The ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ site once changed history. Now, it’s testing the law again.

A patch of the Florida Everglades known as Alligator Alcatraz once had a very different future.

Back in the 1960s, it almost became the world’s largest airport, a six-runway behemoth, many times the size of Kennedy International Airport in New York, for supersonic passenger jets.

That didn’t happen. The project was halted after a single airstrip was built, which later became a little-used training area. But the fight back then to block the futuristic airport changed environmental history.

It helped bring about a bedrock law requiring the US government to consider environmental effects of large federal projects — airports, pipelines, bridges, prisons — before they are built.

This year, President Donald Trump took an unusually aggressive step to weaken that law, the National Environmental Policy Act, known as NEPA. And the Everglades detention center, located on the site of the never-built supersonic jetport, has emerged as an early example of the administration’s efforts to diminish environmental reviews required by law.

Built by the state of Florida in just eight days on the all-but-unused runway, the detention center was created to house federal immigration detainees. It has undergone no public review of its environmental effects, despite the ecological sensitivity of the Everglades, which supports a rich array of plant and animal life, including threatened and endangered species.

The Trump administration has argued that federal environmental rules don’t apply, since Florida is building the detention center. They also note that Gov Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has declared that state rules can be suspended during an immigration emergency.

As of three weeks ago, the facility housed about 900 detainees, according to state lawmakers and members of Congress. State officials have said they want to increase capacity to 4,000 detainees by the end of the month.

The office of DeSantis did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the original decision to build the detention center. The Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

“This is a piece of the administration’s larger mission of removing NEPA as what it considers to be an obstacle to its policies across the board,” said Robert L. Glicksman, professor of environmental law at the George Washington University Law School.

“They see NEPA as an unnecessary and annoying hindrance to the pursuit of federal policies,” he said. “But the statute still exists.”

Even as the Department of Homeland Security has aggressively expanded its detention capacity, repurposing existing facilities and building new ones, it has yet to make public a single environmental review this year.

Friends of the Everglades, the environmental group that originally opposed the jetport in the 1960s, has sued to again shut down the site. In the case, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida, a coalition of environmental groups say the Trump administration skipped legally required reviews and has failed to consider harms to the Everglades’ unique wetlands and wildlife.

On Thursday, the judge in that case ordered Florida and the Trump administration to temporarily halt construction at the site so she could hear arguments from the environmentalists.

“Our country stitched together a patchwork of environmental protections, but now we’re in the moment of a potential unraveling,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades. “The question is: Will the fabric hold?”

The legal fight brings to the fore an extraordinary nexus of the Trump administration’s drive to roll back environmental rules on one hand, and an aggressive immigration crackdown on the other. It has drawn environmental groups into a wider fight, led by immigrant rights groups and other human rights activists, to rein in the administration’s detention drive.

DHS guidelines require the agency to consider water resources, flood plains, birds, wildlife and other environment and health concerns before building a new facility.

As recently as 2024, the department weighed the environmental effects of a far smaller project, a one-story dormitory for detained families on the grounds of the Krome Service Processing Center in Miami.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which would run the planned facility, noted that the site wasn’t far from the Everglades wetlands. Given the location, the department said, “ICE will obtain all necessary federal and state permits prior to commencement of project activities.”

Work at the site would include various measures to minimize any environmental effects, the department said, and people who had an interest in protecting the environment “should be given an opportunity to express their concerns.”

So far, the new Everglades detention center has been through no such process, and there has been no such opportunity for public input.

Environmental groups say risks abound.

“There’s the use of diesel fuel and generators on the side, gray water from washing and laundry, human refuse,” said Elise Bennett, Florida director at the Center for Biological Diversity, another plaintiff in the case against the center. “All of these things are being brought onto this site, there’s a potential for spills and releases into the surrounding wetlands.”

“These are real risks,” she said, “not to mention the risks of pollution with coming storms that could cause a real mess.”

