Miami-Dade mayor wants Alligator Alcatraz site turned over to National Park Service

Miami-Dade County admin June 25, 2026 0 Comments

Miami-Dade mayor wants Alligator Alcatraz site turned over to National Park Service

Miami-Dade’s mayor wants to sell to the U.S. government the county-owned airport that Florida seized for the Alligator Alcatraz immigration detention camp, a conservation plan unveiled hours before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to make his own announcement about the remote site’s future.

In a memo, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told county commissioners she wanted to sell the 17,000 acres of wetlands to the National Park Service, which runs the federal Big Cypress Preserve that surrounds the Alcatraz site and is part of the Everglades ecosystem.

“The eventual closure and decommissioning of the Alligator Alcatraz facility would present a historic opportunity to permanently protect these lands and contribute meaningfully to one of the most ambitious environmental restoration efforts in the nation,” Levine Cava wrote, referring to the ongoing federal project to restore historic water flows into the Everglades.

The plan seems to mirror a proposal made to Levine Cava several years ago by a DeSantis backer, though it never got traction in the second-term Democrat’s administration. The memo does not suggest a price for the sprawling site or whether Levine Cava intends to ask for less than the real estate is worth as part of a conservation effort. In the early days of the state takeover, the DeSantis administration offered to purchase the site for $20 million. Levine Cava rejected that, responding that appraisals had the land worth close to $200 million.

The mayor’s memo, released minutes after DeSantis announced a press conference at the Alcatraz site, follows a call by an ally of the governor to shut down the training airport that had operated there before the state seizure last summer and preserve the land for the sake of the Everglades.

“The plan has always been to protect the Everglades and take it back to a protected area where it’s not a commercial business, an airport,” James Uthmeier, whom the governor appointed Florida’s attorney general last year, told reporters Tuesday at a press conference in Tampa.

Detainees have already been moved to federal facilities, and contractors say they’re being asked to break down tents and stop paying workers whose compensation is being funded by the state operation.

Should Miami-Dade regain control of the Alcatraz site and turn it over to the Park Service, which runs Big Cypress and the nearby Everglades National Park, it would be a significant victory for environmental groups that have spent decades trying to fend off development plans there. It also would give Levine Cava a chance to implement a plan her administration didn’t act on years ago, when Joe Biden was president.

In 2021, Rodney Barreto, a partner in a Coral Gables lobbying firm and a DeSantis ally who serves as chair of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, had delivered Levine Cava a proposal to give the Transition and Training land to the Big Cypress Preserve.

“The Jetport property is ecologically important to the health of the entire Everglades,” Barreto wrote in an Oct. 28, 2021, email to Levine Cava. “It is more important than ever to ensure that the Jetport property is properly managed in a way that ensures their ecological restoration and preservation.”

The term Jetport stems from the first major fight over the land.

In the 1960s, groups led by Marjory Stoneman Douglas fought off a county plan to build the world’s largest airport there — a facility dubbed the Everglades Jetport.

The airport push ended, but not before construction of a 10,500-square-foot runway that, decades later, DeSantis said made the site a perfect place for detaining immigration violators and putting them on deportation flights.

The Barreto proposal to Levine Cava didn’t advance. But the plan did help spark talks between Florida and Miami-Dade about the state potentially purchasing the sleepy training airport for staging disaster supplies for hurricanes that hit southern Florida, according to multiple people involved in the discussions. That effort halted in the summer of 2025, when DeSantis announced he was seizing the airport and renaming it Alligator Alcatraz.

In her memo, Levine Cava said it has become clear that it doesn’t make sense financially for Miami-Dade to pay to resume operations at the training airport once Florida returns control of the land to the county. Before the state takeover, the airport served as a touch-down spot for pilots of small planes needing to keep up with federal landing and take-off quotas.

Levine Cava also suggested her plan would protect Miami-Dade from being victim to another state seizure of the land for a future detention facility or other use.

“The Administration’s objective is clear: to ensure these lands are permanently removed from future detention, industrial or intensive commercial development and dedicated in perpetuity to ecological restoration,” she wrote.

This story was originally published June 25, 2026 at 8:57 AM.