Women like the prominent 20th-century writer and activist Marjory Stoneman Douglas fought half a century ago to protect the Florida Everglades from real estate developers and agricultural interests. Now, a new generation of women environmental leaders is trying to halt a new immigrant detention center on an airstrip in the Everglades.
President Donald Trump traveled to Florida on Tuesday to attend the opening of a new migrant detention center being built in Big Cypress National Preserve that officials have dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” a reference to the onetime maximum-security prison off the coast of San Francisco. The project is part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda and has been championed by Republican state officials, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Attorney General James Uthmeier.
Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday morning that the facility’s location was meant to deter detainees from escaping to face venomous snakes and alligators.
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“I guess that’s the concept,” Trump said. “This is not a nice business.”
“Snakes are fast, but alligators — we’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator. Don’t run in a straight line,” he added, making a zigzagging motion with his hand. “Your chances go up by about 1 percent. That’s not a good thing.”
The marshes and wetlands that make up the Everglades remain protected thanks in large part to Douglas, dubbed the “Grande Dame of the Everglades” or “The Guardian of the Everglades.”
In 1947, the year parts of the Everglades became a national park, Douglas published, “The Everglades: River of Grass,” considered a seminal text that established the Everglades as a critical natural resource and ecosystem. Douglas is frequently quoted as saying: “It’s a woman’s business to be interested in the environment. It’s an extended form of housekeeping.”
It’s a woman’s business to be interested in the environment. It’s an extended form of housekeeping.”
Marjory Stoneman Douglas
Until her death in 1998, Douglas vigorously opposed the Army Corps of Engineers and the sugar industry’s efforts to develop the land and successfully fended off an effort to build a jetport in the Everglades. In 1969, she founded Friends of the Everglades, an organization dedicated to her mission of protecting and conserving the Everglades.
In the foreword to her 1987 autobiography, “Voice of the River,” the writer John Rothchild recalled Douglas speaking at a public meeting in Everglades City in 1973.
“Mrs. Douglas was half the size of her fellow speakers and she wore huge dark glasses, which along with the huge floppy hat made her look like Scarlett O’Hara as played by Igor Stravinsky,” he wrote. “When she spoke, everybody stopped slapping [mosquitoes] and more or less came to order. She reminded us all of our responsibility to nature and I don’t remember what else.”
Her tone, he wrote, “seemed to tame the rowdiest of the local stone crabbers, plus the developers, and the lawyers on both sides. I wonder if it didn’t also intimidate the mosquitoes.”
Today, Friends of the Everglades continues its work under the leadership of executive director Eve Samples. The “Alligator Alcatraz” project has drawn criticism from environmentalists, immigration advocates and tribal leaders alike.
Fifty-six years later, the threat has returned — and it poses another existential threat to the Everglades.”
Eve Samples
“Friends of the Everglades was founded by Marjory Stoneman Douglas in 1969 to stop harmful development at this very location,” Samples said in a statement Friday. “Fifty-six years later, the threat has returned — and it poses another existential threat to the Everglades.”
On Friday, Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity sued in federal court to halt construction of the detention facility, arguing the project did not go through a proper environmental review and would harm endangered and wild habitats.
“The site is more than 96% wetlands, surrounded by Big Cypress National Preserve, and is habitat for the endangered Florida panther and other iconic species,” Samples said in the statement. “This scheme is not only cruel, it threatens the Everglades ecosystem that state and federal taxpayers have spent billions to protect.”
We’re only caretakers of this creation.”
Betty Osceola
The Native American tribes who call the Everglades home are also leading advocates for the land. They include Betty Osceola, an environmental leader and airboat captain who is a member of the Panther Clan and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians. On Saturday, Osceola helped lead a peaceful demonstration opposing the construction of the detention center.
“The Everglades is a skeleton of its former self. I want to help heal the Everglades and put it back to where it’s alive with its wildlife, with its plant life,” she told PBS for a segment of its “Native America” series in 2023. “I’m just being who I was taught to be as a woman of the Panther Clan. We were always taught that we don’t own anything. We’re only caretakers of this creation.”
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