When President Trump announced he was thinking about reopening Alcatraz as a supermax prison — to house “the worst of the worst” — many dismissed it as incoherent rambling, like his interest in annexing Greenland and Canada or forcing Coca-Cola to pivot to cane sugar.
This is the same individual who regularly responds on social media to what he sees on television. Maybe he’d just watched “Escape from Alcatraz.” Maybe Alcatraz is another diversion from his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophilia ring. It’s easy to put Alcatraz into the “Trump being nuts” category.
This would be a grave error. If there’s anything we’ve learned from Trump’s second term, it’s that he’s prepared to execute on his insane ideas. For every Greenland/Canada/cane sugar pipe dream, we see other deranged ideas translated into action. Who would have thought he’d actually send people who were legally in the U.S. to gulags in El Salvador, South Sudan, and Libya? Or that he’d deploy the United States military on the streets of an American city. Or that his Immigration and Customs Enforcement secret police would literally grab people from bus stops and front yards. Or that he’d obliterate American scientific research leadership and our clean energy industry. Or that he’d declare trade wars on our closest allies and economic partners.
Trump II is not the same as Trump I. When he says he plans to do something, and sends out his attorney general and secretary of the interior to hold a press conference, we have to assume he means it.
Trump’s Alcatraz idea is basically lighting taxpayer dollars on fire. Alcatraz is a top tourist attraction, drawing nearly 2 million visitors a year. It supports a significant ecosystem of small businesses and related employment. It does not have a sewer or water system; potable water is shipped onto the island, and sewage is shipped off, daily. Indeed, the extreme cost of operating Alcatraz is one reason the federal government shut it down more than 60 years ago.
Then there’s the fact that Alcatraz was never very secure, with people escaping from it. (While sharks do enter San Francisco Bay, they’re mostly not great whites, and they’re not patrolling for escapees, like Trump says the alligators are at Alligator Alcatraz in Florida.)
So, if this is such a truly dumb idea and colossal waste of taxpayer dollars, why would Trump do it? The answer is simple: Trump is building a fascist police state, with Republicans in Congress giving him an obscenely large slush fund to expand ICE and build more private prison gulags. In the “One Big Beautiful Bill” — the legislative equivalent of Sauron’s One Ring — Trump and congressional Republicans provided ICE with a whopping $75 billion in new funding. This blank check includes hiring 10,000 additional ski-mask-wearing secret police — nearly tripling the number of ICE agents — and $45 billion for new detention facilities, doubling the agency’s holding capacity to 100,000 people. Alcatraz fits right into this strategy.
I want to be very clear that I hope I’m wrong. I’ll be happy to eat crow if I am. But we can’t assume this idea is fake, and we need to be planning now for how to stop this awful plan — or at least slow it down so that it can’t happen during Trump’s remaining time in office. State and city officials are exploring potential strategies at our disposal, with the full awareness that we may be stuck: When it comes to the federal government utilizing its own land, state and local officials have very limited tools to stop them.
At the same time, there may be creative ways local officials can undermine this foolhardy plan. For example, San Francisco’s sewer system doesn’t have to be available to receive sewage from an Alcatraz gulag — does it? Could we stop the prison from using our port? Or our water or power? We should explore these and other avenues.
But there may be even more forceful ways the public can stand up in opposition. San Franciscans need to channel the same energy we demonstrated during the “No Kings” protests this summer. Direct action must be sustained; mass mobilization can’t take time off. Stopping this ridiculous and dangerous Alcatraz idea should absolutely be part of that mobilization, as should stopping other aspects of the administration’s plan for a police state.
Let’s do whatever we can to save Alcatraz — not escape from it — and stop this idiotic idea.
Scott Wiener represents San Francisco and northern San Mateo County in the California State Senate, where he chairs the Senate Budget Committee.