U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi toured Alcatraz on Thursday as part of President Trump's directive to revert the popular tourist attraction to a federal penitentiary.

Riley Gaines defended her decision to swim from Alcatraz to shore at 31 weeks pregnant, addressing backlash on her podcast after completing the challenge alongside Navy SEALs.

After floating the idea of reopening a shuttered federal prison on Alcatraz Island, President Donald Trump tasked two of his Cabinet members to see it for themselves last week.

Alcatraz was shuttered in 1963 due to disrepair and high maintenance costs. Now Trump wants to rebuild and expand the isolated facility

Attorney General Pam Bondi is touring former Alcatraz prison and the surrounding island, as the Trump administration pushes the idea of re-establishing it as a prison more than 60 years after it was closed.

Federal officials recently visited Alcatraz as part of the president's efforts to reopen the historic site as a prison. How did we get here?

From 1934 until its closure in 1963, Alcatraz operated as a maximum-security federal penitentiary designed to hold what some consider America's most notorious criminals.

Trump administration officials have toured Alcatraz, the once-notorious prison island in the icy waters of San Francisco Bay that the Trump administration is seeking to re-open for prisoners. Alcatraz - popularly known as "the Rock" - has not been used as a prison for decades. It is now a historic landmark visited by millions of tourists each year.

Attorney General Pam Bondi and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum toured Alcatraz Island to assess its potential reopening as a federal prison at President Donald Trump's direction.

Alcatraz is the brand known around the world for being effective at housing people that are in incarceration,” Burgum said of the island facility in the San Francisco Bay.

The Trump administration is pushing to reopen Alcatraz as a federal prison, a move that would require repealing national park protections and transferring control from the Department of the Interior to the Bureau of Prisons.

Alcatraz was first used as a jail during the American Civil War. It later became a federal penitentiary in 1934, closing less than 30 years later.