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US PRESIDENT DONALD Trump has visited a newly built detention camp in the Florida Everglades where people arrested in raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents will be sent.
The Trump administration has dubbed the facility “Alligator Alcatraz” due to its location and Trump called it “an amazing thing” while taking a tour past cages with bunk beds.
The establishment of the camp has been condemned as inhumane by Trump’s opponents and immigrant rights groups.
“It’s like a theatricalization of cruelty,” Maria Asuncion Bilbao, Florida campaign coordinator at the immigration advocacy group American Friends Service Committee, told The Associated Press.
The site on an abandoned airfield in the vast wetland will cost an estimated $450 million a year and house 1,000 people, Florida authorities have said.
Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who greeted Trump on the tarmac, said “we want to cut through bureaucracy… to get the removal of these illegals done.”
“A lot of cops in the form of alligators – you don’t have to pay them so much,” Trump told reporters in Ochopee, Florida.
“I wouldn’t want to run through the Everglades for long. It will keep people where they’re supposed to be.”
Trump suggested that he would like to see similar detention camps in other US states.
“And at some point, they might morph into a system,” he added.
Trump also told reporters that his predecessor Joe Biden wanted to put him in a cage like the one he was standing next to.
“Biden wanted me here, the son of a bitch,” he said.
"This is all because of an open border policy where 25 million people floated in."
— Fox News (@FoxNews) July 1, 2025
During a tour of Florida's new migrant detention facility, "Alligator Alcatraz," President @realDonaldTrump tears into the @JoeBiden administration for allowing open borders, forcing the Trump… pic.twitter.com/fC0e3EYSXw
Protesters against Trump’s immigration policies have been demonstrating outside the new Florida facility in recent days while environmentalists have criticised the creation of the camp in a conservation area.
The Everglades National Park is particularly known as a major habitat for alligators, with an estimated population of around 200,000.
Attacks by alligators on humans are relatively rare in Florida but Trump and his officials have played up the risk as the administration continues its make a spectacle of its crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
The sweeping crackdown has featured mask-wearing agents who refuse to identify themselves abducting people from their places of work.
Some people who the Trump administration claimed were members of criminal gangs were targeted in the initial round of raids but in recent weeks ICE agents have widened the net.
As of last week, more than 58,000 immigrants were in ICE custody, according to internal data obtained by CNN.
Today, the US Senate passed a spending bill that would allocate $45 billion to ICE.
With reporting from AFP
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