Is an image showing the Florida prison known as "Alligator Alcatraz" surrounded by a moat authentic? No, that's not true: The photo that has been shared on social platforms does not accurately depict the immigrant detention center erected at a Miami-Dade County, Florida, airport in June 2025. An AI detection tool concluded with 99.9% certainty that it was not real.
The image was included in a post (archived here) shared by @catturd2 on X on June 27, 2025, with a caption that read:
Alligator Alcatraz is what dreams are made out of.
This is what the post looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: screenshot of X.com by Lead Stories)
Lead Stories submitted the image to Hive Moderation's AI-generated content detection tool, which concluded with a likelihood of 99.9% that it was AI-generated content.
The ICE detention center was quickly erected adjacent to the runway at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport about 55 miles west of Miami. The facility was dubbed Alligator Alcatraz because of the presence of alligators in the swampy Big Cypress National Preserve that surrounds the airport.
This is a satellite image of the location provided by Google Maps.
