Crews began dismantling a state-run immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades on Monday, signaling its closure even as state and federal officials continued to say little about the shutdown of a year-old facility that they once praised on a near-daily basis.
State officials informed vendors in a call on Monday morning that they could begin “demobilizing,” or taking down, the tents, fences, trailers and other structures at the detention center, known as Alligator Alcatraz, according to three people familiar with the call. Vendors are supposed to make significant progress on the work by Wednesday, two of the people said.
The directive came days after the Department of Homeland Security said that all detainees had been transferred out of the remote center, which opened a little less than a year ago to much fanfare from President Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis, his fellow Republican.
“As we enter into hurricane season, ICE and the state of Florida have moved illegal aliens from the soft sided facility,” the department said in a statement last Tuesday, referring to the detention center. “For the safety of the illegal alien detainees, we transferred them to other facilities.”
Last year, however, thousands of detainees spent the bulk of last year’s hurricane season at the center, which became the nation’s first state-run facility to hold federal immigration detainees. The season runs from June 1 through Nov. 30.
Immigration lawyers and activists took last week’s statement from D.H.S. as the latest evidence that the facility would soon close.
On Friday, Kevin Guthrie, Florida’s emergency management chief, whose agency operates the center, insisted that it remained open. “At this point in time, we have not been told to stand down, so we are still in a posture to receive detainees,” he told reporters, according to The Miami Herald.
The Florida Division of Emergency Management did not respond to requests for comment on Monday. Monday morning’s call between state officials and the detention center’s vendors was first reported by CBS Miami.
The New York Times first reported last month that federal and state officials were considering closing the facility, which has cost Florida hundreds of millions of dollars to operate, by June.
When asked about a closure since then, Mr. DeSantis has said that the Homeland Security Department is reassessing its detention needs now that Markwayne Mullin is in place as the agency’s new secretary. The agency plans to sell or give away most of the 11 warehouses it bought to detain immigrants, The Times reported last week.
On Monday, Mr. DeSantis’s office referred questions about the center to the emergency management division. James Uthmeier, the Florida attorney general, who was instrumental in opening the center, said on Monday that he could not confirm if it was closing, though he knew that the number of detainees had been dropping.
“Alligator Alcatraz actually stayed open longer than it was intentionally planned,” he said at a news conference in Tampa. “It was never expected to be a long-term thing.”
To many who have closely followed the center over the past year, the inconsistent messaging about whether it is closing — and, if so, for what reason — has left the impression that Alligator Alcatraz, with its hefty price tag and ongoing reports of troubling conditions, has become too much of a political liability.
“It’s been an expensive failure,” said Jeff Brandes, a Republican and former state senator who now runs the Florida Policy Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization. “Nobody would say this was a success.”
The facility has cost state officials more than $1 million per day to operate, including for trucking in water and wastewater disposal. The federal government had committed to pay the state more than $600 million to defray costs, but it has provided only a fraction of that amount so far.
This year, Florida lawmakers imposed new rules on the emergency fund that the state has been using to cover the center’s operating costs. Those rules take effect on July 1, the start of Florida’s new budget year.
State officials hastily erected the detention center on a training airport about halfway between Miami and Naples, hailing it as the showcase of Florida’s cooperation with Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown. They also erected an “Alligator Alcatraz” sign on a road leading to the facility, ignoring criticism that the moniker — and jokes they made about any escapees being intercepted by alligators — was cruel.
Detainees, their relatives and their lawyers have regularly denounced what they have described as unsanitary and inhumane conditions at the center, allegations that state officials deny. Environmental advocacy groups filed a lawsuit against the state and the federal government, arguing that the facility was illegally constructed in sensitive wetlands.
Last week, after homeland security said that detainees had been moved out, a lawyer for the environmental groups vowed to continue the lawsuit over what he called the “secret Gulag in the Everglades.”
“They hope that they can slink away in the middle of the night without explaining to anyone what they did, why they did it, or how they proposed to clean up the mess that they’ve made,” the lawyer, Paul J. Schwiep, said at a virtual news conference on Wednesday. “And we don’t intend to let them get away with it.”
The post Vendors Told to Start Dismantling ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Detention Center appeared first on New York Times.
