DeSantis Races to Open Immigrant Detention Camp in Swamp Amid Hurricane Season

Florida’s Everglades National Park is often referred to as the most endangered national park in the United States.

In 1968, developers tried to construct the largest airport in the world in the middle of the park, which was already suffering from a multitude of environmental crises: disrupted water flow, a drastic decline in the bird population, human development, invasion of exotic species, and the endangerment of the Florida panther.

After an upswell of public outcry led by Indigenous leaders, conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and the newly founded environmental group Friends of the Everglades, construction was halted in 1970 with just one training flight runway completed. In the area surrounding the strip, the federal government established the Big Cypress National Preserve. Recently, Miami-Dade County, the owner of the land hosting the former airstrip, has sought to create a permanent preservation site that would protect the treasured wetlands for generations to come.

Those plans have been dashed. On June 24, Florida state law enforcement seized the site of the old airport from Miami-Dade, putting up barricades and guarding the entrance with armed police. Instead of a wildlife preserve, Florida and the Department of Homeland Security are constructing a 3,000-bed detention center for immigrants, which State Attorney General James Uthmeier has gleefully dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.”

Since announcing their plans, Florida state officials have posted AI-generated photographs of alligators wearing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) hats on social media and boasted repeatedly in interviews with far right commentators that “alligators and pythons are waiting” for any person who attempts to escape the camp. The Republican Party of Florida has even tried to cash in on the planned detention camp by selling Alligator Alcatraz T-shirts and beer koozies online.

This onslaught of cruelty might seem abrupt to onlookers outside of Florida. But such anti-immigrant political theater is nothing new for Floridians living under Gov. Ron DeSantis’s authoritarian administration. By turning Florida into a laboratory for extreme, anti-immigrant policies, DeSantis and the Florida legislature have spent years laying the groundwork for a project like Alligator Alcatraz.

DeSantis’s Anti-Immigrant Authoritarianism

Since taking office in 2019, DeSantis has sought to control Florida’s local elected officials as much as possible. In his first term, DeSantis tasked aides with bringing him a binder listing out all of the powers he could exercise over municipalities as governor, from his authority to remove local elected officials to limiting municipalities from their ability to tax and regulate. Since then, DeSantis has weaponized those powers against local politicians who stood in the way of his far right agenda, even removing elected officials who refuse to fall in line. DeSantis often governs through Fox News hits, using public threats to punish dissent.

DeSantis has primarily used these powers to push a racist, anti-immigrant agenda aimed at targeting the hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the state. Over the last few years, his allies in the state legislature have passed a wave of anti-immigrant bills. In 2019, SB 168 mandated local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement and banned sanctuary cities in Florida, even though at the time of passage, no Florida city had enacted any sanctuary-like policies similar to those seen in New York and Chicago.

The governor also convened a statewide grand jury to investigate immigration-related issues, which used the legal process as a scare tactic for immigrant groups and service providers. One of that jury’s reports questioned whether nonprofit shelters that housed unaccompanied migrant children should retain their state licenses, leading to DeSantis feuding publicly with the Catholic Archbishop of Miami. In 2023, Florida’s legislature made national headlines by passing SB 1718, which mandated that health care providers that accept Medicaid dollars ask patients for their immigration status, required the use of E-Verify for private companies with 25 or more employees, and established felony charges for driving undocumented people across state lines — even for family members.

This year, DeSantis escalated his attacks on immigrants by calling a special legislative session to “combat illegal immigration” in the state. The result: even more powers for the governor to punish elected officials who fail to give their “best efforts” to support Donald Trump’s deportation drive, and a requirement that all 67 counties in Florida enter into 287(g) collaboration agreements with ICE. Local officials who have spoken out against this forced cooperation have been threatened with lawsuits, removal from office, and even criminal charges.

