Kristi Noem says “Alligator Alcatraz” to be model for ICE state-run detention centers

The interior security secretary, Kristi Noem, known as “Alligator Alcatraz“Will be a model for migrant detention centers managed by the state, and she told CBS News in an interview that she hoped to launch a handful of similar detention centers in several airports and prisons across the country, in the coming months. Potential sites are already being studied in Arizona, Nebraska and Louisiana.

“The locations we examine are just airport tracks that will help you give us an effectiveness that we have never had before,” said Noem, adding that it directly called on governors and heads of state to assess their interest in contributing to the Trump administration program to hold and deport more unauthorized migrants.

“Most of them are interested,” said Noem, adding that in states supporting President Trump’s mission to guarantee the southern border, “many of them have installations that can be empty or underused.”

The strategy of the Ministry of Internal Security is based on the opening of an immigration detention center of 3,000 beds in a jetport in southern Florida last month. Nicknamed Alligator Alcatraz by state officials and federally, the installation of fortune cost around $ 450 million to operate in his first year. Regardless in just 8 days, tents and trailers at the Dade-Collier training and transitional airport are surrounded by 39 square miles of isolated swamps, with treacherous terrain and fauna

Last month, President Trump visited the installations, seeing rows of bunk beds aligned behind chain fences and surrounded by razor wire. Trump joked by telling journalists there that “we will teach them to flee an alligator if they escape prison”. When asked if the temporary installation would be a model of what will happen, the president said that he would like to see similar operations in “many states”.

The office of the Governor of Arizona told CBS News that he had not been approached about an establishment managed by the State.

The office of the Governor of Nebraska, Jim Pillen, said in a statement that his administration “continues to be in communication with federal partners on how the Nebraska could best help these efforts,” but added that for the moment, “it is premature to comment” and the governor “would make public details.”

For its part, Noem qualified the Alligator Alcatraz model “much better” than the current detention prototype, which largely contracts its ability to detention for immigration and customs application to for -profit prison companies and county prisons. Ice is an agency that falls under DHS. This model is based on intergovernmental service agreements (IGSA) negotiated and signed between ice and individual localities. She called the installation of Florida – with a possible price of $ 245 per detainee, per night, according to DHS managers – a profitable option. “Obviously, it was much less costs per bed than some of the previous contracts from the Ministry of Internal Security.”

According to the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, the estimated average daily cost of the detention of an adult migrant during fiscal 2024 was around $ 165, although the real cost of detention generally varies according to the region, the length of the stay and the type of installation.

However, Noem argued that new places, all near airports or tracks, will help ice reduce costs by “facilitating fast reversals”.

“They are all strategically designed to ensure that people are in beds for fewer days,” said Noem, adding that some of the planned facilities are still undergoing verification by the ministry and subject to current negotiations. “This can be much more effective once they have obtained their hearings, their regular procedure, their documents.”

Unlike Alligator Alcatraz, which uses funds from a refuge, food and transport program managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Noem said that the state -based initiative would operate a new $ 45 billion financing swimming pool for Ice invited by “Big, Beau Bill” by President Trump, who was sign last month. The silver basin is attributed specifically to the expansion of the ICE and will be almost double the capacity of the agency’s bed space 61,000 beds, depending on cost analysis. On Saturday, ICE held just over 57,000 people in its detention network in more than 150 national facilities.

NOEM – which has implemented a policy on the level of the department through the DHS of personal approval of each contract and to grant more than $ 100,000 – said that the maintenance of ice detention contracts for less than five years is now “the model we have pushed”. For example, she added, Alligator Alcatraz is a one-year contract that can be renewed.

“For me personally, the question I have asked to each of these contracts is, why signing us 15-year offers?” Said Noem. “I have to look at our mission. If we still build and treat 100,000 detention beds in 15 years, then we have not done our job.”

The new policy is a difference in previous agreements concluded within the framework of the Trump administration. In February, Ice signed a 15 -year -old agreement and a billion dollars with the GEO group, a private prison company, to reopen Delaney Hall, An installation of two floors and 1,000 beds which ranks among the largest detention centers in the northeast.

However, Noem said that she did not think that the United States is moving away from a model of private detention. “I mean, these are competitive contracts,” she said. “I want everyone to be at the table, giving us solutions. I just want them to give us a contract that actually does work – a contract that does not put more money in their pockets while keeping people in detention beds just for the good of this contract.”

But the Alligator Alcatraz was also criticized by lawyers claiming that Trump and Desantis administrations have prisoners without indictment or access to the immigration courts, violating their constitutional rights. Lawyer argued in a legal file last month That unauthorized migrants held on the site managed by Florida have no legal appeal to challenge their detention.

Lawyers and experts also questioned the very legality of an immigration detention center managed by the State, taking into account the authority of the federal government on the application of immigration. The opening of the Everglades in the Everglades under the Florida’s Emergency Powers marked a departure from the role of the federal government of migrants in housing, an option generally reserved for those who recently entered the country illegally or those who have been sentenced to criminals.

An American district judge ordered the state and federal officials last week to provide a copy of the showing agreement “who directs the program” to the Everglades Immigrant-Detention Center.

“Florida does not have the legal power to have undoubtedly undocumented immigrants in the absence of an ice contract,” said Kevin Landy, director of the Ice Detention and Planning Policy under President Barack Obama. “A state government cannot do that.”

Detainees detained at the Alligator Alcatraz have also claimed unsanitary and inhuman conditionsIncluding food with maggots, refusal of religious rights and limited access to both legal and water. Florida officials denied the accusations.

However, hidden in the Florida’s Everglades at 45 miles west of Miami, if its location seems to be treacherous, concedes Noem, that is a bit the point. “There is certainly a message he sends,” said the secretary. “President Trump wants people to know if you are a violent criminal and that you are illegally in this country, there will be consequences.”

Noem has offered that deterrent is an effective information -based strategy of three three -letters agencies, other federal government intelligence officials and in many Latin American and South America countries “which indicate” massively, which encourages people to return voluntarily, are the consequences “.

“They see the laws applied in the United States,” said Noem. “They know when they are here illegally and if they are detained, they will be kidnapped. They see they may never have the chance to return to America. And they voluntarily go home.”

The secretary of the DHS met the Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum in March. “One of the questions I asked at President Scheinbaum when I was in Mexico is:” Do you have an idea of the number of people who may have returned to Mexico that we may not know “,” said Noem.

“”[Sheinbaum] According to 500,000 to 600,000 people, returned to Mexico voluntarily since President Trump was in office, “said Noem, explaining that the Mexican president believes that his reluctant citizens fear losing the chance to return to the United States on a visa or work program.

It is a data point that she requests many foreign leaders whom she meets, notably the Ecuadorian president Daniel Noboa, who shared a 90 -minute lunch with the secretary of the DHS in Quito last Thursday. “I asked him the same question,” recalls Noem. “There are not as many illegal immigrants in the United States as in Mexico and Venezuela, but he said he thought that more than 100,000 of his citizens have returned to Ecuador. And that is a large number.”

Noem said that the approximate estimate of its Ecuadorian counterpart is based on two factors – a strengthening of the Ecuadorian economy and a DHS television campaign launched in Latin and South America, warning potential migrants not to enter or remain illegally in the United States.

“He was very proud of the fact that he is better with his economy. So there are jobs,” said Noem. “But he said, you know, our advertisements broadcast in Ecuador. We tell people that, if you have family in the United States who are there illegally, it’s time to go home.”

Margaret Brennan and Camilo Montoya-Galvez contributed to this report.