By Nick Valencia | September 24, 2025
MIAMI — Archbishop Thomas Wenski has spent decades ministering to immigrants in South Florida, but even he sounds shaken by what’s happening inside the infamous detention site Alligator Alcatraz.
“There have always been deportations, and there always will be deportations,” he told Nick Valencia News in an exclusive interview. “But we’re concerned that the deportations happen with due process of law.”
Due process is precisely what he says is missing. The Collier County facility smack in the middle of the Everglades, is not federally run.
“Immigration is the purview of the federal government, not the state government,” Wenski said. “Alligator Alcatraz is run and managed by the state of Florida. And so we’re concerned that many people are falling in between the cracks because of the lack of coordination between the state and the federal government.”
A federal judge has already ordered the facility closed. Instead, the state appealed. While the legal fight drags on, more than 1,500 people remain locked inside, according to the archbishop. At one point, the facility had scaled down to about 150, according to two sources with knowledge of the headcount. Now, things have ramped back up.
Every Sunday, the Archdiocese sends a priest to celebrate Mass, hear confessions, and provide pastoral care. For Wenski, that ritual is not just about faith.
“It’s one way of reaffirming their dignity in a place that wants to dehumanize them,” he said.
The Archbishop worries most about people who have been here for decades — those whose lives, children, and even military service tie them irreversibly to the United States.
“Lots of Central Americans have had TPS since the hurricanes in Central America, 20 or 30 years ago,” he said. “These people have built lives here in this country. Had children — children that are growing up, children that are veterans of our armed services. And so after 15, 20, 25 years in this country, to be told that you don’t belong here and to go home? Well, there’s no home there. Home is here. And that has to be recognized by our policy makers.”
In his view, Trump has already proven his toughness. Now it’s time for him to prove his capacity to compromise.
“The President wants the best for the nation, the best for this country,” Wenski said. “That he is removing criminals from our midst, I think most people will applaud. That he has shut down a border that was out of control, I think most people would applaud that too. So I think at this point we should say, Mr. President, you have some great accomplishments there. Take a victory lap — and let’s make a deal about these people that are here already, that have been here for years. Provide some measure of justice for so many people that are living in fear of a knock on the door in the middle of the night.”
For Wenski, the policy argument is also a moral one: America cannot continue to pretend that the millions of immigrants who have made their homes here are disposable.
