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Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), along with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), announced last week that all persons detained at the Alligator Alcatraz immigration jail were transferred to other facilities, and that the site’s giant tents and cages had been emptied.

The reason given to the public was the risk posed by Florida’s hurricane season, with the agency offering this statement: “As we enter hurricane season, ICE and the state of Florida have moved illegal aliens from the soft-sided facility. For the safety of the illegal alien detainees, we transferred them to other facilities.”

That didn’t seem to be a concern when the makeshift immigration jail opened last June, just as the 2025 hurricane season began. A July 2025 press conference attended by President Donald Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis, then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier was disrupted by heavy thunderstorms that caused parts of the facility to flood, a pattern that would become routine during its yearlong operation. The possibility of a hurricane striking the Everglades site was, in fact, of such little concern that officials from the Florida Division of Emergency Management (FDEM), which administers Alligator Alcatraz, delayed the release of the facility’s hurricane preparedness and evacuation procedures until pressured by members of Congress. When it was finally made public, the 33-page draft document was so heavily redacted that entire pages were blacked out, leaving lawmakers with more questions than answers.

FDEM Director Kevin Guthrie responded to worries about a hurricane impacting an immigration jail comprising industrial tents and cages in the middle of the Florida Everglades by stating that the facility could “withstand category winds of up to category 2,” and that beyond that, “we will have to do an evacuation.”

So what changed between last year’s hurricane season and this year’s? The political context, for one. Who can forget unelected Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier boasting that migrants detained at the facility would find “not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.” Floridian voters were far less enthusiastic about the spectacle of a detention camp marketed around the threat of predators. Subsequent polling found the facility deeply unpopular, with only 35 percent approving and 51 percent disapproving. Those are troubling numbers for Republicans heading into what is already shaping up to be a challenging midterm election cycle.

“Alligator Alcatraz” Guards Allegedly Beat Prisoners for Requesting Phone Access

On top of rhetoric that seemed constructed to disgust anyone except the most extreme anti-immigration hardliners, financial malfeasance generated controversy almost as soon as Alligator Alcatraz opened. To finance the tent-based immigration jail, state officials diverted nearly $1 billion from Florida’s Emergency Preparedness and Response Fund, a reserve traditionally intended for disaster preparedness and response. In one particularly striking example of........

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