Lawyer Basic Pam Bondi and Inside Secretary Doug Burgum arrived Thursday morning at Alcatraz, the San Francisco vacationer attraction that President Donald Trump has vowed to reopen as a jail in some of the far-fetched, performative schemes of his second time period.
Bondi and Burgum each posted images of the go to on social media, with Burgum saying the go to was made to “start the work to renovate and reopen the site to house the most dangerous criminals and illegals” ― suggesting the positioning may very well be used to detain immigrants rounded up in Immigrations and Customs Enforcement raids.
Their go to set off Democrats, with Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s (Calif.) assertion getting proper to the purpose.
“[T]he planned announcement to reopen Alcatraz as a federal penitentiary is the Trump Administration’s stupidest initiative yet. It should concern us all that clearly the only intellectual resources the Administration has drawn upon for this foolish notion are decades-old fictional Hollywood movies,” she stated.
There’s been some hypothesis that Trump’s implausible thought to reopen Alcatraz was the product of his well-known TV-watching behavior. Simply hours earlier than Trump laid out the thought in Might in a head-scratching Fact Social put up, a PBS affiliate serving Mar-a-Lago aired Clint Eastwood’s 1979 film “Escape From Alcatraz,” The Hollywood Reporter discovered.
“It remains to be seen how this Administration could possibly afford to spend billions to convert and maintain Alcatraz as a prison when they are already adding trillions of dollars to the national debt with their sinful law,” Pelosi continued, referring to Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”
California state Sen. Scott Wiener (D), whose district consists of San Francisco, stated Thursday that whereas the thought of reopening Alcatraz as a jail is “absurd on so many levels,” folks shouldn’t write off the opportunity of Trump going forward with the thought with or with out guaranteeing it’s a protected facility.
“Trump has shown that he executes on many of the insane and destructive things that come out of his warped brain,” Wiener wrote in an announcement. “I’m very concerned that Trump will actually try to turn Alcatraz into a gulag to hold the political prisoners ICE is sweeping off the streets. We need to do everything in our power to fight this dangerous idea.”
The concept of reopening Alcatraz as a jail is laughable to many who’ve visited the services, a particularly well-liked vacationer vacation spot on an island within the San Francisco Bay that welcomes greater than a million guests yearly. Alcatraz, which is now a part of the Nationwide Park Service, accommodates not one of the security or security measures of a contemporary detention facility and solely operated as a federal jail for lower than 30 years earlier than closing in 1963 as a result of excessive operational prices of working a jail on an island.
“This isolation meant that everything (food, supplies, water, fuel…) had to be brought to Alcatraz by boat,” The Federal Bureau of Prisons says in its historical past of the previous jail. “For example, the island had no source of fresh water, so nearly one million gallons of water had to be barged to the island each week. The Federal Government found that it was more cost-effective to build a new institution than to keep Alcatraz open.”
Alcatraz, the bureau stated, was practically thrice dearer to function than some other federal jail.
Bondi’s go to comes as she continues to get warmth for the Justice Division’s announcement that it wouldn’t launch any extra information from the Jeffrey Epstein case, reneging on guarantees from Trump’s marketing campaign after hyping up their launch.
