Trump’s Alcatraz Reopening Plan: Key Details
Since it was shuttered in 1963, Alcatraz Prison has become legendary. The seemingly inescapable federal penitentiary, situated on a California island surrounded by frigid and powerful currents, became famous for housing some of history’s most notorious inmates, including Al “Scarface” Capone and George “Machine Gun” Kelly.
Now, decades after the National Park Service acquired the island and transformed it into a popular tourist destination, Donald Trump aims to convert it back into a prison.
“REBUILD, AND OPEN ALCATRAZ!” the President announced on Truth Social on Sunday evening, stating that he has instructed the Bureau of Prisons, the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Homeland Security to “reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt” prison on Alcatraz Island to “house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.”
The move comes as Trump has pursued more aggressively in his second term, including signing orders that the use of extreme sentences and the death penalty, that incarcerated trans women, and that police powers. Trump has also been criticized for eschewing the in carrying out a , detaining and both undocumented immigrants as well as people legally in the U.S. . At an April meeting between Trump and El Salvador’s President , Trump he’d be “all for” deporting Americans to El Salvador next. In January, Trump the opening of a detention center in Guantanamo Bay, where the U.S. has long leased a site from Cuba, to which his Administration would send the “worst criminal aliens.”
“When we were a more serious Nation, in times past, we did not hesitate to lock up the most dangerous criminals, and keep them far away from anyone they could harm. That’s the way it’s supposed to be,” Trump added in his Truth Social post. “We will no longer be held hostage to criminals, thugs, and Judges that are afraid to do their job and allow us to remove criminals, who came into our Country illegally.”
Trump told reporters on Sunday night while returning to the White House from Florida that his Alcatraz plan was “just an idea I’ve had” to counter the “radicalized judges [that] want to have trials for every single—think of it—every single person that’s in our country illegally.” Alcatraz is “a symbol of law and order,” he said. “It’s got quite a history, frankly.”
Long before Alcatraz became a prison site, it was a military fortress. Originally inhabited by the Ohlone people indigenous to the San Francisco Bay Area, the island was named La Isla de las Alcatraces after its large pelicans, which a Spanish Navy officer who arrived in 1775 mistook for gannets (called alactraces in Spanish). Later, the island became a U.S. naval defense fort after the Mexican-American War of 1848. The U.S. military also used the island to hold prisoners, including Confederate sympathizers during the Civil War and Hopi Native Americans who resisted the government’s land decrees and mandatory education programs in 1895. By 1912, it was rebuilt as an official military prison.
In 1933, the Justice Department assumed control of the island and transformed it into a maximum-security federal penitentiary, partly in response to the surge in organized crime during Prohibition. To make escape even more difficult than the surrounding conditions already did, the prison was retrofitted so that each prisoner was confined to a single cell, and one guard was on duty for every three prisoners. Over the 29 years that the prison operated, thirty-six men attempted 14 different escapes, nearly all of whom were either captured or died in the process.
However, the prison was closed in March 1963. Its facilities were deteriorating and would have cost $3 to $5 million to repair, and its isolated location made operating costs prohibitively expensive—nearly more than any other federal prison, according to the Bureau of Prisons—because everything, including potable water, had to be transported in.
The prison has long been a source of public fascination. It was depicted in the 1962 film Birdman of Alcatraz, which told the story of Robert Stroud, a convicted felon who studied the birds he observed while incarcerated and became an ornithologist, even discovering a cure for a common avian hemorrhagic disease. It also appeared in the 1979 film Escape from Alcatraz, starring Clint Eastwood, which was based on the real-life 1962 attempted escape of three prisoners who were never found, as well as in the 1996 fictional action thriller The Rock, starring Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage.
Since its acquisition by the NPS in 1972, the island has become a major tourist attraction, drawing more than a million visitors annually, according to the agency.
A spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons told the Associated Press that the BOP will “comply with all Presidential Orders” but did not elaborate on how it would restore or reopen the prison while it remains under the jurisdiction of the NPS, whose staff and funding have been by , particularly while the BOP is to keep its own facilities open amid deteriorating infrastructure and staffing shortages. “The President’s proposal is not a serious one,” former House Speaker and California Democrat Rep. Nancy Pelosi on X.