Donald Trump is threatening to send unauthorised migrants to a prison camp surrounded by alligators in his latest move to expel “illegal aliens” from the US.
The US president toured the new “Alligator Alcatraz” site in Florida as immigration officials shared memes of alligators wearing baseball caps emblazoned with “ICE” (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).
Florida Republicans are already marketing Alligator Alcatraz merchandise, including T-shirts and stubby holders.
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After touring the site, Mr Trump said its nickname was “very appropriate because I looked outside, and that’s not a place I want to go hiking anytime soon”.
“We’re surrounded by miles of treacherous swampland and the only way out is, really, deportation,” he said.
The site is located west of Miami in the US’s largest area of subtropical wilderness, the Everglades, which is also home to crocodiles, pythons and rattlesnakes.
“You have a lot of bodyguards and a lot of cops that are in the form of alligators,” Mr Trump said. “You don’t have to pay them so much.”
His publicity-heavy tour and the social media campaign appear designed to scare unauthorised migrants into leaving the country voluntarily.
The “Alligator Alcatraz” facility can house thousands of detainees. (Reuters: Evelyn Hockstein)
Mr Trump campaigned heavily on a promise to oversee America’s largest-ever mass deportation.
Unauthorised border crossings have plummeted since his inauguration, but arrests have averaged about 750 per day — well below his administration’s target of 3,000 a day.
He was joined at the site by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who said unauthorised migrants could avoid detention at the site by leaving the US.
“If they self-deport and go home, they can come back legally — we will let them come back legally,” she said. “But if you wait and we bring you to this facility, you don’t ever get to come back to America.”
The facility is a project of the Florida state government, led by Governor Ron DeSantis, and was constructed in about eight days.
It can house 3,000 people and could start receiving detainees within a day of Mr Trump’s tour.
An alligator swims near the entrance of the detention centre on the day of Donald Trump’s tour. (Reuters: Octavio Jones)
The site has attracted protesters, including conservation advocates and Native American groups. Two environmental groups have lodged lawsuits against the project.
The Trump administration insists its immigration crackdown is focused on violent criminals and Ms Trump says the facility will soon house “some of the most vicious people on the planet”.
But new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data suggests the majority of detainees do not have criminal histories.
A CBS News analysis of the data, from the period since Mr Trump’s inauguration, found about 40 per cent of immigrants detained by ICE had criminal convictions. Overall, about 8 per cent had been convicted of violent crimes.
The project has attracted protesters, including from Native American and environmental groups. (Reuters: Marco Bello)
But DHS said that in Mr Trump’s first 100 days, 70 per cent of ICE arrests were “criminal illegal aliens with convictions or pending charges”.
Arguing for the policy, Ms Noem told a bizarre story about a migrant she called a “cannibal”, who she said had been recently arrested by marshals working with ICE.
“They said that they had detained a cannibal and put him on a plane to take him home, and while they had him in his seat, he started to eat himself,” she said.
“These are the kind of deranged individuals that are on our streets in America that we’re trying to target and get out of our country.”
