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

Miami-Dade’s mayor wants the federal parks system to take over the county-owned airport that Florida seized for the Alligator Alcatraz immigration detention camp, reviving a conservation plan for the sprawling site she had hoped the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis would fund in the years before it took over the property under emergency powers.

In a memo, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told county commissioners she wanted the airport and the 17,000 acres of wetlands around it to go to the National Park Service, which runs the federal Big Cypress Preserve that surrounds the Alcatraz site and is part of the Everglades ecosystem. DeSantis announced at a press conference Thursday that Alligator Alcatraz would be officially closed up in the next two weeks.

“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 in her memo, referring to the ongoing federal project to restore historic water flows into the Everglades.

The plan mirrors a proposal made to Levine Cava several years ago by a DeSantis backer, though it never got beyond preliminary talks in the second-term Democrat’s administration.

The memo does not suggest a price for the sprawling site surrounding what’s officially named the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport. In the early days of the state takeover last year, 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.

But before the seizure in the summer of 2025, Levine Cava said her administration had been in talks with the DeSantis administration about a land deal similar to the proposal she released on Thursday.

In comments to reporters, Levine Cava said Miami-Dade isn’t able to sell the airport and its surrounding land to the Park Service. She said the federal agency would only accept donated land. However, federal rules related to assets used for aviation also prevent Miami-Dade from donating the airport property — which includes the 17,000 acres of wetlands — to the federal government. Instead, the county’s Aviation Department, home to Miami International Airport, likely must obtain market rate for the property that’s so far west of Miami part of it sits in Collier County.

That leaves Miami-Dade needing a deep-pocketed buyer for the land who would then be willing to donate it to the Park Service for conservation purposes. Before the Alligator Alcatraz seizure last year, Levine Cava said the hope was that that buyer would be the DeSantis administration.

In preliminary talks that started about a year after she won her first term in 2020, Levine Cava said her administration and state officials discussed Florida purchasing the land, keeping the airport as an emergency operations depot and training center, and then donating the land to be part of the Big Cypress Preserve.

“We had some talks with the state. We were looking at what would be a reasonable price,” Levine Cava said of the talks. “We were in some initial conversations when, instead, the state decided to go in this other direction.”

A year after Florida spent upward of $1 billion converting the airport to a detention center that held more than 20,000 people awaiting detention, Levine Cava may be back where she started in trying to find a buyer for the airport property. “We have to work with our federal and state partners,” she said Thursday.

The mayor’s memo, released minutes after DeSantis announced a press conference at the Alcatraz site, followed a call by an ally of the governor to shut down the training airport 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. In Uthmeier’s previous role as chief of staff to DeSantis, he participated in the Miami-Dade talks about a potential state purchase of the airport property for conservation purposes, Levine Cava said.

Should the Alcatraz site be turned over to the Park Service, 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 first floated 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. Levine Cava said it was that proposal that led to the state talks.

“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.

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.

At his press conference at the Alcatraz site, DeSantis was asked about using the land to help boost Everglades preservation. The governor ticked off multiple efforts his administration has underway to help restore water flow to the Everglades and said he didn’t see the airport site helping much.

“If I thought somehow uprooting all of this concrete would be the key to Everglades restoration, I would support that,” he said. “That just hasn’t been the view of a lot of people who have looked at it.”

But returning the airport itself to wetlands is not part of the Levine Cava plan. Instead, the idea is to lock in preservation protections for the 17,000 acres of wetlands surrounding the facility.

Eric Eikenberg is chief executive of the Everglades Foundation — a nonprofit advocacy group that was not part of the suit other environmental groups filed to try and halt Alligator Alcatraz construction. He was involved in the talks with Levine Cava and Barreto about the potential donation of the airport to the Park Service.

He said the main benefit of turning the surrounding wetlands into a federal park would be discouraging or preventing future county administrations from greenlighting development plans for the facility — such as the brief effort in 2015 to stage an American version of the Paris Air Show on built-out event grounds there.

The original plan would have put the wetlands surrounding the airport “in perpetual conservation,” Eikenberg told the Miami Herald. “So in the future, you wouldn’t have the opportunity to build something there.”

In a statement released Thursday, the Everglades Foundation praised Levine Cava’s plan. “Her memorandum is an important and welcome step toward securing the permanent protection of one of South Florida’s most ecologically significant landscapes — and The Everglades Foundation stands fully behind this effort,” the statement read.

This story was originally published June 25, 2026 at 5:57 AM with the headline "Miami-Dade mayor wants Alligator Alcatraz site turned over to National Park Service."