While the fate of his entire legislative agenda was being decided on Tuesday, President Trump traveled a thousand miles away from Washington to hang out in a makeshift detention center for migrants that had been thrown together on an old airstrip in the Florida Everglades.
The place had already been nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz” by Republicans, on account of the fact that it’s surrounded by miles of marshland seething with reptiles. Mr. Trump instantly thrilled to the alligator alliteration — as he said on Tuesday, “I looked outside and that’s not a place I want to go hiking anytime soon” — and ordered up a tour.
This expedition might have seemed a bit off-piste, since the real action was happening back on Capitol Hill, where Republican senators were genuinely agonizing about whether they could really vote for this hydra-headed bill that Mr. Trump had put forth. But his visit to the detention center was not without purpose. This media spectacle had been manufactured to highlight Mr. Trump’s most winning issue, which binds his party to him more than anything else — immigration.
“I said, ‘Let the press join us on our walk, so they can see what’s happening,’” Mr. Trump said. He walked through the facility, stopping to inspect chain-link fences and bunk beds packed tightly together. His top immigration officials, including Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, tagged along. The group kept insisting that lawmakers in Washington needed to pass the president’s bill so that Alligator Alcatraz and other places like it could get the funding needed to operate. (The bill would steer about $175 billion toward immigration enforcement and border security.)
Ms. Noem told a story about a recent detainee. “The other day, I was talking to some marshals that have been partnering with ICE,” she said. “They said that they had detained a cannibal and put him on a plane to take him home, and while they had him in his seat, he started to eat himself and they had to get him off and get him medical attention.” (The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions seeking clarity about the episode Ms. Noem described on Tuesday).
“These are the kind of deranged individuals that are on our streets in America,” she said.
Mr. Trump said that “very soon, this facility will house some of the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet.” He detailed instances of violent crime in gory detail and said that even the most hardened of killers would have a hell of a time making it out of Alligator Alcatraz alive. “We’re surrounded by miles of treacherous swampland.”
Earlier in the day, he had described the locale as slithering with serpents and alligators. “We’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator if they escape prison,” he said sarcastically. “Don’t run in a straight line.”
Experts on the Everglades very much doubted Mr. Trump’s supposition that the local fauna would somehow play a role in law enforcement. “The only way people really get bit by an alligator is if you step on them,” said James Fourqurean, an associate director in the Institute of Environment at Florida International University. “It is far-fetched that you would step on one, because, you know, they lay hidden. And if you were to step on one and it wheeled around and bit you, it wouldn’t eat you.”
“They’re not really hunting people,” he added.
As for snakes? “Pythons don’t attack people, unless it’s a very, very small child,” he said. “We’re just not on their radar as food.”
But why let the facts get in the way of a bloody good story line? The president who was so tough on crime that he’d see men fed to the gator’s maw before letting them run free!
The facility’s nickname and the president’s tour of it on Tuesday were in keeping with so much of this administration’s approach to immigration policy in that it was meant to inspire terror and publicity. The White House had a ball with the backdrop: Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, posted a selfie with her fellow West Wing aides Margo Martin and Dan Scavino.“En route to Alligator Alcatraz!” she wrote, adding an alligator emoji. The new deputy press secretary, Abigail Jackson, put out an A.I.-generated video of alligators wearing Immigration and Customs Enforcement hats while dancing to Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby.” Pro-Trump influencers like Benny Johnson were invited to come along on the trip, too. “Hi guys. I have just been handed official Alligator Alcatraz merch,” he posted to his 3.7 million followers on social media. “I repeat, this prison has merch. Things are going insanely well.”
It was all one big joke.
Midway through the president’s visit, word came down that his bill had squeaked through the Senate, with Vice President JD Vance casting a tiebreaking vote. (The bill still has to pass the House, where it faces significant resistance.)
“Oooh,” Mr. Trump said. The various immigration officials and Florida lawmakers sitting beside him began to clap at this development. “Thank you, wow,” he told them. “It shows that I care about you, because I’m here. And I probably should be there.”
But there was something else about Alligator Alcatraz that seemed to intrigue him. Something beyond the political. Something elemental. “One thing I’ll say about this land,” he said as his visit wrapped up, “we’ll be gone a million years, and this land is still going to be here. It’s not going to be much different. You’ll have the water moccasins, you’ll have the alligators.”
“You may not have people,” he added. “But you’re going to have all those animals. They’re going to be around.”
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.
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