Trump to visit ‘Alligator Alcatraz,’ Florida detention site : NPR
Heavy generators are carried out at the Dade-Collier training and transition airport last week. Trump is expected to visit the site of the new Florida immigration detention center on Tuesday.
Da Varela / Miami Herald / Tribune News Service
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Da Varela / Miami Herald / Tribune News Service
President Trump is due in Florida on Tuesday to visit what was nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz”, a controversial migrant detention center in the Everglades that the State resolved in a few days.
Florida governor Ron Desantis spoke of the president’s trip at an independent press conference on Monday.
“When the president will come tomorrow, he will be able to see … What will happen is that people will bring you there, they are not going out once they are there unless you want them to go somewhere, because, good luck to civilization,” said Desantis. “So security is incredible – natural and otherwise.”
Florida officials announced at the beginning of last week that they had obtained federal approval to build a detention center at the Dade-Collier Training and Transitioning Airport, an isolated landing track of 39 square miles located in the wetlands of the large national Cypress reserve, next to the Everglades National Park.
Its only, a track of around 11,000 feet has been widely used for training purposes, but those responsible say that it will soon welcome deportation flights.
“So, you can bring people in, they will be treated, they have an order of moving, then they can be put into queue and the federal government can fly – just on the track, just there, you literally drive them 2000 feet, put them on an airplane, then they left,” said Desantis.
The nickname of the site – invented by the Attorney General of Florida James Uthmeier – is a nod to the sad prison on the island off the coast of San Francisco and its proximity to the predators of the swamps, from the pythons to the alligators to the Mousquites.
A screenshot of a video published by the Attorney General of Florida James Uthmeier shows Dade-Collier aerodrome in the Everglades, about 55 miles west of Miami.
AP / Office of the Attorney General James Uthmeier
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AP / Office of the Attorney General James Uthmeier
Uthmeier said last week that the installation will mainly be composed of tents and trailers, without building brick and required mortar.
He said it was on the right track to open with some 5,000 beds – about half of his overall capacity – in early July, which confirmed Desantis on Monday.
“DHS approved by doing this last week and I think that tomorrow will be ready for business,” said the governor, referring to the Ministry of Homeland Security.
The agency supervises the repression of the Trump administration against illegal immigration, including by increasing deportations and arrests and by fixing a daily quota of 3,000 arrests.
The administration wants more than double its existing number of beds for the detention of migrants nationwide at 100,000 and has supervised the new Florida detention center as a key element of this effort.
“We are working on profitable and innovative means to deliver on the mandate of the American people for mass deportations,” said the DHS last week. “Alligator Alcatraz will expand installations and bed space in a few days, thanks to our partnership with Florida.”
The installation will cost Florida some $ 450 million to take place for a year, according to the DHS, although a large part of this is reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). While the landing trail belongs to the county of Miami-Dade, where those in charge have seen the plan with skepticism, Desantis uses its emergency authority to carry out a tight schedule.
The Florida Republicans adopted the project, the GOP of the State now selling brand t-shirts, trucker hats and beer koozies on its website.
The project has many criticisms
The demonstrators hold signs as they protest the construction of “Alligator Alcatraz” on Saturday.
Giorgio Viera / AFP via Getty Images
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Giorgio Viera / AFP via Getty Images
Just as the configuration of the installation was quick, it had the same.
In recent days, hundreds of people representing a large coalition of concerned Floridians – from environmentalists to Aboriginal communities – have bordered the neighboring road to protest the development of the site.
Such tactics have worked in the past: the installation of Dade-collier was envisaged as the largest airport in the world before the demonstrations and an environmental journal convinced the government to stop working on the site in 1970.
This time, opponents include defenders of immigration who are concerned about a lack of surveillance in the establishment, as well as the well-being of prisoners detained in tents in the notorious summer humidity of Florida and what predictions predict will be another hurricane season above average.
State officials have declared that they write natural disaster plans of the installation, with a spokesperson for Desantis, saying to the Associated Press that it will be evacuated “if a tropical cyclone with wind speed higher than the wind rating of the temporary establishment is planned to have an impact on the area”.
The project is also opposed by Amerindian groups, who consider the region of their sacred ancestral homeland. Its site is immediately adjacent to Tamiami Trail, which welcomes 19 traditional Miccosukee and Seminole villages, said Miccosukee president Talbert Cypress, in a press release.
“Rather than miccosukee homelands being an uninhabited desert for alligators and pythons, as some have suggested, the great cypress is the traditional homeland of the tribe,” said Cypress. “The landscape has protected miccosukee and has been sowing generations.”
He said the state would save taxpayers money by moving the installation to a different place “with more existing infrastructure and less environmental and cultural impacts on the large cypress and tribal land”.
Ecologists are also concerned about the impact of the installation on the fragile Everglades ecosystem. The 1.5 million acres of wetlands shelter a variety of endangered species – including Florida Panther, the West Indian range and the American crocodile – and a vital water source for the region.
Friday, two environmental groups – Friends of the Everglades and Center for Biological Diversity – tried to block the work on the site by pursuing federal officials and states, claiming that they had not put the plan by an environmental examination required by the federal government or to the public a chance to comment.
“The hasty transformation of the site into a mass detention installation, which includes the installation of housing units, the construction of sanitation systems and food services, high -intensity industrial lighting infrastructure, diesel energy generators, substantial filling equipment altering the natural land and the supply of transport logistics (including apparent planned use of the track and deletion) clear environmental impacts “.
Desantis has minimized concerns, saying that the installation will be temporary and has “no environmental impact”. A spokesperson for the DHS described the trial as “lazy”, while the uthmery office said that it provided for such “frivolous complaints and jokes of those who oppose the application of immigration law”.
