The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Trump administration could restart deportations of illegal aliens to countries not their own. While this decision will speed up the mass deportation process, there remains a need for detention facilities.
To help satisfy this need, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) tasked state leaders with identifying places for a new facility. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier evidently had a good spot in mind.
Last week, Uthmeier made a public pitch in favor of “Alligator Alcatraz” — “an old, virtually abandoned airport facility” in the Everglades that could serve as “the one-stop shop to carry out President Trump’s mass deportation agenda.”
The state attorney general noted that the 39-square-mile area, which “is completely surrounded by the Everglades,” presents an “efficient, low-cost opportunity to build a temporary detention facility because you don’t need to invest that much in the perimeter. People get out and there’s not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons — nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.”
Uthmeier confirmed Monday that Alligator Alcatraz is a go.
The Department of Homeland Security told Blaze News that the Florida Division of Emergency Management will build a facility on the location that will house up to 5,000 beds for illegal aliens.
Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Florida law enforcement officers who capture under the 287(G) program — a program delegating specific immigration enforcement authority to state and local officers under the Immigration and Nationality Act — can dump detainees off at Alligator Alcatraz. ICE will similarly be able to transfer aliens to the Florida facility under 287(g) authority.
The DHS anticipates that the facility will be functional in a matter of days, initially with 500 to 1,000 beds, but ultimately 5,000 beds by early July, following expansions in several 500-bed increments.
Authorities might ultimately build hardened structures on the site, but for the time being, Alligator Alcatraz will largely be a tented destination.
While illegal aliens sweat it out in the soft-sided structures, Florida Division of Emergency Management workers will be housed in old Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers that have apparently been renovated.
‘I’m proud to help support President Trump and Secretary Noem in their mission to fix our illegal immigration problem once and for all.’
“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,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement to Blaze News. “We will expand facilities and bed space in just days, thanks to our partnership with Florida.”
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Image (left): Department of Homeland Security; Photo (right): Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Noem noted further that the new facilities “will in large part be funded by FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program, which the Biden Administration used as a piggy bank to spend hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars to house illegal aliens, including at the Roosevelt Hotel that served as a Tren de Aragua base of operations that was used to shelter Laken Riley’s killer.”
According to the DHS, the approximate cost of running the facility will be $245 per bed per day and an annual cost of $450 million. Florida will initially foot the bill but later receive reimbursement from FEMA, which has roughly $625 million in Shelter and Services Program funds available for this effort.
“I’m proud to help support President Trump and Secretary Noem in their mission to fix our illegal immigration problem once and for all,” stated Uthmeier. “Alligator Alcatraz and other Florida facilities will do just that.”
Hundreds of protesters traveled to the site of the future detention facility on Sunday to protest its construction, reported WGCU-TV. Their concerns largely appeared to be tied up with the potential environmental impact of the facility on supposedly “sacred” land.
Illegal immigrant advocates have similarly criticized the proposed facility albeit for difference reasons.
For instance, Mark Fleming, the associate director of federal litigation at the National Immigrant Justice Center, told the New York Times that the move amounted to an “independent, unaccountable detention system.”
“The fact that the administration and its allies would even consider such a huge temporary facility,” said Fleming, “on such a short timeline, with no obvious plan for how to adequately staff medical and other necessary services, in the middle of the Florida summer heat is demonstrative of their callous disregard for the health and safety of the human beings they intend to imprison there.”
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