The Carceral Ecology of Alligator Alcatraz

Last summer, a new detention facility appeared deep in the Everglades: Alligator Alcatraz. The project represents a calculated expansion of the nation’s deportation apparatus. When Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier unveiled the South Florida facility in June 2025, he bragged, “You don’t need to invest that much in the perimeter. People get out, and there’s not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.” 

The 450 million dollar-a-year detention center sits on the former Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, deep within the Big Cypress National Preserve. Surrounded by swampland subject to hurricanes, flooding, and disease-spreading insect populations, the facility relies on more than barbed wire and guards to keep detainees confined. By design, its ecology functions as perimeter enforcement.

At the opening press conference, Trump praised the site’s “treacherous” surroundings and declared that “the only way out is deportation.” Since then, flood waters have inundated the facility, journalists have reported inhuman treatment, and a federal court briefly ordered operations to cease. Yet, detainees continue to fill its beds and suffer this new, American punishment. 

Alligator Alcatraz is a harbinger of carceral ecology: a mode of captivity in which environmental hazards, shaped by climate change, become infrastructure. In this age of climate collapse, the state’s new cage is the land itself.

Geographies of Captivity

Alligator Alcatraz sits within a longer legacy of captivity wherein inhospitable land serves as a tool of confinement. From early American plantations to Alcatraz Island to the more recent Manzanar internment camp, numerous examples illustrate the connection between hostile environments and carceral infrastructure. The land—and the swamp in particular—has long been a space of both enforcement and refusal, of captivity and escape.

Plantation geographies were among the earliest iterations of modern carceral ecologies, relying on environmental dangers as deterrents against marronage. These dangers haunt historical accounts of the Great Dismal Swamp, a wetland spanning Virginia and North Carolina where Indigenous and enslaved fugitives navigated treacherous terrain filled with predators that made escape from enslavement nearly impossible.

Centuries and miles apart, one of the predators that haunted that historical landscape also inhabits the Big Cypress National Preserve: the water moccasin. The venomous snake appears as a recurring, near-mythological presence in American slave narratives, including Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In the wetlands surrounding Alligator Alcatraz, it appears again—recast once more as an unwitting agent of state enforcement.

A different ecology—with different predators—structured captivity at Alligator Alcatraz’s namesake: the Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. Sitting on a small island in San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz is surrounded by freezing waters, raging riptides, and the threat of resident Great White sharks. Dubbed “America’s Devil’s Island,” the prison fortress showcased how natural hazards facilitate containment, control, and intimidation. Since the 1850s, its design has inspired subsequent carceral infrastructure in America.

A more recent example of this logic is Manzanar, the World War II-era internment camp located in eastern California’s Owens Valley. The camp was established at the height of the war against Japan and formally institutionalized anti-Japanese racism. An estimated ten thousand people were relocated to the deep desert and incarcerated at its facilities. The camp was effective precisely because the surrounding desert was inhospitable, making escape nearly impossible.

Florida’s new detention center draws on this same logic of its predecessors, but under different ecological conditions. At Alligator Alcatraz, environmental hostility is not merely a feature of the geography; instead, climate change imposes hostility on the land through flooding, heat waves, and habitat degradation.

Like its historical analogs, Alligator Alcatraz relies on environmental features to punish, deter, and confine. But in the age of climate degradation, the state no longer needs to seek out exceptional landscapes to produce this effect. Climate collapse makes geographies of captivity abundant.

Climate Refugees/Detainees

Alligator Alcatraz not only expands what carceral infrastructure looks like, but also who it is meant for. Climate-related migration is on the rise around the world. Yet, despite being the second-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, the U.S. does not offer asylum to climate refugees. Instead, as the Florida detention facility brings into relief, new climate-driven displacement and migration are addressed through carceral expansion.

Though the U.S. makes certain climates unlivable through extractive operations abroad, courts and agencies refuse to properly account for this harm. In a precedential 2024 decision, Cruz Galicia v. Garland, a federal appellate court found that climate refugees lack the requisite social distinction to qualify for asylum status. The harm of this decision is one of omission: a refusal to provide accountability, legibility, or remedy to the violence of climate change.

Even within U.S. borders, state and federal governments have done relatively little to mitigate the harm of the climate crisis. In Florida, hurricane seasons are wreaking increasingly catastrophic damage, but the GOP opted to gut FEMA’s budget. The state has preferred a model of privatized response rather than collective prevention and recovery. This reflects Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s theory of “organized abandonment,” whereby state policies of disinvestment, privatization, and environmental degradation relegate certain racialized populations to premature death.

Alligator Alcatraz follows this same model. In a telling extension of this apparatus, the facility’s construction and operation costs were drawn from the state’s FEMA funding. Instead of restoring sites of crisis, Alligator Alcatraz reappropriates social funding into a tool of punitive governance and population management. Without FEMA dollars flowing to impacted communities, residents of Alligator Alcatraz’s home state are subject to some of the same violence as the refugees who fill the facility’s beds.

