James Uthmeier built his national brand on “Alligator Alcatraz,” the Everglades detention center he named, championed, and rushed into existence without bids or public debate. A year later, it’s shut down, roughly $1 billion poorer, and reimbursement from Washington has barely trickled in. That’s just the start.

A new Florida Trident investigation from Bob Norman traces a pattern running through three separate controversies:

• Alligator Alcatraz,
• A secretive giveaway of prime Miami land to the Trump Presidential Library Foundation, and
• The still-unresolved Hope Florida Medicaid money scandal.

Norman finds Uthmeier at the center of each one.

The Staggering Cost of James Uthmeier

by Bob Norman, Florida Trident
July 7, 2026

When he introduced his idea for an immigrant detention center deep in the Everglades, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said the location made financial sense as a “one-stop shop to carry out President Trump’s mass deportation agenda.”

And he said he’d already coined its name: Alligator Alcatraz.

“It presents an efficient, low cost opportunity to build a temporary detention facility because you don’t need to invest that much into the perimeter,” Uthmeier said in a video he posted on X a year ago. “People get out, there’s not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.”

His former boss, Gov. Ron DeSantis, who appointed Uthmeier to the attorney general post last year, then used roughly $250 million in state emergency funds, intended to pay for recovery from hurricanes and other disasters, to dole out contracts with politically connected firms to build the place in a mere eight days.

There was no public discussion, no bids, no studies, none of the hallmarks of responsible stewardship of taxpayers dollars. It was government by fiat – and it was met with the very vocal support of Trump, who toured the facility and joked about alligators devouring escaped immigrants.

“We’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator, OK?” Trump said. “If they escape prison, how to run away: Don’t run in a straight line.”

The 38-year-old Uthmeier, who began working for the Desantis administration in 2019 and had already begun his current campaign to retain his seat, enjoyed a surge of national recognition in the MAGAverse as a result. A host summed it up during an Uthmeier appearance on Blaze TV. “When we looked at Alligator Alcatraz, we loved it, right?” she said as the attorney general sat across from her. “The headlines around it were great.”

But what began as a splashy political stunt turned into a debacle for taxpayers. After less than a year and an estimated billion dollars spent, the place is officially shut down, a financial disaster left in its wake. It’s become a pattern for Uthmeier, repeated in a recent Trump library land giveaway and the Hope Florida scandal: First make a political splash and worry about cost and legality later. Left on the hook have been taxpayers who’ve seen public coffers and resources squandered mightily in all three cases.

It was ironically the Trump Administration that pushed to close Alligator Alcatraz due to the astronomically high cost to run it.

“It’s a pretty significant indictment of the whole farce when ICE says, ‘Hey, this is too expensive, you need to close it,’” said state Rep. Dan Daley, a self-described “former moderate Republican turned moderate Democrat” who represents northeast Broward County. “When the federal government that is wasting so much money right now is the one to say you need to shut it down over costs, you know it’s bad.”

There is no official number yet for what was spent, but multiple reported figures put it at about $1 billion. DeSantis promised that money would be reimbursed by the federal government, but only $58 million from a $608 million request made late last year has been paid to date.

Daley said he doesn’t believe the reimbursement will ever come, and even if it was it would then just mean federal tax dollars would be wasted instead.

“The governor and the attorney general played this game where they built this and it sounded cool and they sold t-shirts,” Daley said. “And it has become a massive boondoggle.”

Detailed requests for comment on Alligator Alcatraz and other matters addressed in this report were met without response by Uthmeier.

Like the original Alcatraz prison in California, which closed in 1963 due to the cost of having to boat everything into the facility, the remoteness Uthmeier touted as “cost-effective” came with a need to haul in everything, including water and fuel for generators.

“You had space next to Krome [Detention Center] in Miami, you had space next to any number of prisons, and you chose to put it out in the middle of the Everglades,” said Daley. “If you want to be tough on illegal immigration, fine, but if you want to be a fiscal conservative, then this was a disaster.”

An oft-cited example: The company in charge of toilets and shipping sewage, called Doodie Calls, topped the list of vendors with some $219 million in contracts. And Daley puts a great deal of blame for all of the wasted funds on the “headline-chasing” man who named it.

“I think Uthmeier is the center point for Alligator Alcatraz,” he said. “I think he’s dangerous for this state. At some point we’re going to get that catastrophic storm and we’re going to need those dollars. There’s so many uses for it other than promoting the attorney general when he runs for office.”

