MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said on Tuesday that 14 Mexican nationals were being held at the U.S. “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center and that her government was seeking their repatriation.
“All arrangements are being made to ensure they are repatriated immediated to Mexico,” Sheinbaum said in her daily news conference.
The facility sits some 37 miles (60 km) from Miami in a vast subtropical wetland teeming with alligators, crocodiles and pythons, fearsome imagery the White House has leveraged to show its determination to purge migrants it says were wrongly allowed to stay in the country under former President Joe Biden’s administration.
Since President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, a total of 73,533 people have been returned to Mexico, mostly by air, including 67,008 Mexican nationals, Sheinbaum said in one of her daily briefings earlier this month.
(Reporting by Natalia Siniawski and Ana Isabel Martinez)
