In January, when President Donald Trump declared a national immigration emergency, Governor Ron DeSantis and the Legislature placed Florida’s law enforcement resources at the service of the Department of Homeland Security.
The impact of this enforcement delegation on detainee numbers is unclear. But the Sunshine State has now taken an even bolder step. On June 19 Attorney General James Uthmeier announced the construction of “Alligator Alcatraz,” a 3,000-bed tent city designed to hold immigrants detained in Florida and out of state, situated smack in the middle of the Big Cypress National Preserve.
The exact site? The 10,500-foot runway of the Dade County Training and Transition Airport, located on Tamiami Trail in Ochopee (population 131), a 75-mile drive from Naples, 50 miles from Miami, and 6 miles north of Everglades National Park.
Betty Osceola, a Miccosukee tribe member, and Brad Keehn, from Ochopee, discuss the potential impact to the local ecosystem as a result of the incoming development of a new migrant detention center. Bystanders were gathered in front of the access road into the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in the Big Cypress Wildlife Management Area Thursday, June 26, 2025. The airport location is being converted into a controversial migrant detention center currently being referred to as “Alligator Alcatraz.”
A chain reaction ensued. The Friends of the Everglades and Center for Biological Diversity filed a June 27 lawsuit to stop the construction. The state filed a countersuit in reply, with Governor DeSantis declaring “there’s no land being disturbed.” President Trump flew in for a July 1 tour, the first detainees arrived on July 2, and a delegation of Florida Democrats was turned away at the gates on July 3.
Alligator Alcatraz July 3, 2025
But what many people are now asking is: How on earth did a 10,500-foot runway end up in the middle of south Florida swampland in the first place? The answer lies in one of the more bizarre Florida development stories of the go-go 1960’s, where two related issues were in play.
First, by 1965 the population of Miami had tripled since World War II to 1.5 million. Concern arose that Miami International would run out of capacity, that expansion was impossible in its current location, and that South Florida would lose out to other transport centers. In Texas, planning had begun for the creation of the 27-square-mile Dallas-Fort Worth Airport; and Atlanta Municipal had just opened the largest terminal in the country, from which Delta began transatlantic jet service in 1964.
A new sign was installed for Alligator Alcatraz, the ICE detention center in the Florida Everglades. Opening day at the Dade-Collier Training Airport site in Ochopee, Florida, was July 1, 2025.
And second, excitement over the future of jet travel was at a peak. Three wide body aircraft, the Boeing 747, McDonnell Douglas DC-10 and Lockheed Tristar were in development. Supersonic flight was the next big thing. In 1962 Britain and France began cooperation on the Concorde, and in 1966 Boeing won a government sponsored competition to design the SST.
That same year, the Dade County Port Authority began evaluating sites for a new “Jetport.” The DCPA sought a location in a less populated area that might accommodate the sonic booms and other hazards of both super and wide-body subsonic traffic. Locations in Broward and Monroe were nixed by the respective county authorities. But with the help of the Greater Naples Chamber of Commerce, Collier County was amenable to the concept. In the final plans for the site, two-thirds of the 39-square-mile expanse was (and is today) located in Collier.
Management of the close by Everglades Park had been kept in the dark about the location. But with the environmental movement in its early days, the project generated little public opposition. Through eminent domain, the Collier tract was purchased in the summer of 1968 by Dade County for $2.8 million, and ground was broken in September. Governor Claude Kirk hailed the launch of “the first supersonic jetport in the entire world.”
In retrospect, the ambition for the facility was nothing short of fantastic. While phase one would solve the immediate need of diverting training flights from the overtaxed Miami International, the completed Jetport would have 6 runways, designed to accommodate the Concorde and the SST, and there was even a vision of space travel launch pads.
At a time when Florida’s population, at 5.9 million, was smaller than New York City’s, the Jetport was designed to be five times the size of Kennedy International, capable of handling 50 million annual passengers. There would be a 1,000-foot-wide corridor linking the airport to both coasts, including an extension of Interstate 75 and a high-speed monorail. Boosters spoke of the facility as the nucleus of a new 100,000-person metropolis.
But by the end of 1968, opposition emerged. Robert Padrick , chairman of what is today the South Florida Water Management District, was blindsided when the extension of I-75 from Miami to the Jetport was proposed at a latitude well south of today’s location − a route right through a conservation and wildlife refuge he had been assured was off limits.
His trust in the Port Authority shattered, Padrick contacted a slew of state and national environmental groups to “assist us to insure defeat of this abominable proposal.” By April of 1969, those groups had formed an “Everglades Coalition” and recruited the participation of the revered Marjorie Stoneman Douglas. As the debate went national, Interior Secretary Wally Hickel and Washington Senator Henry Jackson emerged as project skeptics.
Jetport advocates pushed back. While Life magazine reported that, “the commercial, political, and financial establishments of Dade, Collier and Monroe counties are sweaty with the excitement of a new boom,” the Miami Chamber of Commerce labeled the coalition’s opposition “limited in vision.” The Fort Myers News-Press editorialized that Jetport opponents “had gone off half-cocked. The objections they raise are not valid and the dangers they apprehend are remote.”
Ironically it was Hickel, a former Republican governor of Alaska who championed the cause of the Everglades in the Nixon administration. Armed with a September 1969 impact study which declared the Jetport would cause “the destruction of the South Florida ecosystem,” he made his case to none other than White House staffer John Ehrlichman. Ehrlichman in turn brought the issue to President Nixon, who had a home in Key Biscayne and was keenly aware of the emerging political clout of the environmental movement.
Nixon killed the project and directed Ehrlichman to negotiate what became the January 1970 “Everglades Jetport Pact.” The Interior and Transportation Departments, the State of Florida and Collier and Dade counties agreed to cease further construction, and to continue training flights only until an alternate Jetport location could be located.
No location was ever found, and Miami International today handles 50 million passengers annually, the total envisioned in planning for the Jetport. Until seized by the Florida government last month, the now famous Dade County Training facility had accommodated training flights in obscurity for five decades.
Oh, by the way, in 1971 the development of Boeing’s SST was cancelled.
An unlikely environmental pioneer, Richard Nixon leveraged the Jetport Pact into another milestone for Florida. To protect the adjacent Everglades, he endorsed congressional action in 1971 to create the 550,000-acre Big Cypress National Preserve, the first national preserve of its kind. When the legislation authorizing the preserve finally passed in 1974, more than 500,000 acres of the initial tract were purchased from none other than Collier family companies.
The world’s biggest Jetport was fated never to be. Whether the country’s largest immigrant detention center suffers a similar fate will be worth watching.
Paul Atkinson, a Bonita Springs resident, is a contributor to The Hill and the New York Sun.
This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Origins of Alligator Alcatraz: Who dreamed up the Jetport? | Opinion