COLLIER COUNTY, Fla. – Processing is set to start Wednesday at the controversial state-built migrant detention facility dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.”
“Alligator Alcatraz will be checking in hundreds of criminal illegal aliens tonight,” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said on social media Wednesday evening. “Next stop: back to where they came from.”
6 p.m. report:
Hours ahead of their anticipated arrival, Florida Department of Transportation Employees were seen installing signs reading “Alligator Alcatraz.”
A Local 10 News crew saw several big rigs carrying supplies into the facility, including additional chain link fencing and water tanks.
The facility is located at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport off the Tamiami Trail.
President Donald Trump, who has championed a mass deportation policy, visited the site Tuesday.
The facility will cost Florida approximately $450 million annually, primarily funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and will use renovated FEMA trailers.
Critics have raised environmental concerns.
“This is not only dangerous, we have spent 25 years investing billions of dollars restoring the Florida Everglades and they’re dropping a lot of infrastructure, electricity, piping, water in the middle of all of that effort,” U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Florida, said on CNN. “It’s going to upend decades of environmental restoration.”
Lawmakers react:
In an interview with Local 10 News Washington Bureau reporter Ben Kennedy, Wasserman Schultz echoed her earlier comments, calling the facility “a complete waste of money.”
“I think they are going to have trouble getting 3,000 detainees there,” she said. “That is twice ― $150,000 per detainee ― that is twice the national average for ICE detention.”
U.S. Rep. Carlos Gimenez, R-Florida, who toured the facility, told Kennedy he backs the facility.
“The swamp surrounds it, but it’s not ― it’s not the Everglades, environmental issues, I don’t have any," Gimenez said.
The Republican Party of Florida is selling “Alligator Alcatraz-themed merchandise, to include trucker hats and beer koozies, amid a palpable sense of excitement from Trump’s loyalists who support the mass deportation policy.
Officials with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security say they’re focusing on “criminal illegal aliens.”
However, administration officials have presented a broad definition of that term to say that those in the country illegally are criminals.
