DeSantis boasts of deporting 21,000 as notorious Alligator Alcatraz jail closes

Toilets and beds are seen inside a migrant detention center, dubbed ‘Alligator Alcatraz’, in Ochopee, Florida, on 1 July 2025. Photograph: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Toilets and beds are seen inside a migrant detention center, dubbed ‘Alligator Alcatraz’, in Ochopee, Florida, on 1 July 2025. Photograph: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images DeSantis boasts of deporting 21,000 as notorious Alligator Alcatraz jail closes Florida immigration jail that became byword for cruelty and cost state taxpayers $1.2m a day shuts down after a year Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, boasted on Thursday of deporting 21,000 people from Alligator Alcatraz, as he confirmed the closure of the notorious immigration jail hastily erected in the Everglades that became a byword for cruelty and human rights abuses and environmental damage. Standing beside Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s so-called border czar, at a press conference at the now dismantled site in Ochopee in the environmentally sensitive region in south Florida , DeSantis presented its year-long operation as a victory for the president’s aggressive immigration enforcement agenda. “Alligator Alcatraz fulfilled the role it was designed to serve,” he said, adding that all of the detainees held there until last week had been transferred into federal immigration custody elsewhere. “When you start talking about 21,000 folks, that without question has made our state safer, and it’s made the country safer as well,” DeSantis added. Critics, however, said the jail run by the Florida state, on which the governor was reportedly spending $1.2m a day of Florida taxpayers’ money, was a political liability for DeSantis. Human cages and overflowing toilets at $1m a day: the brutal legacy of Ron DeSantis’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ jail Read more There was a groundswell that publicity over the multiplying reports of “inhumane” treatment of undocumented detainees, including physical abuse and isolation from legal representation, was becoming untenable. “Alligator Alcatraz is now shut down due to the relentless action of thousands of people who refused to stand idly by,” said Noelle Damico, director of social justice at the Workers Circle, an advocacy group that held a 47th and final weekly “freedom vigil” outside the remote jail on Sunday. “We denounced the brutality, lawlessness, chaos and corruption that was Alligator Alcatraz. We, the people, made it politically toxic. We brought it to an end here, and we will bring it to an end everywhere.” DeSantis did not address the treatment of the detainees, but maintained that most of those who passed through the tented jail were criminals. It was hastily constructed last summer at a mostly defunct municipal training airport, in order to allow frequent deportation flights. “Those would be people, by and large, who would have been released back into society in Florida had this space not been there,” he said, before citing 10 names of individ