TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Nearly three years ago, when Hurricane Ian destroyed a bridge in southwest Florida and left residents on a barrier island with scant access to drinking water and food, Gov. Ron DeSantis leveraged his emergency authority to scramble contractors to reconstruct the bridge. It took less than three days.
Now, the Republican governor is wielding those same powers for something different: building an immigration detention center deep in the Everglades in a week.
Relying on an emergency order issued in January 2023 in response to a flood of Cuban and Haitian migrants arriving by boat in the Florida Keys, DeSantis is seizing county land, mobilizing a team of private companies to build a facility big enough to hold 3,000 detained immigrants and deploying Florida National Guard troops to secure the site. The rush of migrant arrivals ended long ago, but the order, which cites then-President Joe Biden’s “inadequate” response to immigration, has been repeatedly extended.
“This is not our first rodeo,” DeSantis told Fox News on Friday while touring an airfield owned by Miami-Dade County that has quickly been turned into a small grid of heavy-duty tents and trailers.
“The detention of illegal aliens is a little bit different,” the governor acknowledged. “But logistics, we know how to do that.”
The speed by which the state is building the detention camp — nicknamed Alligator Alcatraz in a nod to the gator-filled wetlands surrounding the site — has unnerved environmentalists as well as local and state elected leaders, some of whom are questioning whether the governor is overstepping his authority.
