Detainees at Florida’s immigration detention center dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” have been transferred to other facilities, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said Tuesday.
“As we enter into hurricane season, ICE and the state of Florida have moved illegal aliens from the soft sided facility. For the safety of the illegal alien detainees, we transferred them to other facilities,” ICE said in a statement.
The statement didn’t say how many detainees were transferred or where they were transferred.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration opened the facility last July to support the immigration crackdown by the administration of President Donald Trump.
DeSantis was asked about the facility at a news conference Tuesday.
“The state doesn’t direct people there. It’s DHS that directs them there. And so if DHS stops directing them there, then we obviously are not just going to. It was never meant to be permanent,” he said. “I don’t think that it’s empty now, at least as of yesterday when I got briefed on it, but they’ve had tens, hundreds of billions of dollars plowed into that agency.”
The facility at a remote airstrip in Big Cypress National Preserve has been the subject of multiple lawsuits and complaints about the conditions inside.
A federal appellate court decided in April to keep the detention center open for the time being, blocking a lower court decision ordering it to wind down operations.
But reports surfaced last month that the facility’s closure could be expected as early as June.
DeSantis said the facility was always meant to be a temporary detention center and said the state is being reimbursed by the federal government for over $600 million for the facility.
“I think when we did it we thought that it would be six months to a year in terms of the necessity of it,” DeSantis said Tuesday.
