By Nick Valencia | October 27, 2025
THE EVERGLADES— The road to Alligator Alcatraz stretches through the belly of the Florida Everglades—past mangroves, sawgrass, and the kind of still heat that turns air into glass. It’s where the federal government and the state of Florida built a detention center so remote, so inhospitable, that even the people who work there joke that escape isn’t an option. The nearest town is nearly an hour away in either direction. There is no plumbing. Water has to be trucked in; waste has to be trucked out.
This past summer, a federal judge ruled that the facility violated environmental law and ordered it closed. But before the ink on the ruling dried, the state appealed—arguing that the site was entirely state-funded and therefore exempt from the court’s order. The gates reopened. The guards returned. And Florida taxpayers, not the private prison operators who built it, were left footing the bill.
“If they wanted another detention center, they could’ve built it anywhere else,” said Debbie Wehking, an activist we met standing outside the chain-link fence. “They did it here just because they thought it would be cute to have it in the Everglades, and call it Alligator Alcatraz. It’s costing us a fortune. There’s no plumbing, so all the water has to come in on tankers, and all the wastewater, including human waste, has to go out on trucks. It’s an hour either way to get to where the water comes from or where the waste has to go. What an incredibly stupid waste of money.”
The absurdity would almost be funny if it weren’t so revealing. Alligator Alcatraz has become a kind of microcosm of President Trump’s immigration policy—expensive, punitive, and designed as much for the optics of political symbolism as for practicality.
A Facility Built on Secrecy and Profit
Immigration attorney Evelyn Alonso, who has represented multiple detainees from the facility, says Alligator Alcatraz operates under a logic of its own.
“That place is strategically designed to be confusing and difficult for people to get out of,” Alonso said. “It’s a business.”
The remoteness, she says, isn’t incidental, it’s intentional. Distance makes oversight difficult, delays legal representation, and gives the illusion of control. The farther you push people out of sight, the easier it is to forget they exist.
“Some of the people working there are on work permits themselves,” Alonso added. “They’re in the immigration process. They’re not citizens or residents—and yet they’re enforcing the system on people who are even more vulnerable. It’s the kind of moral outsourcing that allows cruelty to operate under the cover of paperwork.”
The Human Cost of Detention
Outside the gates, “Andy,” a local volunteer who declined to give us her full name, has spent months monitoring buses and supply trucks. She told Nick Valencia News about a man who once worked inside.
“He got fired and came out here looking to get his job back,” she said. “When I got to talking to him, he told me he was undocumented—working inside the facility. They were paying him well. He’d been in Texas before, and I was worried for him. I told him, ‘You shouldn’t go back in there.’”
The irony was hard to miss and something underscored by immigration attorney Evelyn Alonso: undocumented workers enforcing immigration law inside a detention center built to hold undocumented people.
The line between guard and guarded has never been thinner.
A System That Rewards Detention
Mike Hoffman, whose friend was detained in Pennsylvania and later transferred to Florida, said he’s learned not to demonize everyone behind the barbed wire.
“A lot of the people he’s come across were just doing their jobs,” Hoffman said. “They took jobs as guards or ICE agents. He doesn’t view them as bad people.”
Angela Della Valle—whose husband is still floating through the purgatory of America’s immigration system —sees a clearer motive.
“It’s about finding a reason to fill up the detention centers with as many people as possible—in order to make money.”
She’s not wrong.
The day before the federal government shut down, Washington quietly reimbursed the state of Florida $608 million, despite the earlier court ruling. Plaintiffs immediately appealed, arguing that the federal reimbursement undercuts Florida’s claim that the facility is “state-funded.” But the case was put on hold the moment the shutdown took effect.
And so Alligator Alcatraz remains open—running on fumes, federal loopholes, and the quiet resignation of everyone involved.
The gates are still open. The tankers still haul water in and waste out. Somewhere in the Everglades, amid the roar of generators and the buzz of mosquitoes, a detention center keeps running—not because it makes sense, but because no one in power wants to admit it doesn’t.