“They’re opting out of the process altogether,” said Michelle L. Edwards, an assistant professor at Texas State University who has studied how NEPA is implemented for immigrant detention centers.

“The idea that the facility would have no significant environmental effects is outrageous,” she said. “But if there isn’t a judge that says DHS can’t do this, I worry this will continue.”

The Everglades jetport would have been in a league of its own. A rise in interest in supersonic travel in the late 1960s had set off a search for a new intercontinental hub on the Atlantic coast.

The remote location of the Everglades was deemed ideal for supersonic jets and their sonic booms, the thunder-like cracks that resound when a plane breaks the sound barrier. Soon, plans were in place for an airport with six runways, served by new high-speed rail lines.

But the environmental advocate Marjory Stoneman Douglas galvanized opposition to the site. Her work had played a pivotal role in changing the nation’s understanding of the Everglades, to vibrant ecosystem from worthless swamp.

The movement prompted the Nixon administration to issue an environmental impact report, which stated bluntly that the airport would “inexorably destroy the South Florida ecosystem.” In 1970, the project was officially canceled. The same year, Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act into law.

This time around at the site, federal officials have made several arguments as to why NEPA does not apply. For one, Florida runs the detention center, not the federal government, they say. Florida expects to front at least $450 million to pay for the facility, though the state is expected to seek reimbursement from the federal government.

In a statement responding to the lawsuit, a senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, Thomas P. Giles, said his agency’s role “has been limited to touring the facility to ensure compliance with ICE detention standards, and meeting with officials from the state of Florida to discuss operational matters.”

In addition, Florida officials have said they are relying on a 2023 executive order signed by DeSantis that granted sweeping authority to suspend “any statute, rule or order” seen as slowing the response to an immigration emergency.

DeSantis has also said the detention center does not affect the environment because it is built on top of an old airstrip left over from the jetport planning stage. “There’s zero impact” on the Everglades, he said at a news conference ahead of the detention center’s opening.

Legal scholars and environmental groups questioned those arguments.

For one, NEPA would apply, and an environmental review would be needed, if the federal government were paying for the facility to fulfill federal functions, said Kelly Haragan, director of the Environmental Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law. And, Florida does not have the authority to suspend federal statutes, she said.

Haragan had previously filed public comments about a planned immigrant detention center in Dilley, Texas, citing possible contamination of a local aquifer, as well as risk of respiratory illnesses for detained mothers and children from nearby fracking.

The facility was ultimately built. But at least there was a review and an opportunity for the public to weigh in, Haragan said. “Now, they’re seeing if they can get away with ignoring NEPA’s requirements completely,” she said.

Environmental groups, meanwhile, have submitted evidence that the detention site has significantly expanded its footprint from the single airstrip built in the 1960s. Christopher McVoy, a hydrologist and former environmental scientist with the South Florida Water Management District, scrutinized recent aerial photography and found that the site has added approximately 20 paved acres.

“I looked at the paving and the number of structures, and it’s mind-boggling,” McVoy said. “And if they are going to detain even more people there, they’re going to run out of space,” he said. “So will they start draining wetlands at that point?”

The push to diminish the National Environmental Policy Act could lead to one of the most consequential deregulatory actions of the Trump administration, experts say. Trump has already scrapped NEPA guidelines that govern how federal agencies should analyze the environmental impact of infrastructure projects, delegating those decisions to the agencies themselves. The administration has maintained that complying with NEPA has become onerous, requiring environmental analyses that can take years to complete and drive up the costs of major projects.

Home builders, the oil and gas industry, renewable energy companies and others have for years said the federal permitting process takes too long. They accuse environmentalists and “Not in My Back Yard” activists of using the law to tie up all manner of projects they don’t like, from housing projects to transmission lines.

But the Everglades detention center was “such an extreme example, in a very environmentally sensitive place,” Haragan said. “If they can ignore NEPA’s requirements for that facility, that’s just concerning.”