Trump Tours 'Alligator Alcatraz' but Says Farmers Need a Deportation Pass
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Meantime, he says the White House is working on a new temporary pass for migrant farm workers. Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson with The Wall Street Journal. We're joined today by my colleagues, editorial board member Mene Ukebarua and columnist Alicia Finley.

An airport about 40 miles west of Miami in the Everglades has now been transformed into a tent city that officials are saying could house up to 5,000 migrants, according to some reports.

Governor Ron DeSantis stressed that this would alleviate burdens on state law enforcement agencies, jails, also stressing that the facility would be air conditioned 24-7. There are photos circulating that show the inside of these tents, metal bunk beds in detention areas enclosed by chain link fence.

Let's listen to President Trump, who toured this site during an immigration roundtable on Tuesday. Well, I think we'd like to see them in many states, really many states. This one, I know Ron's doing a second one, at least the second one and probably a couple of more. And, you know, at some point they might morph into a system where you're going to keep it for a long time. You know, it's not that far away from home.

It doesn't take years to build and money is spent and wasted. And, you know, like the railway that they have in California, they cost like 40 times more than it was supposed to cost. The same things happens with prisons. You look at this in a short period of time. Ron James and some of the people that really worked on it, along with our people, they did this in less than a week.

And you look at it, it's incredible. Look, the incredible thing is picking the site because the site was one of the most natural sites. It might be as good as the real Alcatraz site. Well, that's a spooky one, too, isn't it? Manet, what do you make of this alligator Alcatraz? Yeah, well, I think President Trump has two reasons, essentially, for wanting there to be an increase of...

detention capacity of exactly this kind. The first is very practical, and the second is more political and symbolic. So to take the practical side of things, detention is important, both in terms of migrants coming into the U.S. illegally, who then need to be held before they could be deported, or in the case of people who are seeking asylum hearings so that they could be detained by the federal government as opposed to released into the country while they're waiting for their hearings.

which is what the Biden administration was in the habit of doing. Also, you have on the deportation side of things, when migrants are picked up, people who had entered the country illegally, who had committed crimes, or perhaps even who were just working illegally after having crossed the border, they generally have to be held somewhere before they can be detained directly. And so there's no doubt that the federal government needs a lot of detention capacity and

Alligator Alcatraz, as it's being dubbed, is one more example of trying to fulfill that goal with Florida stepping up to provide some of the funds to do that. And so that makes a lot of sense. And you do see in things like the big, beautiful bill that Congress is in the act of trying to pass a lot of money going to subsidize exactly this kind of detention. But there is also a more political and symbolic component of it.

which is trying to create a deterrence factor, trying to create reasons for illegal migrants to fear coming into the country and think that their experience might not be so good if they choose to do that. And this isn't the first time the Trump administration has made a bold headline-grabbing move that was intended to have exactly that effect. I think that that was definitely the case with flying some of the criminal migrants to this prison in El Salvador, Seacott.

which is famously known as a very brutal place where a lot of gang members are held. President Trump announced early in his administration that they were going to use Guantanamo Bay to house certain illegal migrants who are in the process of being deported from the United States.

And so you have all of these examples of trying to get the message across that if you are picked up by immigration enforcement, it's not going to be necessarily a clean and tidy process. There's a possibility that you're going to be spending significant time in an undesirable place, in this case, surrounded by a large moat that is filled with alligators in the Everglades.

and a huge risk if you were to try to escape from there. And they want these stories to spread among migrants who are in the United States so that they'll choose to self-deport rather than risk being picked up by ICE and potentially sent to a place like this. They want it to spread throughout Latin America and around the world among people who are thinking of coming to the United States.

It's hard to know what kind of effect these deterrence symbols have. Obviously, it's impossible to measure what the motivations of people are when they're choosing not to come or choosing to remove themselves. But I do think that that's something that President Trump is thinking about in addition to just wanting to increase the detention capacity. That's my read of this, too. It's a mix of political theater by President Trump in classic fashion, an effort to project deterrence,

And then also just the fact that the immigrations and customs enforcement system has long needed more capacity and more beds. There's a CNN story. This says as of last week, more than 58,000 immigrants were in ICE custody in

According to internal data obtained by CNN, many are detained in local jails because ICE has funding to house an average of 41,000 people. So, Alicia, there is a long standing problem here, which is that ICE has lacked the capacity to detain all of the people that it is supposed to detain.

