Pam Bondi, Doug Burgum Visit Alcatraz To Promote Prison's Reopening

Attorney General Pam Bondi and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum arrived Thursday morning at Alcatraz, the San Francisco tourist attraction that President Donald Trump has vowed to reopen as a prison in one of the most far-fetched, performative schemes of his second term.

Bondi and Burgum both posted photos of the visit on social media, with Burgum saying the visit was made to “start the work to renovate and reopen the site to house the most dangerous criminals and illegals” ― suggesting the site could be used to detain immigrants rounded up in Immigrations and Customs Enforcement raids.

Their visit set off Democrats, with Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s (Calif.) statement getting right to the point.

“[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 said.

There’s been some speculation that Trump’s implausible idea to reopen Alcatraz was the product of his well-known TV-watching habit. Just hours before Trump laid out the idea in May in a head-scratching Truth Social post, a PBS affiliate serving Mar-a-Lago aired Clint Eastwood’s 1979 movie “Escape From Alcatraz,” The Hollywood Reporter found.

“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.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi is seen on a U.S. Coast Guard boat after visiting Alcatraz on Thursday.

via Associated Press

California state Sen. Scott Wiener (D), whose district includes San Francisco, said Thursday that while the idea of reopening Alcatraz as a prison is “absurd on so many levels,” people shouldn’t write off the possibility of Trump going ahead with the idea with or without ensuring it’s a safe 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 a statement. “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 idea of reopening Alcatraz as a prison is laughable to many who’ve visited the facilities, an extremely popular tourist destination on an island in the San Francisco Bay that welcomes more than a million visitors every year. Alcatraz, which is now part of the National Park Service, contains none of the safety or security features of a modern detention facility and only operated as a federal prison for less than 30 years before closing in 1963 due to the high operational costs of running a prison 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 history of the former prison. “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 said, was nearly three times more expensive to operate than any other federal prison.

Bondi’s visit comes as she continues to get heat for the Justice Department’s announcement that it wouldn’t release any more files from the Jeffrey Epstein case, reneging on promises from Trump’s campaign after hyping up their release.