President Donald Trump announced last month plans to reopen and rebuild Alcatraz Island — home to one of America’s most infamous prisons that was shut down six decades ago.
For now, it’s a federal historic landmark managed by the National Park Service. Several top leaders from the Bureau of Prisons, including engineers, recently toured Alcatraz to conduct site assessments.
It’s still unclear if or how the Trump administration will proceed.
For nearly three decades, Alcatraz held 260 prisoners — fewer than 1% of the entire federal inmate population at that time.
Long before that, the infamous 22-acre rocky island sitting in the San Francisco Bay was a pre-Civil War fort, then a military prison. Then, it turned into a maximum security federal penitentiary, housing some of the nation’s most notorious inmates, from Al Capone to George “Machine Gun” Kelly.
But they all had one thing in common.
“The federal government has always seen that island as a place to put problematic people,” said Matthew Sakiestewa, a history professor at the University of Arizona, “including a group of 19 Hopi men.”
Some refer to them as the Hopi Nineteen. They hailed from the pueblo village of Orayvi, perched atop Third Mesa in the high desert of northern Arizona. The men — all deemed tribal leaders — were arrested three years after the U.S. Army’s Indian Wars, a series of armed conflicts spanning a century, concluded in 1891.
The Hopis were charged with sedition after refusing to let their children attend Indian boarding schools, which sought to erase their language, identity and culture. In 1890, the U.S. Army came and took 104 Hopi children from Third Mesa to the Keams Canyon Boarding School.
With no due process since they weren’t citizens and considered wards of the state, then-Commissioner of Indian Affairs Daniel M. Browning sentenced the Hopi prisoners to confinement and hard labor for nine months nearly a thousand miles away in 1895.
“Right now, it’s a park. This is a place for the public,” said Sakiestewa, who is Hopi. “I’ve taken the ferry boat trip there, less than two miles from the shore, and you can learn about this Native history.”
Still, Sakiestewa explained that Alcatraz Island is seen as a political symbol “whether that’s [the] federal government’s perspective or also Indigenous peoples.” Even former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland took a trip in 2021 to commemorate an anniversary for the 19-month occupation of Alcatraz that ended a half-century ago.
“Why would Native people want to take over that island?” asked Sakiestewa. “At least part of their argument was that this island was very similar to Indian reservations at the time: no electricity, poor living environment, little housing, very few, if any, opportunities.”
Beginning in the fall of 1969, Alcatraz became a hotbed for political dissent with the Red Power Movement taking over the island.
Protesters felt the U.S. basically walked away from its trust and treaty promises amid a federal effort to move Indigenous peoples off reservations into cities — stemming from the Indian Relocation Act of 1956.
It followed the Termination Era, during which, the U.S. reversed its stance of supporting sovereignty and instead sought to push for assimilation into mainstream society by ending federal recognition of more than 100 tribes within a decade.
“Because of the sacrifices that were made in this place, we no longer have to act out of desperation,” said Haaland. “The fact that I’m standing here today is a testament to that effect. I am here. We are here. And we’re not going anywhere.”
Citing the 1868 Treaty of Fort Lamarie, a group of activists called Indians of All Tribes, issued a proclamation claiming Alcatraz Island as their own until FBI agents and federal marshals ousted the 15 remaining occupiers — four children, five women and six men — in June 1971.
The U.S. transferred Alcatraz Island to the Interior Department a year later.
“These lands tell a story, and you can feel it,” added Haaland. “Some may think [of] Alcatraz Island as a place that movies and novels have described, where prisoners were kept in cells and tried to escape. But for me, and for many Indigenous people, this land tells another story.”
And for Trump, Alcatraz is not only a symbol of law order, “it’s a big hulk that’s sitting there rusting and rotting, but it sort of represents something that’s both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable, weak.”
The island’s history has been glamorized for decades on Hollywood’s silver screen, most notably by the 1979 blockbuster “Escape from Alcatraz” starring Clint Eastwood. The film depicts an iconic real-life prison break by inmates Frank Morris and brothers Clarence and John Anglin a year before The Rock closed in 1963.
“Again, I think a lot of people know Alcatraz,” said Wendy Holliday, a former archivist for the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office. “They kind of know the stories from the movies when it was a federal prison and then don’t really know it’s related to Indigenous people.”
Holliday dug into the history of the Hopi Nineteen.
“When I was doing the research and I lived on the reservation and I was a tribal employee — 100 years after those men were imprisoned at Alcatraz,” she recalled, “ this story was still so resonant as though it had just happened yesterday.”
It wasn’t until 130 years after the Hopi Nineteen were arrested when the U.S. formally apologized for its federal boarding school campaign. Former President Joe Biden atoned for that past while visiting the Gila River Indian Community last October.
“Some of the stories that people would tell me that they had heard kinda passed down, was just about the trauma for them and for their family members that were left behind, wondering what happened,” Holliday elaborated. “It’s not just that they were imprisoned, but they were taken from their ancestral land that was absolutely vital to their spiritual practice and wellbeing. It was a story, still very much alive and I still think, today.”
Californians United for a Responsible Budget, better known as CURB, is a coalition of more than 80 groups organizing against prisons across the Golden State.
When Trump initially talked about reopening Alcatraz, he blamed so-called “radicalized judges” wanting due process for some 11 million undocumented immigrants, roughly 3% of the U.S. population.
“Of course, Alcatraz is just a non-starter,” said Amber-Rose Howard, executive director of CURB. “There’s no drinking water, no utilities, no infrastructure. Trump says so many things, it’s hard to tell what’s a real threat and what’s just fear mongering, but at this time, I think that we should be taking everything he’s saying seriously.”
While operational, Alcatraz cost almost three times as much to maintain compared to any other federal prison. In 1963, the Bureau of Prisons believed no more than $5 million – or nearly $53 million today when adjusting for inflation – was needed to upgrade and keep the facility open.
That estimate did not account for daily operating costs.
If not Alcatraz, Howard thinks undocumented people are likely next to be sent somewhere else — possibly empty prisons that ICE has been eyeing — even in Blythe along the Arizona-California border.
“But I don’t think it stops there,” she added. “It starts with folks who are undocumented, and then it will continue to spill over into disappearing people from underserved, marginalized communities, who are Black — who are Brown — who are Indigenous — who don’t fit the agenda.”