And as long as the promises that are being made by Governor DeSantis about the air conditioning and so forth are good and treating people at this site humanely, I don't see why they shouldn't be at a site in Florida or anywhere else. I think that's right. And it's been a longstanding problem is that the

There isn't enough detention beds for all the people that administrations, and this concludes by the Biden administration, would like to deport. So you have to prioritize who you round up, so to speak.

And this has been a problem with this administration is we don't exactly know who they are targeting. And when you actually decide to start doing immigration raids at workplaces and not just go after the criminals who are currently housed in the jails, you're going to end up rounding up some law abiding workers, people who have committed no crimes and using some of that detention space.

for people who would arguably better require or need that the alligator alcatraz and those kinds of high security facilities.

Also, just recall during the Biden administration, one of the reasons why they paroled so many people into the U.S. is because they didn't have the detention capacities at the border or other places in the country. And so they just ended up releasing them. Now, there were arguments at the time and continue to be, well, maybe we'll

Aren't there some other ways to monitor them, you know, ankle bracelets or such, so that this doesn't become a catch-and-release program? Maybe. Certainly that's a lot less expensive than to hold them in detention facilities where it still could be around $30,000 a year. Now, most of them don't stay there that long. It depends on whether the country from which they came will repatriate them, accept them back.

But you could see them being in there for, you know, years if they don't. Or, I mean, the administration didn't make a move a couple weeks ago to send illegal immigrants and people who came here to third countries, to other countries from which they actually came.

And so that's another option. But to Monet's broader point, I think this is just intended to send a message, don't come here and self-deport. Otherwise, you could be stuck at these facilities. And even if they have got air conditioning around the clock, it still may not be any better than what they experienced in their home countries. Hang tight. We'll be right back in a moment.

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Welcome back. That deterrent message seems to be working so far, Manet. The number of migrant encounters is the phrase that Customs and Border Patrol uses at the southwest border has collapsed.

since President Trump took over. We've just recently flipped a calendar month here, so we don't have the official data yet for June. But this is from Border Czar Tom Homan on Tuesday, writing on Twitter. He says,

Also, none of the 6,070 were released into the U.S. Zero. Let's listen to a little bit more from Tom Homan speaking on Monday to reporters at the White House. We're going to take every opportunity we can to secure that border and make sure we don't do what Biden administration did and let the gotaways. Let me give you, for example, having those resources on the border now on an average day under Biden administration, we had 1,800 gotaways that we knew that we counted in 1,800. You know what they were today?

So we got that border locked down. Mene, the point about these releases into the United States, I think, is important because the signal under President Biden is if you come to the border and maybe you're at a point of entry or maybe you cross between ports of entry and you flag down a Border Patrol officer and you say, I have an asylum claim.

in all likelihood, the signal was you would probably be processed and allowed to stay in the United States and maybe an opportunity to work for months or years while you were waiting for a hearing. And if the levels at the border, the flow at the border is now low enough

and the detention capacity and the detention will is there for the United States, the signal now being sent is you may end up at a place like this Florida detention site while you were waiting for that hearing, which is a much less appealing prospect for somebody who is not in the United States who is trying to decide whether

whether they are going to try to make that journey. And if you have a legitimate asylum claim and you fear for your safety for some specific reason, you may still decide that it is worth taking that risk. But if you are essentially an economic migrant, it makes it much less palatable of prospect. Yeah, I think that there are a whole lot of different policy changes and messaging changes happening.

from the Trump administration compared with the Biden administration that have all added up to this massive drop in border crossings. One of them, of course, is the fact that President Trump has essentially paused hearing new asylum claims.

