President Trump’s visit to the migrant detention center in the Everglades was meant to highlight the issue that binds his party to him more than anything else — immigration.
While the fate of his entire legislative agenda was being decided on Tuesday, President Trump traveled a thousand miles away from Washington to hang out in a makeshift detention center for migrants that had been thrown together on an old airstrip in the Florida Everglades.
The place had already been nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz” by Republicans, on account of the fact that it’s surrounded by miles of marshland seething with reptiles. Mr. Trump instantly thrilled to the alligator alliteration — as he said on Tuesday, “I looked outside and that’s not a place I want to go hiking anytime soon” — and ordered up a tour.
This expedition might have seemed a bit off-piste, since the real action was happening back on Capitol Hill, where Republican senators were genuinely agonizing about whether they could really vote for this hydra-headed bill that Mr. Trump had put forth. But his visit to the detention center was not without purpose. This media spectacle had been manufactured to highlight Mr. Trump’s most winning issue, which binds his party to him more than anything else — immigration.
“I said, ‘Let the press join us on our walk, so they can see what’s happening,’” Mr. Trump said. He walked through the facility, stopping to inspect chain-link fences and bunk beds packed tightly together. His top immigration officials, including Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, tagged along. The group kept insisting that lawmakers in Washington needed to pass the president’s bill so that Alligator Alcatraz and other places like it could get the funding needed to operate. (The bill would steer about $175 billion toward immigration enforcement and border security.)
Ms. Noem told a story about a recent detainee. “The other day, I was talking to some marshals that have been partnering with ICE,” she said. “They said that they had detained a cannibal and put him on a plane to take him home, and while they had him in his seat, he started to eat himself and they had to get him off and get him medical attention.” (The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions seeking clarity about the episode Ms. Noem described on Tuesday).
