U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL PAM BONDI’S surprise visit to Alcatraz, in service of President Donald Trump’s idea to rebuild the shuttered prison there, was widely criticized by Bay Area political leaders Thursday.
Bondi, along with U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, boated out to the world-famous and extremely popular tourist attraction Thursday morning to get a private tour before it opened to the public.
“A great morning at Alcatraz with Secretary Burgum,” Bondi posted on social media following the excursion. “Under President Trump, we are Making America Safe Again.”
Burgum posted that the field trip was the beginning of the federal government’s “work to renovate and reopen the site to house the most dangerous criminals and illegals.”
Predictably, local politicians lambasted the visit and the notion — floated by Trump in May — that Alcatraz should be transformed from a beloved national park and landmark into some kind of super prison.
U.S. Rep. and House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, said the visit was a calculated distraction from Trump’s spending plan, the One Big Beautiful Bill that she said “takes away food from children and rips health care from millions to give tax breaks to billionaires” and adds trillions of dollars to the national debt.
“With stiff competition, the planned announcement to reopen Alcatraz as a federal penitentiary is the Trump Administration’s stupidest initiative yet,” Pelosi said in a statement.
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie said there is no realistic plan to open Alcatraz to anyone but visitors.
“If the federal government has billions of dollars to spend in San Francisco, we could use that funding to keep our streets safe and clean and help our economy recover,” Lurie posted on social media.
U.S. Rep. Kevin Mullin, D-San Mateo, echoed Pelosi’s criticism.
“Not only is this proposal infeasible and illegal, it would be extremely costly and irresponsible considering he just tacked on another $4 trillion to our nation’s debt,” Mullin said in a news release Thursday. “The only person that needs to be locked up in Alcatraz is Trump.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom expressed skepticism that such a plan will ever come to fruition.
“Pam Bondi will reopen Alcatraz the same day Trump lets her release the Epstein files. So… never,” Newsom’s press office posted.
The governor wasn’t the only person to suggest the visit was intended to distract from Bondi’s recent announcement that she won’t release records related to the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case — a move widely criticized by Trump’s own supporters.
In response to both Bondi’s and Burgum’s social media posts from the San Francisco Bay on Thursday, hundreds of commenters demanded she reverse her decision on the so-called “Epstein files.”
State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, called Trump’s park-to-prison plan “absurd on so many levels” but is worried that the president isn’t shy about moving forward with “insane and destructive” ideas.
“We need to do everything in our power to fight this dangerous idea,” Wiener posted.
U.S. Penitentiary Alcatraz closed in 1963 after opening 29 years earlier on the island in San Francisco Bay.
Known as “The Rock,” it housed some of the most infamous criminals of its time, including Al Capone and George “Machine Gun” Kelly.
After its closure and a period of occupation by American Indians, Alcatraz has since turned into a tourist attraction with more than a million visitors a year to the public museum about the history of the island and its prison, according to the National Park Service.
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