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Bondi and Burgum tour a crumbling prison with dreams of shark-infested justice [1]

['Jason Weisberger']

Date: 2025-07-18

Decades of salt, the sea, and neglect have left Alcatraz kinda safe as a tourist destination. People get hurt in our National Parks all the time. Billions of dollars are needed to convert the physical plant into something useable as a prison, unless you are a seriously inhumane and awful kinda of prison designer. The place was shuttered in 1963 because it was too expensive to maintain, and maintaining residency on bird poop stained rock in an ice-cold bay certainly hasn't gotten cheaper or easier.

Attorney General Pam Bondi and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum toured Alcatraz as part of a fact-finding mission for President Donald Trump. "He directed his administration to review a reopening plan for Alcatraz, if it is possible, which is why the attorney general and the secretary of interior have traveled there today," Leavitt said. "If the Alcatraz prison is reopened it would be under the purview of the Bureau of Prisons." Leavitt also said if Alcatraz were to reopen, Trump would want "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." Burgum posted on social media Thursday morning with photos of the pair touring the island. NBC Bay Area

I wonder if they bought tickets on one of the ferry boats and took the standard or premium tour? Noem probably got hung up at the Wax Museum.

Previously:

• Great white shark eats seal off Alcatraz Island

• 'The Mar-a-Lago of mass incarceration': Trump demands to reopen Alcatraz

• Alcatraz Island, a tourist attraction that exceeds all expectations

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