Alligator Alcatraz and the Production of Environmental Carcerality in the Everglades

ABSTRACT In June 2025, the state of Florida opened 'Alligator Alcatraz', a federal immigration detention centre, in the Florida Everglades, weaponising animals and landscapes to construct racialised geographies of fear and rationalise multispecies environmental injustice. In this paper, we examine the symbolic and material conditions of Alligator Alcatraz, pulling apart how what appears to be a novel use of landscape and species for immigration enforcement, is in fact, a deeply historical logic that draws on long‐standing settler colonial tropes of emptiness, danger and disposability. We illustrate how both the American alligator ( Alligator mississippiensis ), and the Everglades itself, are conscripted into carceral geographies that reflect both ecological degradation and racialised state violence. The alligator becomes conscripted as a federal immigration officer, touted by federal and state officials as a mascot of environmental carcerality. Meanwhile, the Everglades is deployed as an empty, deterrent landscape, reviving a settler imaginary that has long justified its destruction and casts Indigenous land, life and knowledge and the more‐than‐human beings living within it as expendable. Alligator Alcatraz pushes us to consider what carceral geographies of US immigration policy reveal about the disposability of certain bodies—human, ecological and more than human. Ultimately, existing in this spectacle of the racialised past and present are the real human costs of detention development in the Everglades, which is damaging local ecologies and Indigenous and migrant lives.