People Will Die at Alligator Alcatraz

Newsweek

a day ago

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Alligator Alcatraz, the immigration detention center that opened July 3 at a remote abandoned airstrip in Florida's Everglades, is the centerpiece of Governor Ron DeSantis' plan to be a "force multiplier" for President Donald Trump's mass deportation plan. The facility has a capacity of 1,000 beds—with plans to raise that to 4,000—costing $245 per bed per day, for an estimated cost of $450 million per year.
Detainees who have managed to communicate with family, friends, and lawyers report appalling conditions. Insufficient and contaminated water. Inadequate, spoiled food. Ignored requests for medical care. Swarms of mosquitoes. Unbearably hot tents that leak when it rains. Severe overcrowding. Facility personnel who berate and threaten them. We have studied immigration detention for over a decade and can say with grim certainty that it's just a matter of time until someone dies at Alligator Alcatraz.
This is what happens when detainees are seen as dollar signs. In our book, Immigration Detention Inc: The Big Business of Locking Up Migrants, we follow the money that coalesces around detention in the United States. Countless companies, state and local governments, and communities are tangled up in the economic webs tied to incarcerating migrants. These entities make money by starving, sickening, and exploiting detained migrants. The less they provide, the bigger their profits.
President Donald Trump speaks with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem as they tour a migrant detention center, dubbed Alligator Alcatraz, located at the site of the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in Ochopee, Fla....
President Donald Trump speaks with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem as they tour a migrant detention center, dubbed Alligator Alcatraz, located at the site of the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in Ochopee, Fla. on July 1, 2025. More
ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images
In fact, it's the business model that has driven the wild growth of the detention system over the last 30 years, regardless of what party controls the White House. Since the 1980s, big prison corporations, like GEO Group and Core Civic, have used lobbying, political donations, and strategic hiring to push for ever-tougher immigration policies that keep up the supply of new bodies to detain.
With Trump's push for mass deportations, it's only ramping up. "This is to us an unprecedented opportunity," said GEO Group Executive Chairman George Zoleyon a call with investors after Trump won.
A range of other types of companies profit, too: Aramark and Wellpath, which provide food and medical care, respectively, make millions from immigration detention centers. In-facility stores run by corporate giants like Keefe Group charge detainees' outrageous prices for food, medicine, and other necessities, like personal hygiene products. Companies involved in communication, transportation, maintenance, security, technology, and equipment also profit ... the list is endless.
County jails also become addicted to detention money. Local officials, in Democrat- and Republican-led districts alike, often see detaining people for ICE as a way to make up for budget shortfalls. With the Trump administration's encouragement, Ron DeSantis is taking this approach to a whole new level, turning detention into a speculative business. Build centers, enact laws that make more people detainable to fill them, then get the big ICE check.
Policymakers, too, benefit from businesses tied to detention, often receiving generous campaign donations. Secretary of State Marco Rubio got political contributions for years from GEO Group. Both Attorney General Pam Bondi and "border czar" Tom Homan have been on GEO Group's payroll.
Policymakers may invest in detention-adjacent businesses, like Trump's "mass deportation" architect Stephen Miller, who has a financial stake in Palantir Technologies, a software company specializing in surveillance and defense tools that works with the U.S. government. Such mutually beneficial arrangements are central to Alligator Alcatraz. As the Miami Herald reported, contractors hired to build it donated to DeSantis' campaign.
Detainees, in turn, pay with their health and even their lives. People have been dying in ICE custody for decades, but that's increased dramatically since Trump took office—11 people have died in ICE detention since then.
ICE facilities are supposed to adhere to a set of national detention standards, and ICE is legally required to conduct periodic inspections. But facilities with egregious conditions pass with flying colors. In June, when a local news chopper captured detainees at the Krome Detention Center in Florida spelling "SOS" with their bodies in an outside area, in a desperate plea for help, ICE issued a statement that the facility maintains "compliance with federal standards."
To make matters worse, the Trump administration has drastically cut DHS funding and staff charged with protecting detainees' rights, and tightly restricted elected officials' access to facilities.
The groundwork for the "follows standards" response has already been laid at Alligator Alcatraz. Responding to horrifying observations by Democratic congresspeople who visited the facility, on July 13 in an NBC Meet the Press interview, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said that it's "held to the highest levels of what the federal government requires for detention facilities." We know what that means.
With Trump's so-called Big Beautiful Bill, another $45 billion will be injected into supersizing the detention system, enlarging the machine of cruelty and exploitation. If we don't demand accountability and eliminate profit incentives, more companies and communities will become economically dependent on locking up, starving, and making human beings sick.
Nancy Hiemstra and Deirdre Conlon are co-authors of Immigration Detention Inc: The Big Business of Locking Up Migrants.
Hiemstra is a political geographer whose research focuses on U.S. immigration enforcement policies. She is an associate professor at Stony Brook University in Long Island, N.Y.
Conlon is a critical geographer working on privatization of immigration controls in the U.S. and Britain. She is an associate professor based at the University of Leeds in Leeds, U.K.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.