'Alligator Alcatraz' airport has a long runway. Can it launch deportation flights?

MIAMI — The remote airport Florida seized from Miami-Dade County over the weekend to build a detainment camp could be the last stop in the United States for some undocumented immigrants if Gov. Ron DeSantis succeeds in launching state-run deportation flights.

While largely idle, the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in the Everglades has a runway long enough to rival what’s available at Miami International Airport. In touting the plan to house thousands of people facing deportation in a makeshift detention center there, a top DeSantis ally said the 10,500-foot-long runway was a major selling point.

“Big planes can land,” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a DeSantis appointee, said in an interview with conservative commentator Benny Johnson this week. “We’ll detain, deport and get people out of this country.”

Site work is already underway at the location, which sits about 40 miles west of Miami International Airport, with detainees expected to be held there as soon as July 1. Already, dozens of trailers are lining the airfield, and trucks were seen going into the site on Tuesday afternoon, bringing in portable restrooms, generators and construction machinery, such as bulldozers, forklifts and cherry pickers.

While now mostly used for training and practice flights, the largely idle airport was originally designed in the 1960s to accommodate the kind of jumbo jets that land in Miami and other major cities. The plan for the Everglades Jetport died in the 1970s in the face of environmental opposition, but not before construction finished on a runway that’s still as long or longer than three of the four main runways at MIA.

The paved area around the runway on the 17,000-acre county site is large enough that Miami-Dade briefly pushed it for a major aviation expo to serve as the Western Hemisphere version of the Paris Air Show. The plan 10 years ago was to convince Boeing, Airbus and other major manufacturers to land their latest jumbo jets on the runway to show off to potential buyers, who would gather at temporary pavilions and entertainment areas for the event.

“There’s no real infrastructure there,” said Frank Nero, the former head of Miami-Dade’s economic-development arm, the Beacon Council. He was an advocate of a Miami air show but thought the Dade-Collier airfield was too remote as a location, even if it could accommodate major airliners. “They could take off and land there. But that was about it.”

But the airfield’s rugged setting was a selling point for Uthmeier, who labeled the planned temporary detention center as “Alligator Alcatraz” for the proximity of pythons, alligators and other predators near where people facing deportation would be held. He suggested the Everglades hazards would be a deterrent for someone who might want to try and escape from state custody.

“Thankfully, Mother Nature does a lot on the perimeter,” he told Johnson. “There’s really nowhere to go.”

Uthmeier told Johnson the facility would likely house immigration offenders not just from Florida but from around the country, suggesting the runway could be used for arriving flights as well. He told Johnson the facility would prioritize people facing deportation who also have convictions for other crimes.

“But we’ve got to enforce the law across the board,” he said. “If you are not legally in this country, you should not be here. We have an obligation to support the Trump administration.”

Building a detention camp deep in the Everglades has environmental groups warning of damage to the ecologically sensitive area for the sake of giving DeSantis a high-profile role in an immigration crackdown. The proposed detention facility is part of the DeSantis administration’s effort to help President Donald Trump carry out what he has vowed to be the largest deportation operation in American history.

Along with pushing local police agencies to help federal immigration agents arrest people facing deportation, DeSantis has made it clear he wants Florida to play a role in the actual deportations, too.

In late January, the governor called state lawmakers back to Tallahassee for a special session focused on immigration. Among other things, he was seeking the extraordinary state authority to deport immigrants who are in the country illegally and $350 million to help him do it through the same program he used to send migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in 2022.

“We’ve used it to send [them] to places like Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, for example,” DeSantis said at the time. “We want to expand that to be able to send them outside of the country or parts outside the continental United States.”

While the seized Miami-Dade airfield gives the DeSantis administration a major runway for planes, the governor may not have all that he needs to actually launch deportation flights from there.

Republican leaders in the state legislature did not go along with the original DeSantis plan to have Florida fund the flights filled with federal immigration detainees. Instead, lawmakers said the only way the governor could play a role in deportations would be at the request of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The federal government would also need to reimburse the state for all transportation costs if it were to ask the state for help with deportations.

It is unclear whether the Trump administration intends to ask Florida to help with deporting people.

The Trump administration, however, has already pledged financial support for temporary detention centers in Florida, with state operating costs expected to hit about $450 million a year to run them. That includes the Dade-Collier airfield and the possibility of another detention facility elsewhere in Florida.

One potential site is Camp Blanding — the Florida National Guard base about an hour southwest of Jacksonville. A spokesperson for the Florida National Guard told the Miami Herald on Tuesday that the site is “solely providing real estate for this project” and referred all questions about construction of a migrant detention center there to the Florida Division of Emergency Management, which has not responded to a request seeking comment.