Daley and other Uthmeier critics speculate the attorney general pushed Alligator Alcatraz in a bid to win an endorsement from Trump for this year’s campaign to retain his position as top lawman in the state. But that endorsement didn’t come until after he spearheaded another eye-popping loss for taxpayers just a couple months later.

This one involved prime publicly owned property – assessed at $67 million but worth as much as $300 million – given to the president for what he now says will be a Trump-branded hotel or office building project.

An unconstitutional land grab?

A very mysterious special meeting of the Miami Dade College Board of Trustees was held this past Sept. 23 before most South Floridians had even made it to work for the day.

Only a select few knew what the 8 a.m. meeting was really about. This meeting, unlike others, wasn’t livestreamed for the public, and the required public notice given was extremely vague, saying only the board would “discuss potential real estate transactions.”

But there was no discussion, said Miami attorney Andres Rivero, who would later file a lawsuit alleging the board that morning violated the state’s Sunshine Law.

“They have the meeting at 8 a.m., they do a pledge, and a moment of silence and they’re done at 8:03 a.m.,” Rivero said.

It was enough time for the trustees to vote to give away one of the greatest assets of the college – a 2.6 acre tract of land on Biscayne Boulevard right next to the city’s Freedom Tower and across from the Kaseya Center where the Miami Heat play.

The first person to inform the public what the land was really for lived 500 miles away in Tallahassee. Just minutes after the vote, at 8:22 a.m., Uthmeier posted another pre-produced video on X announcing the land would be given to the Trump Presidential Library Foundation.

“I can think of no better location to tell the story of Donald Trump,” Uthmeier says in the fawning video while standing at the Freedom Tower. “A story of strength, one of redemption, one of victory, and one of sacrifice for the American people.”

The secretive taking of such vital public land shows not only the outsized control the DeSantis administration has taken over the state’s colleges and universities (in another questionable use of taxpayers’ money, Uthmeier is also collecting $100,000 a year from the University of Florida for two hours teaching a week), it’s also precisely the kind of shady backroom deal, Rivero said, that the state’s Sunshine Law, which demands public business be conducted in public rather than behind closed doors, was designed to prevent.

“How does the attorney general know to make and release this video minutes after the vote?” asked Rivero. “I want to know why the attorney general is involved in this.”

Miami historian Marvin Dunn, the plaintiff in the lawsuit, said he was suspicious from the start. “I thought that it was impossible for a decision of that magnitude to be made within five minutes without [board members] having discussed it among themselves prior to that meeting,” he told the Trident.

And he said Uthmeier’s video only proved to him that laws were indeed broken.

“It was a dumb move,” said Dunn of Uthmeier’s announcement. “It showed that there had to have been previous discussions among people at the state level and even at the level of the White House for that library to be placed on the site.”

When Dunn’s complaint was filed, Uthmeier – who also voted with DeSantis and the Florida Cabinet to hand the land over to the Trump foundation – tweeted it was “bogus” and assigned lawyers from the Attorney General’s office to defend the lawsuit.

And just a week after Uthmeier voted for the land transfer, Trump gave him a rousing  all-caps-strewn endorsement.

“James is an America First Warrior, who is a true champion for ‘MAGA,’” Trump wrote online. “He is THE MAN behind ALLIGATOR ALCATRAZ … James Uthmeier is a Strong Conservative Fighter and Prosecutor, and has my Complete and Total Endorsement — HE WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN!”

The endorsement smacks of a political quid pro quo, said Ben Wilcox, research director for the non-profit watchdog Integrity Florida.

“It does give the appearance that the endorsement of Uthmeier by Trump was transactional,” Wilcox said. “It’s just ugly.”

The judge in Dunn’s lawsuit in fact ruled the Sunshine Law was likely violated and temporarily blocked the land transfer. This too was extraordinary because of Uthmeier’s involvement, said Wilcox.

“The attorney general is the one who is supposed to be enforcing the open meeting law in the first place,” he said. “That the attorney general knew about it in advance and was prepared to put out a video about it shows he was complicit in it.”

Trump: “I don’t believe in building libraries” 

To satisfy the court, the board of trustees – all appointed by the governor – re-voted in favor of the land transfer at another special meeting in December during which public input was mixed between outrage and support of the giveaway.

But the final insult was still to come. In March, the president’s son, Eric Trump, who publicly thanked Uthmeier and DeSantis after the Cabinet vote and called both “incredible partners,” unveiled the plans for the “library” in an AI-created video on X.

The project was depicted as a towering skyscraper complete with a giant golden statue of Trump and the $400 million Boeing 747 gifted to him by Qatar displayed in the lobby.

