United States President Donald Trump has toured Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz immigration detention facility in the Everglades before it gets its first detainees.
“It’s known as Alligator Alcatraz, which is very appropriate because I looked outside and that’s not a place I want to go hiking,” Trump told the media during a livestreamed event on Tuesday. “But very soon, this facility will house some of the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet.”
Trump campaigned for the presidency on promises to tackle immigration but faces a shortage of detention beds. The One Big Beautiful Bill, Trump’s tax and spending plan, passed the Senate during his Florida stop and includes $150bn for his deportation agenda over four years.
State officials quickly built the expected 5,000-bed facility to detain immigrants on top of a decades-old landing strip. The Department of Homeland Security pegged the one-year cost of running the facility at $450m, which it plans to pay for with money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Shelter and Services Program.
Florida officials, including former Trump rival Governor Ron DeSantis, joined the president and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for the tour. DeSantis said Noem’s team told him the facility would be opened to receive detainees after Trump’s departure.
Trump talked for more than an hour as he deflected questions about who could lose Medicaid healthcare coverage under the tax and spending legislation, warmly responded to a suggestion to arrest former President Joe Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and repeated a frequent complaint about shower heads lacking sufficient water pressure. Noem, meanwhile, said US Immigration and Customs Enforcement had detained a “cannibal” who “started to eat himself” on an airplane.
Here is a fact check of some of Trump’s remarks:
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