Seriously, Florida's Gonna Close Its Stupid Gator Gulag Just Like That? Huh!
We'll believe it when we see the empty former airport grounds, occupied only by possums, armadillos, and grifters out of a Carl Hiaasen novel.
Florida appears to be actually following a federal judge’s order to shut down that concentration camp for immigrant detention that Gov. Ron DeSantis slapped together in the Everglades over just a few days in June.
US District Judge Kathleen Williams ruled on Wednesday that yes, the detention center must be shut down at least temporarily, and no, Florida and the US Department of Homeland Deportation may not keep abusing prisoners there while multiple lawsuits go forward. We’re sure you can still buy tacky T-shirts celebrating the place, with funny AI slop images of alligators in ICE caps waiting to eat immigrants.
The facility that DeSantis and Great Leader call “Alligator Alcatraz” — it’s the funniest rightwing joke since saying they identify as an attack helicopter! — is likely to be emptied out soon, leaving Florida stuck with the bill for at least $218 million it spent to throw together the tent prison on a former training airport in the middle of the Everglades.
The Associated Press reports that just shutting the place down will cost $15 million to $20 million, plus just about the same amount to get it back open again if courts let it reopen, according to court filings.
The Florida Division of Emergency Management will lose most of the value of the $218 million it has invested in making the airport suitable for a detention center, a state official said in court papers. […]
An Associated Press analysis of publicly available state spending data showed that Florida has signed at least $405 million in vendor contracts to build and operate the facility, which officials had initially estimated would cost $450 million a year to run. A previous AP review found that as of late July, the state had already allocated at least $245 million to run the site, which opened July 1.
That’s a lot of money to blow in two months! Gonna have to sell a lot of shitty T-shirts to recoup that!
The Alliterative Atrocity is the subject of multiple federal lawsuits; the one that Judge Williams ruled in was filed by several environmental groups and the Miccosukee Tribe, who argued that state and federal authorities ignored federal laws requiring public input, looking at alternatives, and conducting an environmental review before hastily throwing together a huge prison camp in sensitive wetlands. We know, hard to believe Trump and DeSantis would put deporting immigrants ahead of the environment.
Another lawsuit against the facility focuses on the prison’s refusal to allow detainees adequate access to the legal system. That one is still going through some jurisdictional challenges, with part of it being dismissed and the rest being moved to a different federal district court in Florida.
And last Friday, a third suit was filed by civil rights groups who argued that no more prisoners should be allowed at Banality-of-Evil Buchenwald because the place was run as haphazardly as the process by which it was built. On top of the literally shitty physical conditions, with inoperable toilets, flooded cells, mosquito infestations, and lack of water, this lawsuit also focused on the complete disregard of detainees’ rights under the Constitution:
[The lawsuit] described “severe problems” at the facility which were “previously unheard-of in the immigration system.” Detainees were being held for weeks without any charges, they had disappeared from ICE’s online detainee locator and no one at the facility was making initial custody or bond determinations, the civil rights groups said.
“Lawyers often cannot find their clients, and families cannot locate their loved ones inside ICE’s vast detention system,” the civil rights attorneys said. “Detainees have been prevented from accessing attorneys in numerous ways. Detainees without counsel have been cut off from the normal channels of obtaining a lawyer.”
What’s more, that suit argued, since immigration is a federal matter, DeSantis and the state of Florida have no authority to run Snake Sobibor or to contract the work out to private prison companies.
While DHS of course won’t answer questions about how many prisoners have been moved out of the concentration camp, a statement from the agency Thursday did say that “DHS is complying with this order and moving detainees to other facilities,” although it also should have added, “now leave us alone so we can go arrest some firefighters while they’re fighting a wildfire.”
But other information is coming out, like an email exchange between a state official and a rabbi who wanted to offer his services as a chaplain at Gator Gulag, which only sounds like the beginning of a dad joke. Kevin Guthrie, the executive director of Florida’s “Division of Emergency Management,” wrote back to the rabbi to say there won’t be any demand for chaplains there since “We are probably going to be down to 0 individuals within a few days.” Guthrie didn’t explain why the state’s version of FEMA is working on deportations instead of preparing for natural disasters, but considering DHS’s new rules aimed at making sure no disaster aid gets to undocumented people, that does seem in line with current Republican thinking.
When Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Florida) went to inspect Reptile Ravensbruck recently, NPR reports, he said he saw a whiteboard listing the number of prisoners as 336, far below the capacity DeSantis and Trump bragged the place would have.
Since then, says Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, volunteers monitoring the site have seen at least three buses containing detainees leaving the facility. “It's a relief that the state appears to be phasing out operations ... in compliance with the judge's order,” she says. “When the last detainee leaves, the state should turn off the lights and shut the door behind them, because it's not an appropriate place for a detention center.”
And while it really does appear that, for now at least, DHS and Florida really are shutting down Deportation Dachau, they continue fighting in the courts to spend tens of millions more to reopen it as soon as they can.
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or if you’d prefer to make a one-time donation, here’s your button, without any alliterative cutesiness because we ran out.
It’s odd how the US can’t afford pencils in their public school classrooms, but somehow there is always more money for the gulag.
I say we preserve it for use after the Neo-Nuremberg trials.