White House officials tour Alcatraz amid potential reopening plans

(CN) — Top White House officials toured the infamous Alcatraz prison off the coast of San Francisco on Thursday morning as part of a “fact-finding mission” to determine the feasibility of President Donald Trump’s suggestion that it be reopened as a federal penitentiary. 

Attorney General Pam Bondi and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum briefly toured the site, but indicated there would be no official decision on whether the government would restore the prison 62 years after its closure. 

Fox News justice correspondent David Spunt was the only member of the media in tow and reported that Bondi, Burgum and Trump view the site as the potential “symbol of law and order that this administration is looking for.”

In an interview with Spunt, Bondi said that the prison could be used to “hold the worst of the worst.” 

“It could hold middle-class violent prisoners, it could hold violent illegal aliens,” Bondi said. “This is a terrific facility, it needs a lot of work, but no one has been known to escape from Alcatraz and survive.”

The visit is the latest example of the Trump administration using controversial sites to detain immigrants as part of its mass deportation efforts, first at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and more recently at the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” in southern Florida. 

“This is Alcatraz, it’s the brand known around the world for being effective at housing people that are in incarceration, so this is something that we’re here to take a look at,” Burgum told Spunt. “Its original use was a prison, and so part of this would be to test the feasibility about returning it back to its original use.”

In a statement on X, Senator Nancy Pelosi slammed the idea as the administration’s “stupidest initiative yet” and an effort to distract from any political fallout from the so-called Big, Beautiful Bill. 

“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,” the California Democrat wrote. “Should reason not prevail and Republicans bring this absurdity before the Congress, Democrats will use every parliamentary and budgetary tactic available to stop the lunacy.”

The prison, constructed on the remains of a Civil War-era fort that held Confederate sympathizers, was first opened in 1934 as a federal penitentiary. The prison was intended for previously problematic prisoners and was a “last resort prison” for those the government viewed as beyond rehabilitation. 

Alcatraz quickly gained a reputation as the toughest prison in the U.S. due to brutal and inhumane conditions. Five men took their own lives, 15 died from illnesses and eight were murdered. 

In 1939, then-Attorney General Frank Murphy slammed the prison as “conductive to psychology that builds up a sinister ambitious attitude among prisoners.”

The prison closed in 1963 due to the high costs of running it — in 1959, the facility was over three times more expensive to run than the average prison, at $10 per prisoner per day compared to $3 in most other prisons — and an estimated $5 million was necessary to address structural deterioration. 

A June 1962 escape by Frank Morris, John Anglin and Clarence Anglin — who famously used papier-mâché dummies of their heads to distract guards as they escaped via a vent in the roof and on a makeshift raft — was among the final nails in the coffin for the prison. While the FBI said the men likely drowned and their bodies swept out to sea, sightings and contact with family members and others have been reported as recently as 2013.

Among Alcatraz’s most famous prisoners were: Al Capone from 1934-1939; Ellsworth Raymond Johnson, the “Godfather of Harlem,” from 1954-1963; Alvin Francis Karpavicz aka “Creepy Karpis,” from 1936-1962; and George Kelly Barnes aka “Machine Gun Kelly,” from 1934-1951.

Since its closure, the prison has since become a tourist attraction run by the National Park Service, with about 1.6 million visitors annually and generating about $60 million in annual revenue. 

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that, if reopened, the site would be under the purview of the Bureau of Prisons as well as the Department of the Interior.

When asked who Trump plans to hold there, Leavitt echoed Bondi and responded, “the worst of the worst criminals in this country, both American criminals who commit heinous crimes but also illegal alien criminals before deportation as well.”

The building has no water or electricity source from the mainland, and it is rotting from the inside due to salt water intrusion.

The Bureau of Prisons did not respond to an emailed request for comment regarding the potential cost of restoring Alcatraz to an operational state. 

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