Florida governor Ron DeSantis spent $1.2m of taxpayers’ money per day to open and operate the harsh immigration detention facility known as ‘Alligator Alcatraz’, court records obtained by the investigative news website the Florida Tributary have revealed. The state may now be left to foot at least $608m of costs after a shift in position by Donald Trump’s administration over federal reimbursement.
James Uthmeier, DeSantis’s former chief of staff and Florida’s unelected attorney general, admitted last week that a federal reimbursement grant the governor had insisted was secure might not be delivered. In a court filing, Uthmeier and fellow defendants conceded that Florida took the risk that federal funding would not materialise, having relied on verbal assurances from the federal government. The justice department subsequently indicated that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) could disallow some or all of the grant request made by Florida’s emergency management department, which operates the jail in the Everglades.
The funding dispute is linked to a long-running lawsuit seeking to close the facility permanently. Plaintiffs, including Friends of the Everglades and other environmental and civil rights groups, argued that the promise of federal funding exposed the jail to federal environmental laws. Miami district court judge Kathleen Williams agreed and ordered the facility shut in August, but a three-member appeals panel blocked that ruling in October. The panel, including a judge whose attorney husband works for a company with business ties to the DeSantis administration, ruled that because the jail was built using only state funds, federal regulations did not apply.
Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, said the facility had been planned, built and operated in secret, concealing impacts on the Big Cypress National Preserve and the Everglades. “We won’t stop fighting until it’s safe and the government complies with all environmental laws,” she said. Noelle Damico of the Workers Circle, which has organised weekly vigils at the jail, said the developments were unsurprising, citing “lawlessness, woeful unaccountability, and apparent corruption” as eroding trust in government.
The Tributary’s findings also point to murky finances, including allegations that tens of millions of dollars in no-bid contracts were awarded secretly to political allies. The Associated Press reported in July that officials had used an executive order and emergency declaration to seize a remote, barely used airport on ancestral Indigenous land owned by Miami-Dade county, while already sending in preferred contractors.
