Florida AG says hundreds of immigrants to be jailed at Alligator Alcatraz Wednesday night
Alligator Alcatraz was built in eight days at the Dade Collier Training and Transition Airport in Collier County.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier posted on X, formerly Twitter, that "Alligator Alcatraz will be checking in hundreds of criminal illegal aliens tonight." His post, about 5:30 p.m. July 2, then said: "Next Stop: back to where they came from."
The immigrant detention center, 44 miles south of Naples off U.S. 41 and 54 miles west of Miami, is scheduled to hold up to 3,000 detainees temporarily. Banded with more than five miles of barbed wire, the tent city-type facility boasts 200 security cameras and will be staffed by 1,000 and guarded by 400 more.
President Donald Trump and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem toured the facility Tuesday, July 1, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. They were joined by Uthmeier, Naples Congressman Byron Donalds, and Florida Division of Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie for a roundtable on illegal immigration after the tour.
Meantime, far from the VIPs and outside the entrance on U.S. 41/Tamiami Trail, protesters, a couple of supporters and a media frenzy were taking place.
Friends of the Everglades in Stuart and the Center for Biological Diversity filed a federal lawsuit to stop the detention center from being built and opened to confine people who are detained in immigration raids.
The suit was filed in U.S. District Court against the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Florida Division of Emergency Management, and Miami-Dade County. The plan has gone through no environmental review as required under federal law, and the public has had no opportunity to comment, the lawsuit states.
DeSantis pushed forward saying the state is using emergency powers to seize the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport away from Miami-Dade local county government. Using 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 permitted the state to seize the land and build the detention center.
It took eight days to get the site ready and build the air-conditioned tents.
Dade Collier Training and Transition Airport is a 39-square-mile airport facility with a 10,500-foot runway that was meant to be a six-runway commercial airport in the 1960s but the idea was abandoned because of environmental concerns.
It's in the long-protected Big Cypress National Preserve just outside the Collier County community of Ochopee.
J. Kyle Foster is a growth and development reporter for the Naples Daily News and The News-Press, part of the USA TODAY Network.
This article originally appeared on Naples Daily News: Hundreds of immigrants headed to Alligator Alcatraz FL detention site
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