“I think he was just referring to they’re deporting them very quickly, and that’s a good thing,” DeSantis said of Guthrie’s email.
“We don’t determine who goes into the facility ... Who they send in or don’t send in is on their decision.”
DeSantis said the “rapid removals from Alligator Alcatraz” by the Department of Homeland Security may be a result of the court ruling.
DHS confirmed that the department is moving detainees out of the Everglades site.
Department spokesman Nathaniel Madden said that despite what he called an “activist judge” who ordered the facility to be dismantled, “we are working at turbo speed on cost-effective and innovative ways to deliver on the American people’s mandate for mass deportations of criminal illegal aliens”.
“DHS is complying with this order and moving detainees to other facilities. We will continue to fight tooth-and-nail to remove the worst of the worst from American streets,” Madden said in an email.
Opponents who have kept vigils outside the gates of the facility since it opened on July 1 said busloads of detainees were being moved out last weekend.
A congressman who visited the centre last week said fewer than 350 men remained at a place that DeSantis said could eventually hold 5000 people.
The DeSantis administration seized hectares of land around an old airstrip under an immigration emergency order the governor first issued in 2023 and has renewed every year since.
He said the state was working in conjunction with DHS to deport immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and Florida law enforcement officers assisting ICE.
The relocation of the detained immigrants comes six days after a federal judge in Miami ordered the state to wind down operations in the Everglades as a result of a lawsuit filed by environmentalists and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians.
“This is a detention centre that never should have opened,” said Tania Galloni, a lawyer with Earthjustice.
Earthjustice and Friends of the Everglades sued the state and federal governments for erecting the facility without first doing an environmental assessment.
“It’s gratifying that operations have come to a close there because every day that centre operated, it was causing environmental harm,” Galloni said.
Guthrie did not respond to a request for comment.
Guthrie’s department, which is usually deployed to help the state prepare for and recover from hurricanes, used contractors and spent at least US$218 million to build the temporary site on a little-used airstrip in the Big Cypress National Preserve.
It took only eight days to put up “soft-sided tents” around chain-link cages. The site, which is near the border of Everglades National Park, has no electricity or plumbing.
It’s being run on generators that power portable air conditioners and lighting and has portable toilets.
Drinking and bathing water is trucked in several times a day, and sewage and other waste must be trucked out.
“This is a major victory for Florida’s environment and due process,” said state Representative Anna Eskamani (Democrat-Orlando), who testified in the case on environmental impacts.
“I’ve said it before and will say it again, no one should be detained in the middle of the Florida Everglades. Not only is it environmentally unsound, but it’s inhumane.”
Two separate lawsuits over the treatment of detainees and their access to lawyers are ongoing.
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