Florida Governor Ron DeSantis says Florida will convert Baker Correctional Institution into a migrant detention centre for up to 1300 detainees. Photo / Getty Images
The US of state of Florida will use an old prison to set up a second migrant detention centre with capacity for up to 1300 detainees, Governor Ron DeSantis has announced as part of his aggressive stance on immigration.
Converting the Baker Correctional Institution in north Florida will cost US$6 million ($10.1m) and take “two to three weeks”, officials said. The plan is for a “dormant” part of the prison, which currently has about 400 inmates, to soon hold people arrested in Florida under the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
DeSantis opened the first state migrant detention facility virtually overnight in early July and announced that Alligator Alcatraz, located at an old air strip in an isolated area next to Everglades National Park, could hold as many as 5000 people. The site has about 1000 detainees now.
The price tag for the governor’s new centre, dubbed “Deportation Depot”, will be a fraction of the US$450m ($760.5m) cost for Alligator Alcatraz and has the advantage of what DeSantis called “ready-made infrastructure”. State officials issued a plan in May to set up detention centres at existing facilities such as prisons and Camp Blanding, the headquarters for the Florida National Guard near Jacksonville.
Alligator Alcatraz was not part of that plan, and after it was opened, DeSantis said he wanted to wait to see how quickly a second location might be needed. This week, he described demand for another location as “ramping up”.
“This was something that was very appealing from that perspective, because it would require us to do a lot less in standing up than we would at Blanding and far less than we had to do at Alligator Alcatraz,” DeSantis said at a news conference in front of the Baker County prison, located in the small town of Sanderson, between Jacksonville and Tallahassee along Interstate 90.
While the prison doesn’t include a runway, he noted that it is near an airport.
“And so here you got Lake City [Gateway] Airport 15 minutes down the road, and I think it’s very, very convenient - not as convenient as Alligator Alcatraz, where it’s literally just one big facility, but about as close as we can get,” DeSantis said.
In the six weeks since what DeSantis refers to as a “makeshift facility” opened in the Everglades, Alligator Alcatraz has been beset by problems and expensive logistical challenges. Its portable toilets have backed up, and its chain-link cells flooded during heavy rains. Swarms of mosquitoes have attacked detainees and staff alike.
The first deportations from there began in late July under what DeSantis termed an “aggressive” schedule.
Despite the physical issues and pending lawsuits, the site has become a symbol of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L Noem has said that several other states might use it as a model.
Critics said the location and relatively low cost of the latest detention facility proves that building a temporary centre in protected wetlands in South Florida was unnecessary.
“They are spending $6 million on this, which also shows us how much of a big expensive grift the Everglades Detention Camp has been,” state Representative Anna Eskamani wrote on social media.
DeSantis has used an ongoing state-of-emergency declaration – first issued two years ago – to award no-bid contracts to companies helping to build, staff and maintain Alligator Alcatraz.
Eskamani called the new site in North Florida “another dumb-named facility” and said the state may have been motivated by pending lawsuits to open a new detention centre despite Alligator Alcatraz being far below capacity. Environmental groups and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians have sued to shut down the Everglades centre, as have civil rights attorneys on behalf of detainees who they say lack access to legal counsel and are suffering from poor conditions at the facility.
Last week in Miami, US District Judge Kathleen Williams ordered a two-day pause on new construction at Alligator Alcatraz. She said Wednesday that she expects to rule within a week on environmentalists’ request to stop operations there entirely.
“This is very likely motivated by the risk of the Everglades Immigration Detention Camp closing via court order,” Eskamani noted.
“This was something that was very appealing from that perspective, because it would require us to do a lot less in standing up than we would at Blanding and far less than we had to do at Alligator Alcatraz,” DeSantis said at a news conference in front of the Baker County prison, located in the small town of Sanderson, between Jacksonville and Tallahassee along Interstate 90.
While the prison doesn’t include a runway, he noted that it is near an airport.
“And so here you got Lake City [Gateway] Airport 15 minutes down the road, and I think it’s very, very convenient – not as convenient as Alligator Alcatraz, where it’s literally just one big facility, but about as close as we can get,” DeSantis said.