Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the closure Thursday of the controversial swampland migrant detention center dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.”
The facility, built in less than 10 days on the site of an old airport deep in the Florida Everglades, opened last July after DeSantis, a Republican, offered to assist the Trump administration in providing bed space for migrants slated for deportation.
“We stood up Alligator Alcatraz to help address the failures of the Biden administration on immigration enforcement and bolster the Trump administration’s efforts to resume interior enforcement and removal operations,” DeSantis said in a statement.
“Alligator Alcatraz has fulfilled this mission.”
DeSantis said the Sunshine State “led the way in increasing much-needed detention capacity … removing thousands of the most dangerous criminal liens from our country.”
“Our detention operations support has led to nearly 30,000 additional deportations and Florida accounts for more than 40% of all state/local immigration arrests nationwide,” he continued.
A total of 21,000 people were deported through the facility, according to DeSantis.
All detainees still awaiting deportation have been moved to other federal facilities and the tent structures where migrants were housed at Alligator Alcatraz will be torn down, the governor said.
Critics of the facility argued that conditions were inhumane; migrants were mistreated; and that the temporary structures posed a threat to the wetlands and endangered species in the Florida Everglades.
“They did a really good job of keeping this contained, so that it didn’t have that impact on the surrounding environment, especially given what we’ve done to support Everglades restoration,” DeSantis said at a press conference announcing the closure.
“When this was proposed as this possible short-term solution, that was clearly one of my questions. I was like, ‘Well, what’s that going to mean?’ And they were saying, ‘No, here’s how we do, here’s how we contain it,’ and they did.”
DeSantis said he expected the federal government to reimburse Florida for the $1.2 billion cost of building and running the facility.
Border czar Tom Homan recounted how DeSantis got on the phone with him “within days” of President Trump taking office, offering to help with the illegal immigration crackdown at a time when federal resources for carrying out mass deportations weren’t yet in place.
“He stepped up in a time of need,” Homan said at the press conference, “and he continues to step up.”
