For more than a year, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier’s campaign has sought to profit from his role in the creation of “Alligator Alcatraz,” the sprawling immigrant detention facility in the Florida Everglades that became a national symbol of President Donald Trump’s aggressive crackdown on immigration. 

From the earliest days of the now-shuttered facility, Uthmeier has been selling “Alligator Alcatraz”-themed merchandise to fund his 2026 election campaign, as he runs to hold on to the office that Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed him to in February of 2025. Fans can buy $30 t-shirts, $27 baseball hats, and an $8 set of bumper stickers to advertise their support for the attorney general and the makeshift facility he’s credited with coming up with the idea for. Even the domain name alligatoralcatraz.com redirects visitors to the Uthmeier campaign’s official online store.

Now, an analysis by The Florida Trib shows Uthmeier and his campaign have taken in hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions linked to businesses hired to build, operate, and supply the detention center, an indication of how politically profitable his association with the facility has proven to be.

While the amount of contributions tied to contractors behind the Everglades facility is a fraction of what it takes to run a statewide campaign in Florida, the specifics of the donations made to Uthmeier’s campaign are notable – with some coming just days before or after the companies landed major state contracts.

Uthmeier’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

A ‘low-cost’ government opportunity

When the newly appointed attorney general took to social media last summer to tout the plan to build the pop-up prison at an isolated airstrip in the Everglades, he sold it as a “low-cost opportunity” for the state to help carry out Trump’s vision for federal immigration enforcement. 

“You don’t need to invest that much,” to secure the site, Uthmeier said in a slickly produced video posted online last June, as a hard rock soundtrack pounded in the background. 

In fact, the state would soon be burning through more than $1 million a day to operate the compound of tents and trailers, which ultimately helped process and deport more than 20,000 people, according to DeSantis.

More than a year later, the estimated cost of the now-closed facility has exceeded $1 billion – after multimillion-dollar contracts flowed to state contractors, including companies controlled by well-connected political donors who poured some of their proceeds back into the campaign accounts of politicians like Uthmeier.

“Alligator Alcatraz started out as a gimmick to impress President Trump and quickly turned into a way to reward ‘friendly contractors/donors’,” said Gil Smart, executive director of VoteWater, a group that advocates for the Everglades and other environmental causes. 

VoteWater has endorsed Uthmeier’s Democratic opponent, former state Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez.

“This is exactly the type of activity Florida’s attorney general is supposed to investigate,” Smart added. “Instead, Uthmeier is at the center of it.”

Questioned by The Trib, Rodriguez called the creation of the facility “an abuse of power” and the no-bid contracts awarded to build it “massively corrupt.”

“From the warden to the toilets, everything was privatized. No-bid contracts. Massively profitable for James Uthmeier and his friends,” Rodriguez said. “We need to root out that corruption in Tallahassee. And my opponent’s not rooting it out, because he is the root of the corruption.”

A $250,000 check

When the state seized the county-owned land for the detention facility and awarded contracts for its operations, it was the Florida Division of Emergency Management that took the lead, an agency that’s housed under the leadership of DeSantis – not the attorney general’s office. 

But in reviewing state contracts for the facility and campaign contributions made to Uthmeier and the political committee behind him, familiar names cropped up, and one $250,000 check stood out – and not just for its sheer size.

The couple behind that donation is not only among the most prodigious Republican donors in Florida politics, but also behind some of the biggest contracts the state signed to run “Alligator Alcatraz” – Carlos Duart and Tina Vidal-Duart.

The married couple and co-executives sit atop CDR Companies – a network of affiliated firms that has grown into a juggernaut of government contracting with a national reach, from engineering to healthcare to emergency management. Collectively, their companies have been awarded up to $1 billion for state contracting work in recent years, according to the Miami Herald. 

The husband and wife are noted allies of DeSantis, who appointed them to the boards of two of the state’s public universities. Vidal-Duart also previously sat on the board of the Hope Florida Foundation, which a grand jury found routed $10 million from a state Medicaid settlement into nonprofits that then funneled much of the money into a political committee controlled by Uthmeier, who was then the governor’s chief of staff.

