Photo credit: CBS News
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has said the dreaded “Alligator Alcatraz” will remain as a model for state-run migrant detention centers.
KWTX reports that she said she hopes to launch a handful of similar detention centers in multiple airports and jails across the country, in the coming months.
The Department of Homeland Security strategy builds on the opening of a 3,000-bed immigration detention center at a jetport in South Florida last month. Called Alligator Alcarez by state and federal officials, the makeshift facility will cost an estimated $450 million to operate in its first year. The tents and trailers at Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport are surrounded by 39 square miles of isolated swampland, boasting treacherous terrain and swampland.
The place was visited by President Donald Trump last month. When he saw the rows of bunk beds lined up behind the chain fences encircled by razor wire, he joked to reporters that “we’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator if they escape prison.”
When asked if the facility was to be a model of what’s to come, he replied that he’d like to see similar operations in “many states.”
Noem said the Alligator Alcatraz was “much better” than the current detention prototype, which largely contracts out its Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention capacity to for-profit prison companies and county jails. ICE is an agency that falls under DHS. The model relies on intergovernmental service agreements (IGSAs) and signed between individual localities. She called the Florida facility a cost-effective option.
She also said keeping ICE detention contracts to a duration of under five years is now “the model we’ve pushed for.”
However, the facility has come under fire from attorneys claiming both the Trump and DeSantis administrations are holding detainees without charge or access to immigration courts, thereby violating their constitutional rights. Lawyers and experts have also called into question the legality of a state-run immigration detention center given the federal government’s authority over immigration enforcement.
Detainees held at the facility have also claimed unsanitary and inhumane conditions, including food with maggots, denial of religious rights and limited access to legal assistance and water. But Florida officials have denied those accusations
