(Morgan Sweeney, The Center Square) President Donald Trump traveled to Florida Tuesday to visit ‘Alligator Alcatraz,’ the new, hastily constructed immigrant detention center that sounds like something from a science fiction novel.
“Very soon, this facility will house some of the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet,” Trump said at a panel Tuesday.
The facility – which might ultimately look more like a deportation camp – is the nearly 40-square-mile Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in Miami-Dade County. Nestled amidst the wetlands of the Big Cypress National Preserve and with a nearly 11,000-foot runway, it was selected to be quickly transformed into a deportation site. It is typically used for military training.
Hundreds of tents with beds are being set up to house about 5,000 migrants making the location America’s largest state-run deportation facility. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis used his emergency authority to assist the federal government in its mass deportation efforts by preparing the site. Running the site will reportedly cost Florida about $450 million for one year, according to a Department of Homeland Security official, to be mostly reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“This facility here is a fantastic representation of what can happen when all of government works together and when it’s accountable to the taxpayers and citizens that live here,” said DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who also visited the site Tuesday.
“This facility is exactly what I want to consider every single governor in this country to consider doing with us.”
Even though the center has been ‘stood up’ in just eight days, Noem attempted to allay the concerns of some Americans about the well-being of the migrants who will be detained there.
“I want everybody to recognize that the detention facilities that ICE adheres to is a higher standard than is required at state-level, at local department of corrections facilities,” Noem added. “This is a state-of-the-art facility – air-conditioned, isolated though, for security purposes.”
Trump framed the cost of the project not as additional expense for the federal government but as a mere redirection of taxpayer dollars that were already being used to care of migrants anyway.
“We took the FEMA money that Joe Biden allocated to pay for the free luxury hotel rooms where he [was] paying hundreds of millions of dollars in New York City, and we used it to build this project. And Ron, it was just a little fraction of that money, the money they spent on that project,” he said to the governor.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier dubbed the facility “Alligator Alcatraz,” referencing its location and the infamous high-security federal prison off the coast of San Francisco that used to house some of the country’s most dangerous criminals.
