inviting an angry response from commentators on X.