Eric Trump wrote that he and his team at the Trump Organization, where he serves as executive vice president, poured their “heart and soul” into the project during the previous six months.

When asked about the plans the following day, President Trump said the quiet part out loud: “I don’t believe in building libraries or museums,” he said, adding, “It’s going to be most likely a hotel.”

The stunning admission that the library would include a Trump-branded hotel prompted another lawsuit, this one filed by the Constitutional Accountability Center in Washington D.C. Also including Dunn as one of the plaintiffs via a business he owns, the suit alleges the land serves as an illegal gift given to the president by Florida in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause, which forbids the president from receiving gifts while in office from individual states.

“Due to the President’s influence on so many aspects of federal policy … every state has an incentive to enrich the President should such private rewards be permitted,” the CAC’s attorneys wrote in the federal complaint, which remains active. “To avoid even the possibility that conflicts of interest like these would harm the American people by compromising their leaders’ judgment, the Founders enshrined the prohibitions of the Domestic Emoluments Clause in our national charter.”

Dunn said the president’s admission that it would be a hotel helped make the case a “very powerful” one.

“It’s a big foot and it’s hard to extract it from his mouth,” Dunn said of Trump’s admission. “He gave truth to the central element of our lawsuit, that the president took a personal gift from the State of Florida with a commercial benefit. A hotel is a leap into another universe. It has no relationship to the mission of a presidential library.”

The Democrat challenging Uthmeier in the attorney general’s race, former state lawmaker Jose Javier Rodriguez, said both Alligator Alcatraz and the Trump land giveaway were pure “political theater” done for one reason.

“All of this is so my opponent could get a pat on the head by Donald Trump,” said Rodriguez. “And he got that. This is the cost of corruption.”

As an example of the latter, Rodriguez points to another gut punch for taxpayers, this one happening outside the public eye and involving what one Republican lawmaker alleges involved potential criminal conduct on Uthmeier’s part: The Hope Florida fiasco.

“He stole $10 million” 

It’s the anatomy of a scandal:

Back in 2024, $10 million was mysteriously diverted from a state Medicaid settlement into the Hope Florida Foundation, a charity championed and stewarded by Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis.

Within days of receiving the money, Hope Florida provided two $5 million grants to a pair of non-profits which then quickly supplied millions of dollars to Keep Florida Clean, a political committee backed by Gov. DeSantis that led the campaign against Amendment 3, the ballot initiative to legalize adult-use cannabis.

The diversion of taxpayers’ money to stack the deck against (and ultimately help kill) a popular citizen-led referendum obviously rocked the governor and his wife when it became known – but all the facts point to Uthmeier as the connective tissue for the entire sordid saga.

At the time the Medicaid funds were funneled away, Uthmeier, then the governor’s chief of staff, was at the nerve center of the often secret and combative administration that diverted the $10 million. And Uthmeier was also the chairman of Keep Florida Clean, the anti-Amendment 3 PAC that ultimately received the money.

An investigation led by Republican state Rep. Alex Andrade, chair of the Florida House Health Care Budget Subcommittee, zeroed in on Uthmeier, whom Andrade accused of wire fraud and money laundering in the case.

“I developed the facts,” Andrade told Florida Roundup in an interview last year. “The facts remain that James Uthmeier, when he was the governor’s chief of staff, he misappropriated, misdirected, misused, stole $10 million from Florida’s Medicaid program and he laundered it to his PAC.”

A subsequent grand jury investigation by the Leon County State Attorney’s Office didn’t lead to charges, but it prompted a potentially critical report from the grand jury that so far has been kept secret (the Florida Trident first reported the existence of the report and is fighting in court to unseal it).

Uthmeier has publicly denied wrongdoing and called the investigation a “nothingburger.” Daley lamented that he doesn’t believe justice will ever be served in the case – in part because the central figure in it is the state’s top lawman with a sympathetic ear at the top of a heavily politicized White House.

“There haven’t been any checks and balances for years,” said the legislator. “[Republicans] have a supermajority in the House and Senate. It’s absolutely illegal but there is no one that is going to hold them accountable. They got away with it.”

Rodriguez, vying for Uthmeier’s seat, put it in more stark terms.

“To take money from elderly and sick kids in the medicaid program and then give it to a political campaign is so brazen,” he said. “It’s as if Ron DeSantis has put an arsonist in charge of the fire service. That’s what he’s done to us.”

About the Author: Bob Norman is a senior editor for the Florida Trident. His work as an investigative reporter has won dozens of awards and led to criminal charges and the removal of several corrupt public officials. He can be reached at norman@flcga.org.

This article first appeared on Florida Trident and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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