The Trump administration plans to use funds from an otherwise gutted disaster-relief agency to build a migrant detention centre that’ll be largely guarded by alligators and pythons.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, nicknamed ‘ICE Barbie’ after her penchant for cosplaying as an immigration agent, announced on X Monday night her department has been working at “turbo speed” to deliver on President Donald Trump’s mass deportation drive, and that she expects the new facility to be ready within a matter of days.
A brainchild of Florida state Attorney General James Uthmeier, the centre will mostly comprise a number of large tents set up on a remote airfield in the Everglades, which Uthmeier has said will require minimal security given the site is surrounded by dangerous wildlife.
The plan fits neatly with the tenor of Trump’s immigration crackdown, which has already seen migrants detained at Guantanamo Bay, notorious for the torture of Islamic terror suspects, and the COCET facility, an El-Salvadoran megaprison likened by critics to a concentration camp.
It also echoes pledges made during Trump’s first term in office, when he spoke repeatedly and at length about wanting to build a razor-topped wall and “moat” along the U.S. border with Mexico, filling the latter with snakes and alligators to ward asylum seekers off making the already perilous crossing.
“These new facilities will in large part be funded by [the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA)] Shelter and Services program, which the Biden administration used as a piggy bank to spend hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars to house illegal aliens,” Noem added in her Monday post.
Under President Trump’s leadership, we are working at turbo speed to deliver cost-effective and innovative ways to deliver on the American people’s mandate for mass deportations of criminal illegal aliens. We will expand facilities and bed space in just days, thanks to our…
— Secretary Kristi Noem (@Sec_Noem) June 24, 2025
Popular among the MAGA base, that’s a claim that dates back to the Hurricane Helene relief efforts last October. Trump said then, in statements amplified by Elon Musk and other supporters, that the Biden-Harris administration had no money left to support victims of the disaster because “they spent it all on illegal migrants.”
The then-presidential candidate’s suggestion that money for disaster relief had been spent on housing undocumented migrants did not stand up to scrutiny. FEMA, a division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), had administered payments to New York City to provide lodging for immigrants, but from a separate fund appropriated by Congress specifically for that purpose.
In an ironic twist, Trump had during his first presidency already done exactly what he accused Biden of doing. In 2019, he took $271 million from DHS programs, including $155 million from the FEMA disaster fund, to meet the costs of additional detention facilities for asylum seekers attempting to cross the southern border.
Since assuming office for the second time in January, the president has nevertheless now embarked on a cost-cutting crusade to significantly scale back, if not outright eliminate, FEMA.
Battered as the United States is each year by hurricanes and other extreme weather events, the rationale behind gutting the United States’ chief disaster relief agency has not been entirely clear, beyond Trump’s desire “to give out less money” as part of his administration’s wider crackdown on “wasteful” federal spending.
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