The end of Alligator Alcatraz? DeSantis says it ‘would be great’ to shut it down
Gov. Ron DeSantis is now backing plans to shutter Florida’s state-run immigration detention facility in the Everglades, 10 months after the state opened it and after spending hundreds of millions of dollars on its construction and operation.
He told reporters in Lakeland Thursday that “it would be great for us to break that facility down,” following a New York Times report that the Department of Homeland Security and state officials were considering closing Alligator Alcatraz.
DeSantis said discussions with the federal government about shutting down the facility started after Markwayne Mullin was confirmed as the new DHS secretary in late March.
“It’s been discussed,” DeSantis said of shutting down the facility. “You had a new secretary come in, take a fresh look at these things.”
DeSantis met with Tom Homan, the White House’s “border czar,” on Monday afternoon, according to his schedule. He said Thursday they talked about the $608 million DeSantis promised taxpayers was coming from the federal government to reimburse the state for the cost of the facility, but never arrived.
“We’re getting it and you will see that very shortly,” DeSantis vowed.
The federal government has repeatedly said in federal court that it won’t reimburse the DeSantis administration for the site construction costs, only per-detainee cost. That might leave Florida taxpayers still picking up the tab for the millions of dollars the state spent in quickly erecting the site in the middle of the Everglades.
The apparent willingness to abandon the facility now marks a sudden heel turn for the state and federal administrations that have promoted the detention center as an exemplar for Trump’s mass deportation agenda. The state spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in court fending off efforts to close it down, including recently overturning a Miami judge’s order doing just that.
They promoted it as an intentionally remote, scary place to deter people from migrating to the U.S., even as it became, for critics, an example of the Trump administration’s wide net and cruel treatment of immigrants.
The potential shuttering of Alligator Alcatraz now is part of a larger effort by DHS to shift its approach toward immigration enforcement, according to DeSantis.
“From my conversations with Tom, the mission continues. How you do that mission matters. And how some of this stuff happened in Minnesota, I think the agency looks at and said maybe they could have handled that a little bit differently,” he said, pointing to the mass immigration crackdown and killing of two U.S. citizens protesting ICE in that state.
When it comes to Alligator Alcatraz, “if they decide that they have the resources, that this is not needed, well yeah, I mean we don’t need to do it.”
The governor has long defended the facility and his office has spent more than half a million dollars fighting court challenges against it. But, after the public revelation Thursday of plans to shut it down, he said that it was always meant to be temporary.
“Our goal on this was for that facility to be a bridge to DHS being able to do this,” he added. “We’re going to still cooperate, if we get people, we’ll bring them to DHS. But they should be the ones, ideally, that would be able to simply hold, process, and then repatriate.”
The Department of Homeland Security told the Miami Herald it was not “pressuring” the state to shut down the facility, but did not deny discussions about that possibility.
“DHS continuously evaluates detention needs and requirements to ensure they meet the latest operational requirements,” a Department of Homeland spokesperson wrote in a statement.
Critics react
Community activists and politicians celebrated the news of the facility’s potential closure Thursday.
Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava on Thursday said on social media that the news of the site possibly closing was “long overdue.”
“For months, thousands have been detained there in inhumane conditions without meaningful due process–while wasting millions of taxpayer dollars. It is time for dignity & accountability to be restored,” the post
U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Broward County Democrat who visited the facility last month, echoed Levine Cava’s statement, writing that “this wasteful cruelty must stop immediately.”
Katie Blankenship, founding attorney of Sanctuary of the South, a legal services organization, said though she and her clients hoped for the closure of the detention center, “we will believe it when we see it.”
Blankenship filed a declaration in federal court last month stating that one of her clients held at the site had been beaten and left with a black eye. She said Thursday the detention center was “rife with human rights abuses.”
“There’s no question that it should be shut down immediately,” she said.
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