To impose his anti-immigrant agenda, DeSantis has used agencies like the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the Florida Highway Patrol, and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission in an unprecedented way. For the last three years, DeSantis has deployed members of these agencies to assist Texas’s Operation Lone Star, a militarized campaign against people crossing the border. In February, DeSantis’s Highway Patrol signed the first 287(g) Task Force agreement with Trump’s ICE, adding over 1,500 zealous troopers to the state’s obsessive drive to detain as many Florida immigrants as possible. DeSantis has even created his own State Guard to supplement the Florida National Guard, which operates exclusively under his administration’s control and has served as the vanguard for his “shock and awe” raids on worksites across the state.

Miami-Dade’s Tepid Response

In this authoritarian environment, DeSantis’s move to seize land owned by Miami-Dade County worth an estimated $195 million has been met with almost no resistance by local officials. Miami-Dade is the county with the highest percentage of immigrant residents in Florida, where over 54 percent of residents are foreign-born and more than 70 percent are Hispanic. Yet as state law enforcement descended on the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport site in the Everglades, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava offered only meek resistance, sending a technocratic letter to the governor outlining her environmental and financial concerns with the project. When asked if she thought Alligator Alcatraz was a good idea at an event the following day, Cava — who won reelection on a progressive platform and opposed both 287(g) agreements and complying with ICE detainers in the past — said only that “we believe that border control is important. We believe immigrant criminals should be held to account.”

On June 26, when constituents showed up at a County Commission meeting to call on the county to resist further collaboration with ICE, sheriff’s deputies dragged a woman out of the chamber after she asked a clarifying procedural question. To date, no county official has publicly voiced any moral objections to the dangerous camp being built on their land, even though many of their constituents are likely to be the ones crowded into its tents.

Devastation and Complicity

The potential impacts of Florida’s plan are catastrophic. From a humanitarian perspective, the mad dash to open a 3,000-person detention camp is irresponsible and dangerous. Confining immigrants in tents in the middle of a swamp during Florida’s hurricane season is a deliberately cruel scheme designed to inflict suffering on those held there. That kind of cruelty is reminiscent of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s inhumane tent city in Arizona, which was shut down after years of lawsuits from mistreated prisoners.

Environmentally, Alligator Alcatraz threatens one of the most ecologically significant and fragile landscapes in North America. The proposed development site is surrounded by sensitive habitats that are already under increasing pressure from climate change, invasive species, and human encroachment. The heavy infrastructure and increased activity associated with a high-security detention camp — including lighting, road traffic, noise pollution, water discharge, and waste generation — would further fragment wildlife corridors and degrade ecosystems protected under federal and state law.

There are also serious questions about how such a site would protect any semblance of due process for immigrants. Will those detained in this Everglades detention camp have access to lawyers? Will loved ones be able to visit and keep in touch with those in detention? Will there be any oversight by third-party groups on the conditions at this detention camp and the treatment of those detained there? Considering the horrific conditions at other detention facilities in Florida such as Krome Detention Center, where overcrowding, lack of hygienic products, medical attention, lack of bathroom access, and general abuses have been detailed, the mistreatment of detained immigrants seems inevitable — and intentional.

The fiscal impact of the plan is also shocking. Miami-Dade has reportedly been offered just $20 million in compensation for land appraised at a value of $195 million, which would be paid from disaster funds allocated for responding to the extreme weather events that impact Florida with ever-increasing frequency. For Florida’s Indigenous peoples, the site is priceless sacred ground. And for all who value Florida’s nature and its critical role in the state’s ecosystem, there can be no fair exchange for the destruction of the Everglades. At the state level, the annual cost of operation for this site is an estimated $450 million. Just last month, Florida’s legislature extended its annual session several weeks due to disagreements over the state budget. And next year, the state is set to face a severe $2.8 million budget shortfall.

Authoritarianism festers when executives like Ron DeSantis are allowed to rule by decree. Even before Alligator Alcatraz, DeSantis had defined his political legacy by gleeful cruelty against immigrants. But through their inaction, local Democrats elected to office have now become complicit in dehumanization of their residents and the destruction of their shared natural resources. If there is any hope of stemming Florida’s authoritarian slide, Miami-Dade officials will have to finally stand up for their constituents and push back against those profiting from their suffering. If not, their legacy will be forever tarnished by failing to stop the humanitarian, environmental, legal, and financial devastation of the DeSantis administration.