Campaign finance records show that Carlos Duart personally donated $3,000 to Uthmeier on March 11, 2025, the maximum contribution that can be made directly to a candidate. On the same day, CDR Enterprises, which lists Duart as its president and his wife as its executive vice president, also cut a $25,000 check to the Friends of James Uthmeier political committee, which does not face the same fundraising restrictions as a candidate’s individual account.

When Uthmeier unveiled the state’s plans in June of 2025 to transform a remote airfield into a fully operational detention facility in a matter of days, the couple’s companies were go-to contractors to make that vision a reality. 

Records in Florida’s public contract database show that companies controlled by the couple were among the first to ink contracts to operate “Alligator Alcatraz,” with Lemoine CDR Logistics signing a $60 million contract on June 23, 2025, and CDR Health TNT netting a $56 million contract two weeks later.

In early September, another CDR-affiliated company managed by the couple signed a deal to staff a second state-run immigration detention facility dubbed “Deportation Depot” in North Florida’s Baker County. This time, it was a $100 million contract. A little over two weeks later, CDR Enterprises made the $250,000 donation to Friends of James Uthmeier on Sept. 17, 2025, on top of the previous $25,000 contribution.

Campaign finance records show the $275,000 that CDR Enterprises donated to Uthmeier’s political committee is the second-largest total contribution that the company has made so far this election cycle – second only to a $500,000 donation made to a political committee affiliated with DeSantis, who is term-limited and isn’t currently running for office.

Neither Duart nor Vidal-Duart returned calls from The Trib, but a spokesperson provided a statement saying their financial support was motivated by the attorney general’s efforts to protect children. 

“Tina Vidal-Duart and Carlos Duart have given more than $1 million to shelters and organizations that give women and children fleeing domestic violence and trafficking a safe place to live, and their support for Attorney General Uthmeier is part of that same commitment, because no one in Florida has done more to protect children from exploitation,” said a CDR spokesperson.

Signing contracts, signing checks

Campaign finance records show Uthmeier’s campaign has received donations from other “Alligator Alcatraz” contractors as well.

On July 7, 2025, less than a week after Trump toured the Everglades facility and praised Uthmeier for his role in creating it, an executive at another go-to government contractor donated $2,000 to Uthmeier’s political committee. Jason Osborne serves as chief strategy officer at Garner Environmental Services, where he focuses on “aggressive domestic and international market expansion” for the company, according to his LinkedIn profile. 

Two days after Osborne made his donation, Garner executed a $102 million contract for the “buildout” and “ongoing maintenance” of the Everglades detention center. In September of 2025, a $49 million contract with Garner would follow, to retrofit and repair structures at Baker Correctional Institution to make way for the North Florida immigration detention center “Deportation Depot.” Osborne and Garner did not respond to messages from The Trib.

In November of 2025, the Tallahassee-based firm Williams Communications wrote a $5,000 check to Friends of James Uthmeier, after signing a $245,000 contract that July. Campaign finance records show that is the only political contribution the company has made in Florida this election cycle. AT&T made a $15,000 donation to Uthmeier’s political committee after signing a $12,500 contract in July of 2025. Neither of the companies donated directly to the Republican Party of Florida this cycle, nor did Duart, Vidal-Duart or their companies, apart from an in-kind or non-monetary donation from CDR Maguire worth $3,200. 

One detention center contractor that did give to the state GOP was IRG Global Emergency Management, which made a $10,000 donation to the party on June 24, 2025, the day after the company signed a $51 million contract to provide transportation services for the Everglades facility. In October of that year, IRG’s affiliate Access Restoration Services would write a $100,000 check to RPOF. Over the course of those same months, the state party would donate $500,000 to the Friends of James Uthmeier political committee. 

Kate Payne is The Florida Trib’s state government reporter. She can be reached at kate.payne@floridatrib.org.