Protesters line highway in Florida Everglades to oppose ‘Alligator Alcatraz’
A coalition of groups, ranging from environmental activists to the Amerindians, pleading for their ancestral homeland, converged on Saturday outside an landing trail in the Florida Everglades to protest the imminent construction of an immigrant detention center.
Hundreds of demonstrators bordered part of the US Highway 41 which crosses the swamps – also known as Tamiami Trail – while rolling trucks transported materials in the aerodrome. The cars passing by Klaxon in support while the demonstrators made a sign of signaling of the signs calling for the protection of the vast reserve which houses some native tribes and several endangered animal species.
Christopher McVoy, an ecologist, said he saw a constant flow of trucks on the site while he protested for hours. Environmental deterioration was a great reason why it was released on Saturday. But as a commissioner of the southern city of Florida, he said, the concerns concerning immigration raids in his city also fueled his opposition.
“The people I know are in tears and I was not far from it,” he said.
Florida officials took the front in last week by building the compound called “Alligator Alcatraz” in the molers of the Everglades.
The government has accelerated the project under the emergency powers of an executive decree issued by Governor Ron Desantis who approaches what he considers an illegal immigration crisis. This ordinance allows the State to bypass certain purchasing laws and that is why construction continued despite the objections of the mayor of the county of Miami-Dade, Daniella Levine Cava and local activists.
The installation will have temporary structures such as heavy tents and trailers to house detained immigrants. The State estimates that in early July, it will have 5,000 immigration detention beds in operation.
The Amerindian leaders of the region saw construction as an encroachment on their country of sacred origin, which caused the protest on Saturday. In Big Cypress National Preserte, where the landing trail is located, 15 traditional miccosukee and Seminole villages, as well as ceremony and burial land and other gathering sites, remain.
Others have raised human rights concerns about what they condemn as the inhuman housing of immigrants. The concerns about environmental impacts were also at the forefront, as groups such as the Center for Biological Diversity and the Friends of the Everglades filed a complaint on Friday to stop the detention center plans.
“Everglades are a vast interconnected system of navigable waterways and wetlands, and what happens in a field can have damaged impact downstream,” said Eve Samples, executive director of the Friends of the Everglades. “It is therefore really important that we have a clear meaning of any impact on wetlands on the site.”
Bryan Griffin, spokesperson for Desantis, said on Friday in response to the dispute that the installation was a “staging operation necessary for mass deportations located at a pre-existing airport which will have no impact on the environment.”
Until the site undergoes a complete environmental examination and public comments, depending on environmental groups, construction should stop. The rapid establishment of the establishment is “overwhelming evidence” according to which the state and federal agencies hope that it will be “too late” to reverse its actions if they are ordered by a court, said Elise Bennett, a main lawyer of the Center for Biological Diversity working on the case.