So the asylum provision is in federal law, of course, in the Immigration and Nationality Act. So the president doesn't have the authority to completely end that avenue toward entering the country. But he issued an executive order that essentially paused it, citing the emergency of the number of people crossing for a certain period of time, such that the federal government isn't entertaining new claims altogether. And of course,

People who do make new claims are required to cross at points of entry. That was something that the Biden administration dragged its feet to do for many years before eventually implementing that policy in 2024. And there also are a lot more border agents along the southern border than there were before. So you combine all of these changes with the deterrent effects that you mentioned, what is likely to happen to people who do arrive in the country once they're able to cross, and

And it does send a message that the odds that I'm going to be able to get to a major city like New York or Chicago and find a way to work and support myself probably won't actually have my hearing for another couple of years, by which point I might be able to evade detection or I might end up getting my claim granted and be able to stay in the country. That isn't really the picture for most migrants who are attempting to come into the country today the way that it was originally.

over the past several years. So I think that the Trump administration is really torn about how far it should go with deportations, how many resources it should dedicate to getting people who are working in this country out. But I think that when it comes to

closing the border and the message that it sends to people who are looking to arrive, they're very united and the policies that they've put in place have been very effective. But on that point, there is a fundamental contradiction, I think, that has not been resolved. And Alicia, I think it is in Trump himself when he came in and saw the Journal's editorial board during the 2024 campaign. He was talking about

mass deportations. But then he was asked about what do you do about dreamers, people with U.S. citizen children and spouses who may have been here for a long time? And he said, well, you have to have heart.

And we have seen both sides of that from Trump in recent days. Last month, he was talking about we're going to exclude farm workers, hospitality workers at hotels and so forth from these mass deportations. Then he seemed to reverse course on that. Now he's back, I guess, to reversing or maybe not. We'll see. But this is what he told Fox News Sunday morning futures this weekend.

But, you know, when you go into a farm and you've had somebody working with them for nine years doing this kind of work, which is hard work to do, and a lot of people aren't going to do it, and you end up

destroying a farmer because you took all the people away. It's a problem. You know, I'm on both sides of the thing. I'm the strongest immigration guy that there's ever been, but I'm also the strongest farmer guy that there's ever been. And that includes also hotels and, you know, places where people work, a certain group of people work.

So we're going to we're working on it right now. We're going to work it so that some kind of a temporary pass. Alicia, what do you make of that? Some kind of a temporary pass the White House is working on? Would Congress be required to pass that kind of legislation to create that kind of a program? Does Trump have the ability to do some of that on his own? And could he bring Republicans along to do it?

Well, I think the way I read that statement is that he will deprioritize in terms of enforcement workplaces and people who are abiding by the law is going to showing up at work every day at these farms, hotels, construction sites that he's not going to try to round them up.

And he shouldn't. There are a lot higher priorities. As he pointed out, the criminals, you go after the criminals first. And it's a waste of detention capacity to detain people who are working, who are contributing to the economy, maybe, as he pointed out, for years.

For farmers, about an estimated 40% of the workforce is illegal. Now, many of them have documents claiming that they're legal. So many of their employers are technically are, you know, they're in compliance with their law. They may have suspicions that their workers are illegal, but nonetheless, they have legal documents claiming

And if you were to take out those 40% of the workforce, farmers wouldn't be able to harvest their crops, pick crops. This is arduous work, as the president suggested. There aren't many U.S. workers who are willing to do it. The other workers that farmers employ are generally on H-2A visas only.

or sometimes kids of the illegal immigrants. So they're technically U.S. citizens, but if their parents were deported, there's no guarantee that they would continue to work in these jobs either. It pays actually fairly well. So it's not like farmers are using these legals because they're cheap. It's just that they're willing to do these jobs because they don't have a higher skills level.

And same thing within leisure and hospitality and construction site and construction actually does require certain amount of skills. And usually what happens is that they learn it, they pick it up with the trades from other workers or sometimes to their illegals, but they learn on the job. So it's kind of an informal apprenticeship. And I'll tell you in California,

The coal construction industry and basically agriculture relies on illegal workers and foreign workers in general. So you would really be decimating the workforces if you went after these individuals. And he very euphemistically refers to them as certain groups. Yes, they are illegals, but he doesn't want to actually like accuse, you know, his farmers of employing.

them. But I think that this is he's trying to balance between what the economy needs, which is obviously more in foreign workers, foreign workers comprised of all the growth in the civilian labor force over the last two or three years, as well as the need to control the border and not invite more migrants in, and some of whom have actually also been a burden on some of these big cities. Hang tight. We'll be right back in a moment.

