When members of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration first floated the idea of building a sprawling immigration detention center at a little-used airfield in an isolated stretch of the Florida Everglades, they touted the proposal as a “one-stop shop” and an “efficient, low-cost opportunity” for the state to help carry out President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown.
“You don’t need to invest that much,” to secure the perimeter of the site, Attorney General James Uthmeier said in a promotional video posted to social media last June, complete with a hard rock soundtrack.
“People get out, there’s not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons,” he said. “Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.”
Despite the initial sales pitch, state officials have burned through more than $1 million a day to operate “Alligator Alcatraz,” a figure first reported by The Florida Trib, with the businesses of major GOP donors among those netting multi-million dollar contracts. Projections of the facility’s overall costs have exceeded $1 billion and a long-promised $608 million federal reimbursement has yet to materialize, though state officials maintain that the feds will eventually pay Florida back.
Now, less than a year after the tent-and-trailer facility first opened, private vendors hired by the state to build the site have been told to prepare to dismantle it, with detainees being moved out ahead of the June 1 start of hurricane season, as first reported by the New York Times, which pointed to federal officials’ concerns that the cost of running the remote compound has exceeded its usefulness.
DeSantis continues to defend the facility, which he said has helped deport 22,000 people. The governor has acknowledged that state and federal officials have discussed closing the site, though he said he hasn’t gotten any “official word” and that the compound was always meant to be temporary. Uthmeier, his former chief of staff who is credited with coming up with the original proposal for the site, continues to sell “Alligator Alcatraz” branded merchandise on his campaign website.
“We’ve saved taxpayers money,” DeSantis told reporters at a press event in Titusville on Wednesday. “We’ve saved taxpayers from medical care and schooling and all these different things that you end up footing the bill for when you have an open border.”
As legislators in Tallahassee are locked in back-and-forth negotiations over the state budget – debating whether to fund line items and special projects totaling as little as $6,000 – GOP leaders have downplayed questions about who will ultimately pay for the multi-million-dollar facility and whether they may have to set aside more funds to cover the bills.
“That’s last year’s budget,” said state Rep. Jason Shoaf, chair of the House budget subcommittee overseeing emergency management. “We’re working on how we’re appropriating the dollars this year.”
With little involvement by local officials and little oversight by state lawmakers, the costs of the facility mounted due to the sheer scale of basic infrastructure needed to support some 1,400 daily detainees and hundreds of staff at the site, which is surrounded by environmentally sensitive wetlands. Workers have trucked in trailers, generators, pop-up kitchens and mobile showers, and hauled out tons of human waste – an estimated 45,000 gallons of wastewater a day.
Meanwhile, the multi-billion emergency fund that DeSantis used to build the facility has expired, leaving the Florida Division of Emergency Management temporarily without a key revenue source as hurricane season looms.
Separately, the division, which oversaw the construction of the Everglades facility, is fighting a federal lawsuit alleging the agency shortchanged contractors millions of dollars for work related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Asked Friday about reports that the state has missed payments to Alligator Alcatraz vendors, DeSantis directed a reporter to FDEM.
“I’ve got bigger fish to fry than cutting checks to vendors,” DeSantis said.
On the last day of this year’s regular session, lawmakers voted to reauthorize the Emergency Preparedness and Response Fund, with significant new guardrails to curtail the governor’s emergency powers following the spending spree. That bill has yet to be formally sent to DeSantis’ desk for his review, and lawmakers have still not agreed how much money to add to the fund.
“Eventually the governor will get the bill. Eventually that funding will be available,” said state Sen. Ed Hooper, the chamber’s budget chief. “And I hope we don’t have to spend a nickel of it.”
Critics have said the timing of the reported closure is no coincidence, as a lawsuit brought by environmentalists against the facility heads back before a federal judge who had previously ordered it shut down.
“This political stunt was a failure by every measure,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, one of the groups that filed suit. “Our government failed the Everglades and failed taxpayers, and history will remember.”
Kate Payne is The Florida Trib’s state government reporter. She can be reached at kate.payne@floridatrib.org.
