DeSantis boasts of deporting 21,000 as notorious Alligator Alcatraz jail closes

Florida immigration jail that became byword for cruelty and cost state taxpayers $1.2m a day shuts down after a year

Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, boasted on Thursday of deporting 21,000 people from Alligator Alcatraz, as he confirmed the closure of the notorious immigration jail hastily erected in the Everglades that became a byword for cruelty and human rights abuses and environmental damage.

Standing beside Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s so-called border czar, at a press conference at the now dismantled site in Ochopee in the environmentally sensitive region in south Florida , DeSantis presented its year-long operation as a victory for the president’s aggressive immigration enforcement agenda.

“Alligator Alcatraz fulfilled the role it was designed to serve,” he said, adding that all of the detainees held there until last week had been transferred into federal immigration custody elsewhere.

“When you start talking about 21,000 folks, that without question has made our state safer, and it’s made the country safer as well,” DeSantis added.

Critics, however, said the jail run by the Florida state, on which the governor was reportedly spending $1.2m a day of Florida taxpayers’ money, was a political liability for DeSantis.

There was a groundswell that publicity over the multiplying reports of “inhumane” treatment of undocumented detainees, including physical abuse and isolation from legal representation, was becoming untenable.

“Alligator Alcatraz is now shut down due to the relentless action of thousands of people who refused to stand idly by,” said Noelle Damico, director of social justice at the Workers Circle, an advocacy group that held a 47th and final weekly “freedom vigil” outside the remote jail on Sunday.

“We denounced the brutality, lawlessness, chaos and corruption that was Alligator Alcatraz. We, the people, made it politically toxic. We brought it to an end here, and we will bring it to an end everywhere.”

DeSantis did not address the treatment of the detainees, but maintained that most of those who passed through the tented jail were criminals. It was hastily constructed last summer at a mostly defunct municipal training airport, in order to allow frequent deportation flights.

“Those would be people, by and large, who would have been released back into society in Florida had this space not been there,” he said, before citing 10 names of individual detainees he said had “massive rap sheets” including sexual assault of minors, drugs trafficking, fraud, DUI and domestic battery.

Homan was even more forthright, in effect calling reports of mistreatment of detainees a hoax, and saying, without evidence, that up to 70% of those arrested were criminals or had pending charges.

Homan said: “People say this administration is inhumane. Let me tell you something, illegal immigration right now is down 97% at the border. That means less women are being sexually assaulted making that journey. That means less children are dying making that journey. That means less fentanyl is getting into the country to kill Americans. That means less national security threats are being let in this country.

“The targeting of public safety threats and national security threats are the priority of the president, and we’re achieving that.”

Evidence collected by media investigations during the year that Alligator Alcatraz was in operation, however, contradicts the assertions of DeSantis and Homan, and especially of Trump, who previously said that the facility was reserved for “the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet”.

Hundreds of detainees had no criminal records or charges , it was disclosed last July, with their only alleged violation that of being in the US without legal documents, a civil offense. The majority of people detained in federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) jails around the country have no criminal convictions . Violating immigration law is a civil offense in the US.

DeSantis briefly spoke about the environmental impact at the site, which is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit brought by several advocacy groups and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians who claim the jail has harmed the fragile Everglades wetlands with pollution and the acres of new slabs of concrete on which its tents were placed.

“They did a really good job of keeping this contained, so that it didn’t have that impact on the surrounding environment, especially given what we’ve done to support Everglades restoration,” DeSantis said.

“When this was proposed as this possible short-term solution, that was clearly one of my questions. I was like, well, what’s that going to mean? And they were saying, no, here’s how we do, here’s how we contain it, and they did.”

The governor said he was also still expecting that the federal government would reimburse Florida for up to $1bn spent on the jail, but was unable to give a timeline.

Damico said the closure of Alligator Alcatraz represented a humiliation for the DeSantis and Trump administrations, but forced the immigration fight to other places, such as the governor’s touted “deportation depot” at a former state prison in Baker county.

“For their own political ends, they tried to convince Americans to hate and fear immigrants and tolerate or justify brutality toward them. They failed,” she said.

“They failed here and will continue to fail across the nation because ordinary people said, ‘no, this is not who we are. This is not the America we will become.’

“Together we stood as immigrants and citizens alike, reflecting the strength of America, a belief in our constitution, and the commitment to go the distance, shoulder-to-shoulder for freedom and justice.”