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Don't forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker. Play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast. From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. Welcome back. So some of those migrants were let in by the Biden administration, given work permits by the Biden administration, and have been legally working on those farms or hotels, hospitality, construction sites for maybe a couple of years now.

And it does raise the question, I think, Monet, of how far President Trump and the Trump administration intend to go, because sometimes he is out there striking the deterrence line and talking about mass deportations, maybe millions of people. We're going to open an alligator Alcatraz in every state and we're going to have a swift processing. And then other times he takes a kind of a different approach. Again, in the same interview, he said this, we're going to do something for farmers that

where we can let the farmer sort of be in charge. The farmer knows he's not going to hire a murderer, unquote. And so the political success of this project and the popularity of it, I think, in some sense is going to be answered by that question of,

who ends up at alligator Alcatraz? Is it going to be mostly people who are crossing the border right now and the Trump administration is putting there so as not to continue these releases into the country and this catch and release, to use that phrase? Or is it going to be other people who get swept up, maybe dreamers, maybe line cooks, maybe people who had legal work permits under President Biden that have now been revoked by President Trump? Yeah, well...

I think Alicia said the magic word that should be guiding the Trump administration and its deportation policy, which is prioritizing. And I think that that's true both in a legal sense of what they're allowed to do with regard to how they deport different types of illegal migrants, but then also in a practical sense in terms of avoiding doing damage to the economy while also enforcing the rule of law. So to take the legal side of things first,

What Trump was describing in that clip of literally giving some kind of pass to certain types of employers, assuring them that their employees, despite being illegal, aren't going to be investigated, seems to skirt the law as I understand it.

because the president can't just essentially confer legal status, even temporary, to migrants who are in the country legally. It essentially resembles what President Obama did with DACA, where the president does have a certain amount of discretion about which types of illegal immigrants can be allowed

allowed temporarily to stay in the country versus deported. But he can't just by decree say that we are going to confer legal status on a broad class of migrants and not pursue action against them. But on the other hand, of course, the federal government has limited resources. That's just an unavoidable fact.

Even if they're robustly enforcing immigration law, they're still going to have to pick who they are going to pursue first because the number of agents, ICE agents and others, is constrained. And so by necessity, they have to essentially create a hierarchy of people who they're going to pursue, and they would be on a very firm legal standing approaching it that way.

So very clearly, criminal migrants should be first. And that's something that President Trump and Tom Homan have said repeatedly. They definitely are pursuing criminal migrants and trying to get at some of the sanctuary cities and states that are making it harder for them to gain access to criminal migrants who are being held in some of these jails or have been released into the general public.

After that, it gets a little bit more difficult to prioritize who should be the next class of people who the government focuses on. But I think that you were right when you suggested that relatively recent arrivals, people who are crossing now under the Trump administration or people who are in that group of 8 million people who came into the country illegally during the Biden administration would be in that next tier of people, especially if they don't have children, especially if they aren't gainfully employed, etc., etc.,

And I think groups that you'd want to put toward the lower end of the hierarchy in terms of pursuing them should be people who, for example, were allowed into the country under some of these parole programs that the Biden administration created, like for Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan migrants.

Those people were given a legal permission by the government to come here. Many of them took jobs. The Trump administration was on a solid legal footing in canceling that provision. So it is within its legal right to pursue them. But as a matter of fairness, I think that most Americans would agree that people who followed the law as it existed at the time when they came to the country didn't

should be treated as low priority targets for deportation. So ideally, we would have a Trump administration that was taking care, sitting down, going through all these possibilities and hammering out a clear policy for how they were going to pursue this. Of course, that is not how President Trump is known to operate in any domain. And so what we're really getting is a lot of chaos and confusion and changing their minds. But hopefully through trial and error, they might slowly move towards something like a much more rational approach to deportation than we've seen so far.

Thank you, Manay and Alicia. Thank you all for listening. You can email us at pwpodcast at wsj.com. If you like the show, please hit that subscribe button, and we'll be back tomorrow with another edition of Potomac Watch.

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