'Alligator Alcatraz': Abandoned Everglades airport may soon house migrants

An abandoned airport in the middle of Florida's Everglades could soon become a facility to house undocumented immigrants.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said in a video posted on X that the 39-acre plot of land could house as many as 1,000 immigrants within the next two months. He dubbed the facility "alligator Alcatraz" because the abandoned airport is surrounded by alligators and pythons.

“Florida’s been leading on immigration enforcement, supporting the Trump administration and ICE’s efforts to detain and deport criminal aliens,” Uthmeier said in the video.

The new detention facility could open at a time when many Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities, in Florida and across the country, are facing overcrowding.

Detainees in Florida's Krome North Processing Center in Miami-Dade County told local news station WPTV in April that they were being forced to wait for hours to enter the facility, sleep in shackles, or sleep next to toilets because of overcrowding at the facility.

Similar stories have cropped up at ICE detention facilities in Burlington, Massachusetts; Lumpkin, Georgia; and Farmville, Virginia.

As of early June, ICE had more than 51,000 people in detention centers across the country. The agency is also working to meet a quota of detaining approximately 3,000 people per day.

Trump's "One Big, Beautiful Bill Act" includes about $45 billion for ICE to expand its detention center capacity, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.