I want to address the condition of our national backyard, in this case, the Everglades. If you’ve been away in the wilderness without access to a shortwave radio, you may have missed the news that immigrants who Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has detained can now be shipped to a place called Alligator Alcatraz, a new detention center in Florida so named by the Trump administration to suggest the end of the road humorously. A friend pointed out that the moniker probably came from someone currying favor with the president, perhaps Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. (Trump has repeatedly stated that he’d like to reopen Alcatraz due to its one-way in, no-way-out reputation.) Reopening the infamous prison in San Francisco was not feasible, so Alcatraz 2.0 is in the Everglades.
Alligator Alcatraz happens to be in Big Cypress National Preserve, about 40 miles west of Miami. It’s part of the Everglades, but not part of Everglades National Park, although the two areas share a border and are part of the Greater Everglades ecosystem. The regions are fundamentally intertwined; the preserve is a source of water for the park. Moreover, like many federally protected lands, they are wildlife sanctuaries, sacred to Native Americans, and offer visitors ways to commune with nature, however you choose. However, preserves tend to make more provisions for hunting, mining, and fishing. Now we can add imprisonment to the list of activities.
The Big Cypress National Preserve has an abandoned airport with a long runway, making it perfect for an ICE facility. Detainees would be flown in, beyond the reach of the media or protesters, including Native Americans concerned about the absence of environmental impact studies and selfie-taking fans who have gathered near the sign pointing to “Alligator Alcatraz.” In other words, there will be no direct witnesses à la Guantanamo Bay; neither citizens nor the media will be able to watch arrested migrants get offloaded to a site that had previously been the province of alligators and pythons.
But this framing of the jail—the name, the savage creatures that presumably will serve as de facto guards—is misleading. Gators and snakes are not the only residents near Alligator Alcatraz. Big Cypress National Preserve—the first of America’s natural wonders regions to be designated thusly—is also home to tropical birds, river otters, black bears, and the Florida panther, which is endangered as it is in the states where its cousin, the mountain lion, still roams. (Of course, the Florida Panthers, this year’s winner of the National Hockey League’s Stanley Cup, is based near Fort Lauderdale; perhaps in a few years, the only place you’ll see actual panthers will be on a logo.)
The preserve came about due to the advocacy of conservationists, including Marjory Stoneman Douglas, whose efforts led to the creation of Everglades National Park, and for whom the high school in Parkland, Florida, is named—the one where 17 students and staff were killed in 2018 in a mass shooting.
Stoneman Douglas’s seminal book, The Everglades: River of Grass, was published in 1947 when the eponymous park opened. Along with her group, Friends of the Everglades, she brought national focus to a region that had largely been written off and scheduled for destruction. She wrote beautifully about her beloved wetlands, including Big Cypress, which was not yet protected. “It’s a wilderness of pine and scrubby stuff and bushes,” she observed. “…The river cypresses stand there in the winter time, in great, gray-scratched heads, like little hills, starred with white spider lilies and sedges, and milkwort in saffron-headed swaths…red-shouldered hawks cruise the low cypress and the marshlands…the brown deer, the lithe panthers that feed on them, the tuft-eared wildcats, the opossum and the rats and the rabbits have lived in and around [the Big Cypress] since this world began…”
There is much more, and in this time of focus on the area, it bears revisiting.
Regarding Donald Trump, every open space is up for grabs, and no situation is not monetizable. With Alligator Alcatraz, we see the culmination of what Stoneman Douglas called the perception of “wetlands as wastelands.” In other words, individuals are being thrown away into an area thought to be of no value. The othering of land, the environment, and wild animals is part of a bigger problem. Swamps are often considered trash bins where you can dump things, just like in the desert. In the latter’s case, the view is “there’s nothing there.” If there is, it’s “varmints” like coyotes, and they have to go. In the case of Big Cypress National Preserve, it has been characterized as savage, patrolled by evil gators and man-eating pythons. (Incidentally, the pythons are a problem; not indigenous to Florida, they’ve been dumped there like many other things when “pet” owners tire of them, and there they have flourished.)
When asked about the possibility of “escape from Alligator Alcatraz”—a question that perhaps unwittingly harked back to the film Escape from Alcatraz, based on a true story about three men who managed to get out of that place and were never to be seen again. Trump mimicked how one might flee alligators lurking at Big Cypress, swiveling his hand like a snake, suggesting a flight route. This was meant as a laugh line.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland is two miles from Everglades National Park. Ever since the 2018 shooting, I’ve wondered if its students were required to spend time in the park, studying flora and fauna, reptiles and fish, Native-American history, and distant stars, or anything else our national parks offer. Would that have headed off school violence? I’m hardly the first to note that nature is healing, and connecting with it saves lost souls. Or, as noted poet and novelist Jim Harrison once wrote, “How can you be depressed if there’s a creek?”
After it was announced that Alligator Alcatraz had opened, Trump suggested that other states follow suit. Sure enough, Representative Nancy Mace, the troll-o-maticSouth Carolina Republican, weighed in, addressing a post on X to the Department of Homeland Security. “We’ve got a swamp and a dream,” she said. “Let’s talk. South Carolina’s gators are ready.”
Will other public lands offer detention zones? When it comes to penitentiaries in national preserves, they may not be a legal violation, but the idea violates our longstanding embrace of wildlands. Yes, there are national monuments that were sites of imprisonment—Manzanar, the infamous detention center for Japanese Americans, and others come to mind. Still, these were set aside to acknowledge those in captivity. As far as I know, no other national preserve, sanctuary, park, or monument is designated as such because its rustic beauty has been repurposed for imprisonment and denial of freedom—the opposite of “public lands.”
“Ours is a house divided—not by red and blue states—but by something more essential: our relationship to what’s wild. Should we leave it alone? Cherish it and make sure it lasts. Or continue to wall it up, fence it off, and take shiny things from it so we can all get rich?” I wrote this in my review of The National Parks: America’s Best Idea by Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan. It accompanied their PBS documentary of the same title. The title comes from Wallace Stegner’s famous description of the necessity of the country’s most magnificent natural wonders. A preserve may not be a park, but neither is it a jail. In the case of Big Cypress, it’s an International Dark Sky Park, a designation given by Dark Sky International to the few remaining places on the planet where such magic is still available. It’s safe to say that stargazing was not a concern among the private contractors running Alligator Alcatraz. The camp’s floodlights may obliterate the dark skies in the region. But there’s still a creek—a river of grass, as Douglas called it—and it’s where the alligators and otters live, where beautiful birds wade. Orchids and cypress trees flourish, signifiers of a life unfettered. And so we must add another item to Project 2026: removing cages from Big Cypress and a mandate to ensure this does not happen again.
