Florida follows up Alligator Alcatraz with ‘Deportation Depot’
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Diverging Reports Breakdown
Florida follows up Alligator Alcatraz with ‘Deportation Depot’
The state of Florida is building a $6m detention centre in the state’s south. The facility will be used to house immigration detainees. The state has been struggling with staffing shortages in its immigration detention facility in the south of the state for more than two years. The new detention centre is expected to be open by the end of the year, but it could be open for up to a year before it is fully operational. It will be the first of its kind in Florida, and the second in the country.
Mr DeSantis touted the relative ease of setting up the north facility at a pre-existing prison, estimating the build-out cost to be $6m. That’s compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars the state has committed to construct the vast network of tents and trailers at the south facility in the rugged and remote Florida swamp.
“This part of the facility is not being used right now for the state prisoners. It just gives us an ability to go in, stand it up quickly, stand it up cheaply,” Mr DeSantis said of the state prison, calling the site “ready-made”.
It could take two to three weeks to get the facility operational, according to Kevin Guthrie, the director of the Florida division of emergency management, the agency in charge of building the immigration facilities.
Staffing handled by National Guard
The state had announced plans to “temporarily” close the prison in 2021, because of persistent staffing shortages.
“A building that’s been dormant now for a couple of years is going to have some unforeseen challenges,” Mr Guthrie said when estimating the construction timeline.
Staffing at the site will be handled by the National Guard and state contractors “as needed,” Mr DeSantis said. The state’s National Guard had been called on to help run the state’s prisons for more than two years due to chronic staff shortages, before being mobilised to support the state’s immigration enforcement efforts.
Mr DeSantis pledged that detainees at the new facility will have “the same services” that are available at the state’s first detention centre.
Attorneys for detainees at the Everglades facility have called the conditions there deplorable, writing in a court filing that some detainees are showing symptoms of Covid-19 without being separated from the general population.
Rainwater floods their tents and officers go cell-to-cell pressuring detainees to sign voluntary removal orders before they are allowed to consult their attorneys, they claim.