As American consumer activity and deregulation abroad create climate refugees, the United States invests in carceral detention as a border governance strategy. Alligator Alcatraz is financed through disaster relief funds and structured around environmental collapse, which functions as both punishment and deterrent. The state manages climate displacement not through protection or repair, but through coercive containment. Environmental degradation functions as both the crisis and the solution.

Recruiting Carceral Ecologies

The symbolic role of FEMA funds in Alligator Alcatraz’s operations clarifies the governance choice at hand: restore livability or capitalize on inhospitability. Here, climate collapse functions carcerally. Abandonment and captivity coexist.

The prison industrial complex is a product of racial capitalism, and Alligator Alcatraz typifies the form it can take under conditions of climate collapse. At the facility, the state’s climate violence merges abandonment and confinement to manage racialized populations.

The carceral state has always been a system of population control. Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues that California’s prison expansion follows the state’s need to manage “surplus populations.” She defines these racialized groups as “workers at the extreme edges, or completely outside, of restructured labor markets.” Organized abandonment and carceral expansion are both strategies of racial capitalism. In carceral ecologies, these tools come together.

At its core, Alligator Alcatraz operates as an instrument of racialized population control. Gov. DeSantis invoked emergency powers to serve this very purpose. Given the horrific conditions of the facility, the intensified ICE operations that fill its beds, and the racialized discourse around who it is for, Alligator Alcatraz showcases the overlapping logic between the carceral state and racialized population management: social disappearance.

Whereas the prison has functioned as the catchall institution for surplus populations, the new catchalls will be polluted neighborhoods, flood zones, and other precarious environments. Alligator Alcatraz is the state’s answer to the crisis, normalizing the idea that certain communities should be subjected to the brutality of a collapsing climate. And some should even be punished by it.

Rematriation and Resistance

Alligator Alcatraz sits on a stretch of Indigenous land associated with the Calusa, Taíno, Seminole, Mascogo, and Miccosukee Nations. The area was referred to by local Indigenous tribes as “Pa-hay-Okee” (grassy rivers) due to the landscape’s vast grass marshlands and the more than one hundred species of native grass that grow in the region. Local Indigenous groups have been central to fighting for environmental protections in the region, including by opposing the new detention facility. 

Back in June 2025, in an interview with the BBC, Betty Osceola, a member of the Miccosukee Tribe, expressed concern over the detention center’s impact on both the local ecosystem and the people incarcerated inside. Her comments conveyed solidarity with both the alligators and the imprisoned migrants.

Osceola spent the summer protesting outside Alligator Alcatraz, and she was not alone. A number of human rights and environmental groups have continued to mount pressure on the state and federal government to close or more closely monitor the facility. One such environmental group, Friends of the Everglades, uses the slogan: “No Airports. No Rock Mines. No Prisons,” calling attention to the afterlives of settler colonialism in militarism, extractivism, and carcerality on native land.

In November 2025, the National Congress of American Indians—a long-standing organization representing more than 600 tribal nations—adopted a resolution calling on the federal government to close Alligator Alcatraz because of its proximity to Tribal lands and its infringement on Tribal cultural practices. The resolution criticized the use of Indigenous land for inhumane detention and explicitly recalled how Native lands were previously appropriated for Japanese internment camps.

Indigenous resistance to the carceral state is not new. Perhaps the most famous example is the American Indian Movement’s nineteen-month occupation of Alcatraz Island. Between 1969 and 1971, a multi-tribe group of young activists declared “We Hold the Rock” and claimed the island as Native land rather than a site of state control and punishment. Implicit in this occupation was a rejection of the prison-industrial complex as an expression of settler colonialism.

Another recent example of this politics emerged in January 2025, when the Appalachian Rekindling Project acquired 68 acres of private land, preventing the construction of a new prison. One of the project leaders described the overlap between decarceration and Indigenous sovereignty movements, stating: “The thought of adding another extractive industry—one that extracts people from their communities and extracts labor out of them—was really horrifying to us.”

Against Carceral Ecologies

Historical and contemporary resistance efforts offer a blueprint against carceral ecologies, showing how organized opposition can interrupt the expansion of punitive landscapes. Across the country, movements confronting coercive state power have developed strategies for resisting organized abandonment and carceral expansion. Their work reminds us that unlivable environments need not be recruited into the service of the carceral state or its self-reinforcing cycles of violence. Instead, carceral logic, settler colonialism, and climate destruction can be challenged through collaborative resistance rooted in mutual survival.

The ongoing emergence of carceral ecologies demands a reclamation of ecosystems, not as part of the carceral state but as victims of it too. The alligators are not the enemy.

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Feature Image: An alligator surfaces in Everglades National Park. Photo by Everglades National Park, 2020.

Alexandra White (she/her) is a J.D. candidate at Stanford Law School and a member editor of the Stanford Environmental Law Journal. On her Substack, Bodies Writ, she writes about coercive state power, environmental violence, and feminist theory. She spent the past decade co-running a reproductive justice organization in Seattle, Washington. Contact.