Miami Dade College gifts Donald Trump land for his library — and a hotel
Posted by Admin on Sep 29, 2025 | 0 commentsFormer MDC Prez Eduardo Padron: ‘Unimaginable’
So, the state is about to gift Donald Trump a $67 million piece of prime downtown real estate for his future presidential library — and, maybe, a hotel to boot.
This is the parking lot next to the Freedom Tower, across from the Kaseya Center, smack in the middle of downtown’s cultural hub. The very same piece of land Miami Dade College bought in 2004, after a lot of sacrifice, to expand its Wolfson Campus for a growing student population. The same property former MDC president Eduardo Padrón said was “critical” for the school’s future.
Gone. Just like that.
The MDC Board of Trustees voted in a blink-and-you-missed-it meeting last month to transfer the lot to the state, with an agenda that vaguely said they’d be discussing “potential real estate transactions.” No mention of the $67 million parcel. No mention of Trump. No mention that Gov. Ron DeSantis had already decided where it was going.
And the very same day, voilà, DeSantis announced that his hand-picked Cabinet would vote Tuesday to gift the property to the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Foundation. Attorney General James Uthmeier and freshly minted CFO Blaise Ingoglia could hardly contain themselves on X, gushing about how excited they were to hand Trump the land. Ingoglia even bragged this would be one of his “first votes.” Que cute.
Uthmeier even dropped a hype video about how “no better location” could tell Trump’s story than a spot right next to the Freedom Tower — Miami’s own Ellis Island of the South.
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Never mind that Trump’s immigration crackdown has put scores of Cubans in deportation proceedings and that one of his first acts in office was suspending asylum at the border. Never mind that Freedom Tower was the beacon for Cuban refugees fleeing Castro’s Cuba — while Trump is promising the “largest deportation operation in U.S. history.” The irony practically writes itself.
The location is a dream spot: 2.6 acres across from Bayside and PortMiami, at the entrance to MDC’s Wolfson Campus, and just steps from the newly-renovated Freedom Tower that the college poured $25 million into restoring. That same tower where Miami-Dade School Board Member Roberto Alonso, MDC’s board vice chair (also appointed by DeSantis) said his parents were welcomed decades ago. Alonso said Trump’s library would “really take Miami to the next level.”
Next level of what? Insanity? Double-standard? Hypocrisy?
What the college didn’t say in the vague agenda or the lightning-round vote is that the land has been pitched to developers before and could have netted MDC a pretty penny. A decade ago, they tried to monetize that same parking lot, across from the $6 billion Miami Worldcenter project. This week, they just gave it away. For free.
Padrón, who led MDC for nearly 25 years, was blindsided. “It’s frankly unimaginable that this decision was made without any real discussion of the consequences of what that will do to the college,” he said in an interview with WLRN. “There was a lot of sacrifice in order to gain that piece of land for the expansion of the college.”
Translation: The land was meant for students, not for Trump’s hotel-library ego project.
Trump has been shopping Florida schools for his library — FAU, FIU, and MDC were all on the list. Now it looks like the Magic City won. Maybe. Because remember, Trump likes options, and insiders say MDC could still be just a “satellite” location.
Alonso, who was appointed to the school board by DeSantis, said the MDC board got the “request” from the governor’s office on Sept. 16 and insists the college doesn’t need the lot anyway. “The college and our community have so much to gain from a presidential library,” Alonso said, calling it an “economic engine.” Ladra wonders: economic engine for who, exactly? Students paying tuition? Or Trump Inc. selling hotel rooms and MAGA merch?
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Let’s not forget that this could be the first presidential library with an attached hotel. Imagine that — a two-for-one shrine to Trump where you can book a suite after your tour of “alternative facts.”
Meanwhile, MDC students are literally spilling out of the Wolfson campus. Enrollment there has grown from 19,500 in 2003 to more than 27,000 today. Across the county, nearly 59,000 people are enrolled at MDC, making it one of the largest community colleges in the nation. Padrón said the college once considered using the lot for a conference center or a new building for the New World School of the Arts. Instead, it’s going to Trump’s library-hotel vanity project.
The property, bought by MDC for $24.8 million in 2004, is now valued by the county appraiser at more than $67 million. And with Miami’s real estate boom, it would almost certainly fetch even more if it were put up for bids.
But no. No bids. No discussion. No transparency. Just a fast-track giveaway.
Because this isn’t about students. This is about DeSantis and his Cabinet paying tribute to the Orange Idol while shortchanging Miami Dade College — and the people it’s supposed to serve.
There will be a protest Monday afternoon, before Tuesday’s cabinet vote, led by historian and Florida International University Professor Marvin Dunn, who called the location “an insult” to the hundreds of thousands of Cuban, Venezuelans, Haitians and other “freedom seekers” who live here.
But Alonso told CBS News Miami that it was “not about political values or ideologies. It’s about the office, the office of the president, and something that will be here in Miami for our students, our community to go visit and to learn more about the office of the presidency.”
Also, Trump’s foundation — which reportedly has $53 million in commitments so far, thanks in part to settlements from Trump’s defamation suits against ABC, Meta and Paramount — has to break ground within five years.
MDC’s current president, Madeline Pumariega, called the move “historic.” She’s not wrong. It’s a historic giveaway of tens of millions in public land so that Donald Trump can build a monument to himself.
The Freedom Tower will still be a symbol of freedom. But it could stand next to a symbol of Florida power brokers bending over backwards for the Donald and robbing MDC students of resources and opportunity.
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