Alcatraz Prison Return Gets Boost in Trump DOJ Budget Plan (1)

The White House seeks to increase the Justice Department’s budget by 13%, with proposed funding to help reopen Alcatraz as a prison and advance the Trump administration’s hard-line law enforcement agenda.

The Trump administration’s fiscal 2027 budget request released Friday includes $40.8 billion in discretionary funding for DOJ, a $4.7 billion increase from the department’s 2026 enacted level and a departure from cuts the administration is seeking in other non-defense agencies.

The document is a wish-list—including $1.7 billion for the Bureau of Prisons to reopen Alcatraz and support other federal prisons—that doesn’t necessarily reflect what Congress will approve.

President Donald Trump’s asks for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 would help the administration advance its goals “to stop the migrant crime epidemic, demolish the foreign drug cartels, crush gang violence, lock up violent offenders, and end the weaponization of Government against the American people,” according to the budget document.

The requested additional funding to help reopen Alcatraz and restore other federal prisons builds on $5 billion already allocated to the Bureau of Prisons to restore detention facilities. Alcatraz, which is located on an island in San Francisco Bay, closed as a federal prison in 1963 and has been a National Park Service site open to the public since 1973, according to the Bureau of Prisons website.

The budget proposal includes $152 million “to cover the first year of project costs” associated with rebuilding Alcatraz “as a state-of-the-art secure prison facility.”

The Trump administration is also asking for $3 billion in additional funding to support its targeted law enforcement efforts in major US cities, building on the initiatives that deployed federal officers to Memphis, Minneapolis, and elsewhere over the past year.

The White House is requesting that Congress allocate $30 million to support DOJ’s new fraud division, led by the newly-confirmed Colin McDonald. The funding will help the new division “investigate and prosecute fraudsters and provide much needed relief to those harmed by their schemes,” according to the budget document.