Florida Concentration Camp in Everglades Gets First Inmates

A concentration camp in the Florida Everglades hastily built of tents and cages made of cyclone fencing received its first inmates.

The camp was built in eight days at the little-used Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport by the state of Florida to hold up to 5000 immigrants detained by the federal government. It is reputedly the brainchild of Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier. It has over 200 security cameras, 28,000 feet of barbed wire and 400 security staff.

Operating it will cost the state $450 million per year, which the federal government will reimburse, raiding the Federal Emergency Management Agency budget for the funds.

Each cage will hold 32 inmates. It has bunk beds, three toilets with a small sink on top which also serves as the source of drinking water, and no screens to keep out the flying insects ubiquitous in the Everglades. Its floor flooded from an ordinary rainstorm before the first inmates arrived.

Police officers are allowed to send immigrants in their custody to the new camp for deportation. Because it is not operated by the federal government, federal standards will not apply for the conditions in which inmates may be kept. The inmates transferred into the camp cannot be found in the database kept by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for relatives and lawyers to use to locate the inmates.

The camp and its use are set up to avoid inspection, be too remote for local community protests, and bypass normal standards and protocols.

Environmental groups, Native American tribes and the politically liberal raised objections ever since the place began to be thrown together. They said it threatened the delicate Everglades ecosystem, occupies land sacred to Native Americans, and will be cruel for people detained there due to heat and mosquitoes.

Signage identifies it as Alligator Alcatraz, playing on Donald Trump’s jokes that alligators will eat anyone who escapes. People posed with the sign for selfies. Right wing memes circulated in social media, such as a photo of an adult and baby alligator with a caption saying tonight they’ll try that new Mexican place for dinner.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and various federal officials encouraged other states to build their own concentration camps. Some Republican-controlled states began to express interest in doing so.

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