On June 20, nearly three weeks into the Atlantic hurricane season, Florida disaster-management officials assembled a group of emergency relief contractors in Tallahassee and asked them to do something they had never done before.
Governor Ron DeSantis wanted to construct a camp in the Everglades that could hold thousands of immigrants detained in President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign. To get it built fast, Kevin Guthrie, the head of the state’s emergency-management division, asked the firms to start moving tents, trailers and toilets onto an abandoned airstrip near Miami within days.
The state-run facility, nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz,” was inaugurated with 3,000 beds, with the ability to scale up in the coming weeks and months as needed.
Trump visited the facility on Tuesday with DeSantis and other Florida officials, as well as Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary.
“You have a lot of cops in the form of alligators,” Trump said. “I wouldn’t want to run through the Everglades for long. It will keep people where they’re supposed to be.”
Alligator Alcatraz has been cheered by conservative pundits, and the Florida GOP is selling Alligator Alcatraz t-shirts, hats and beer koozies. It has also drawn protests from environmentalists and critics of Trump’s policies. Scores of protesters were at the site when Trump visited, as a three-foot alligator laid half-submerged in swampy waters nearby.
DeSantis sees Alligator Alcatraz as the first of multiple state-run immigrant detention centers. According to a planning document reviewed by Bloomberg News, emergency contractors in the state could build detention capacity for as many as 10,000 people. Construction is expected to begin on a second camp near Jacksonville, in northeast Florida, after July 4, Guthrie said on Tuesday.
Florida first pitched the Trump administration on the plan for “makeshift detention space” about a month ago, and DeSantis offered Florida National Guard members to serve as immigration judges, the governor said earlier this week.
Alligator Alcatraz is the latest manifestation of DeSantis’s quest to play a high-profile role in Trump’s immigration dragnet. Already, he’s pushed Florida cities to help US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on arrests, promising that local leaders who resist will pay a political price.
Read More: Miami Chafes at Trump’s ICE Raids and ‘Alligator Alcatraz’
“Blue states are trying to sabotage” Trump’s immigration policies, DeSantis said, but Florida has been “really full throttle saying, you know, that we’re not going to solve this problem unless we’re part of the team.”
No other states are known to be constructing detention camps to assist in Trump’s deportation efforts, which have pushed detention facilities beyond capacity. Some people who have recently been detained by ICE, including in Miami, have described extreme overcrowding.
Five of the 10 people who have died in ICE custody since January had been detained in Florida, according to detainee death reports and agency news releases. Last week, Isidro Perez, a 75-year-old Cuban man who’d immigrated to the US in 1966, died after he reported chest pains while being held at the Krome Service Processing Center in Miami.
ICE had more than 56,000 people in detention as of mid-June, according to a Bloomberg analysis of the latest data available, but the agency is only funded to hold about 41,500. The Trump administration has identified tent providers, private prison companies and disaster-relief firms to help expand its immigrant detention capabilities.
Read More: ICE Looks to Tent Providers in a Deportation Push Worth Billions
Using contractors who’ve already been vetted by Florida’s Division of Emergency Management allowed DeSantis to sidestep time-consuming competitive bidding requirements, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The Alligator Alcatraz contractors include SLSCO Ltd., a Galveston, Texas-based construction firm that built parts of the first Trump administration’s border wall; Garner Environmental Services, a disaster-relief company that has worked with New York City on migrant care; Doodie Calls, a portable-toilet provider; and CDR Companies, which will run medical services and did some site preparation, according to the three people, who asked not to be identified discussing information that hasn’t been made public.
CDR confirmed that the company is working on the project but declined to comment further, citing nondisclosure agreements. Representatives of the other three companies didn’t respond to requests for comment for this article.
Detention Standards
Private prison operators such as Geo Group Inc. and CoreCivic Inc. have traditionally dominated immigration detention in the US. Their facilities are required to meet federal standards that dictate everything from access to phone calls to food service and medical care.
Details about Florida’s planned detention facilities are laid out in a redacted version of DeSantis’s 37-page Immigration Enforcement Operations Plan that was reviewed by Bloomberg News. In that document, it says the Department of Homeland Security could waive some ICE detention standards to “streamline the setup of detention facilities.”
“We believe that the nature and vast scope of the illegal alien presence deserves a rethinking of detention processes and standards,” the plan says, adding that the standards are so limiting that many county jails in Florida can’t meet them.
Florida is home to a large population of migrants who are at risk of deportation because of Trump’s changes to US immigration policies, including his move to cancel temporary humanitarian protections for immigrants from countries including Cuba, Venezuela and Haiti.
“Immigration detention is not criminal detention, it’s not calculated to punish people,” said Anthony Enriquez, vice president of US advocacy and litigation at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, which has long pushed for better conditions inside ICE facilities. “It’s supposed to have higher standards of care — it’s not supposed to be brutalizing.”
The state is planning to spend around $245 per bed per day at Alligator Alcatraz, according to a DHS spokesperson, who said the state can seek reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
One person who attended the June 20 meeting between Florida’s emergency department and its contractors said representatives of multiple vendors expressed concern that the state’s planned spending was too low to adequately meet federal standards.
The state representatives said they didn’t yet have a plan in the case of a hurricane threatening the area, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing the private meeting.
Guthrie, the Florida emergency-management official, told reporters at the site on Tuesday that the Alligator Alcatraz structure could withstand category-2 winds and that the state has evacuation plans in the event of a hurricane.
Building Alcatraz
On June 23, contractors began to build Alligator Alcatraz. Trailers, generators, heavy-duty tents and portable showers and bathrooms were being delivered and lined up at the site, according to aerial footage from Miami’s NBC 6 South Florida.
At the news conference Monday, DeSantis touted the facility’s rapid construction, boasting that “these guys set up this whole thing in a matter of days.” He also praised the natural security provided by the site’s remote location.
“Good luck getting to civilization,” the governor said.
Though many of the companies involved in the Alligator Alcatraz project have little to no experience with detention facilities, some have been involved in immigration-related work in other regions.
Garner Environmental took over a $432 million contract to provide migrant services in New York City after another disaster-response company allegedly mistreated and lied to migrants. SLSCO secured multiple contracts during the first Trump administration to build portions of the border wall in California, New Mexico and Texas.
Photo: Federal agents detain an individual following a hearing in immigration court in New York. (Bloomberg)
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