Florida’s headline-grabbing push to create “Alligator Alcatraz” — an immigration detention center deep in the Everglades — happened swiftly, with little apparent notice to state legislators responsible for paying for it or to local officials who will have it on their doorstep.
It also may prove to be one of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ most aggressive moves during his six-plus years in office. Citing the governor’s emergency powers, the state’s emergency management director told Miami-Dade County that it was taking control of an Everglades airstrip now owned by Miami-Dade County and located mainly in Collier County in order to begin building the multimillion dollar facility.
Governor DeSantis’ Bold Immigration Stance
DeSantis declared an emergency on immigration during Joe Biden’s presidency and has since extended it. After President Donald Trump took office, the Republican governor has pledged Florida will do whatever it can to assist Trump’s administration in its mass deportation efforts.
“Time is of the essence,” Kevin Guthrie, the state’s emergency management director, wrote in a letter sent to Miami-Dade officials late Monday. “We must act swiftly to ensure readiness and continuity in our statewide operations to assist the federal government with immigration enforcement.”
Not much was known publicly about the plans for the detention center until Attorney General James Uthmeier — DeSantis’ former chief of staff who was appointed to the job in February — talked up the idea of “Alligator Alcatraz” on social media last week. The chosen site is a long airstrip that was built as part of a massive project abandoned in 1970 amid environmental opposition.
By Monday, the Department of Homeland Security said it had signed off on a plan to house up to 5,000 people in Florida who are either arrested by state law enforcement or brought to detention centers by federal immigration authorities. DHS said in a statement that it planned to tap into a Federal Emergency Management Agency shelter program to reimburse the state the estimated $450 million a year it will cost to run the remote detention centers.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, we are working at turbo speed on cost-effective and innovative ways to deliver on the American people’s mandate for mass deportations of criminal illegal aliens,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement. “We will expand facilities and bed space in just days, thanks to our partnership with Florida.”
The project fits into DeSantis’ larger efforts to curtail illegal immigration in the nation’s third most populous state. He had previously signed into law legislation that required hospitals that receive Medicaid funds to ask about patients’ immigration status and got the state to ban “sanctuary cities.” In 2022, DeSantis, with the help of Uthmeier, arranged to transport migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard to draw attention to immigration concerns. This year, he pushed the Legislature to ramp up efforts to have local and state law enforcement help the Trump administration.
Uthmeier was recently found in civil contempt by a federal judge who said he deliberately gave law enforcement permission to flout her court order putting a state law on illegal immigration on hold.
Florida on Monday launched the project and plans to stand up the detention center in a matter of days, including bringing in old FEMA trailers for workers and using tents for those brought to the center. The governor’s office maintained that there would be no removal of vegetation, additional paving or permanent construction. Guthrie in his letter said Florida would still offer to buy the property from Miami-Dade, but they would use the site during the “duration of the state of emergency.”
The move to create the facility — and have the state pay for the costs up front — was apparently not shared with legislators who just wrapped up work on a new state budget a week ago. A spokesperson for state Senate President Ben Albritton said the Senate had no details on the project.
Collier County officials said Tuesday they were caught off guard by the state taking over the training airport in their county but said they have no say in the issue.
During a meeting, county commissioners wondered whether the facility would be evacuated during tropical storms and where the evacuees would go. Commission Chair Burt Saunders said the public needs to know the county had nothing to do with the decision.
“This county has no authority, has no jurisdiction, has no say in what goes on at that airport,” Saunders said. “This is an issue coming out of Tallahassee. We were not consulted in any way in terms of whether it’s a good place for this type of facility — not our issue.”
Dan Summers, Collier County’s emergency services director, told the commission the county is cooperating with the state. He added the county would encourage the state to airlift medical emergency patients as needed to Miami-Dade County, where there are more “air assets.”
“If you’ve been out there, then you know it’s a long way from nowhere,” Summers said.
The Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport and its 10,500-foot runway were built as part of the Everglades Jetport before the project was shut down in 1970 because of environmental concerns.
Most of the nearly 25,000-acre facility appears to be in Collier County although it is owned by Miami-Dade County. The state offered the county $20 million for the property Saturday then took it over Monday after Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava raised concerns about the price, public safety and potentially “devastating” environmental impacts.
The governor’s office released a plan Monday that suggests water will be brought onto the site and that trash and sewage will be trucked away but details were lacking.
Over his two terms, DeSantis has used his executive power in a more expansive fashion than previous Democratic and Republican governors. Previous Florida governors have used emergency powers in novel ways, such as ordering polling places to remain open for example. But DeSantis has now pushed the authority further by commandeering property owned by another local government.
Friends of the Everglades executive director Eve Samples said her group is “considering all options” when asked if the state’s actions, under an 2023 executive order dealing with immigration, are legal.
Samples called the waste plan a “back of the envelope” proposal and said she doesn’t believe the “prison” is temporary until a date is set for closing it.
She said the detention facility is proceeding at a “staggering pace.” She said more than 4,000 people have responded to her group’s alert asking the governor to kill the project, saying it threatens his Everglades legacy.
“There is just no way you can claim to be an Everglades advocate and let this proposal for a prison in the Everglades move forward,” Samples said. “The two are mutually exclusive.”
There was no response to questions and a request for comment Tuesday from the Miami-Dade mayor or the county. A county spokesperson late Monday issued a statement emphasizing Miami-Dade had not received a response from the state to questions about the offer to buy the land.
The governor’s office in a statement that mentioned how the plan was to make the center a temporary facility added that “Governor DeSantis has insisted that the state of Florida, under his leadership, will facilitate the federal government in enforcing immigration law … Florida will continue to lead on immigration enforcement.”
Other questions were raised as well.
Talbert Cypress, chair of the Miccosukee Tribe, posted a message on social media saying his tribe was opposed to the use of “our ancestral lands” for a detention center and urged the state to locate it somewhere else. “Rather than Miccosukee homelands being an uninhabited wasteland for alligators and pythons, as some have suggested, the Big Cypress is the Tribe’s traditional homelands,” he wrote. “The landscape has protected the Miccosukee and Seminole people for generations.”
State Sen. Jason Pizzo, an independent gubernatorial candidate who challenged the legality of the state’s transport of migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in 2022, pointed out the state has had problems with its prison system in recent years and was forced to use the National Guard to help staff them.
“We have 67 dilapidated and inefficient correctional facilities that we have trouble staffing already. Sounds brilliant,” Pizzo, a former Democrat, said in a text message.
Rep. Maxwell Frost, a central Florida Democratic member of Congress, blasted both the Trump administration and the DeSantis administration with moving ahead with the center. He said current detention centers “contain conditions that are nothing short of human rights abuses. Places where people are forced to eat, sleep, shower, and defecate all in the same room. Places where medical attention is virtually non-existent.”
“Anyone who supports this is a disgusting excuse for a human being, let alone a public servant,” Frost said in a statement.
Jeremy Redfern, a spokesperson for Uthmeier, responded saying, “We’re eager to read your story, so that we can identify which Florida officials publicly oppose helping the Trump Administration advance the president’s agenda on illegal immigration. The Attorney General was honored to help bring this solution forward, and we’ve been encouraged by the many state legislators and local leaders who are beyond excited to support Florida’s efforts.”
