Florida’s immigration jail known as “Alligator Alcatraz” will probably be empty of detainees within days, a state official has said, indicating compliance with a judge’s order last week that the facility must close.
The Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s administration appealed the order by federal court judge Kathleen Williams that the tented detention camp in the Florida Everglades, which attracted criticism for its harsh conditions, must be dismantled within 60 days.
But in an email reported Wednesday by the Associated Press, Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida department of emergency management, which operates the jail on behalf of the federal government, appeared to confirm it would be shuttered.
“We are probably going to be down to 0 individuals within a few days,” Guthrie wrote to Mario Rojzman, a Miami Beach rabbi who has been helping to arrange chaplaincy services.
Representatives for Rojzman confirmed the authenticity of the memo to the news agency. Guthrie’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Miami Herald had previously reported that hundreds of detainees were moved from “Alligator Alcatraz” to other immigration facilities in the state in advance of Williams’s ruling.
On Monday, protesters who have maintained an almost permanent presence at the gates of the jail reported seeing convoys of buses driving out.
Maxwell Frost, a Florida Democratic congressman, said that he was told during a tour last week that only about 300 to 350 detainees remained.
“Alligator Alcatraz” was touted by Donald Trump as a holding camp for up to 3,000 undocumented immigrants as they awaited deportation. The jail, he said, was reserved for “the most vicious people on the planet”.
Since it opened in early July after being hastily constructed in late June at a remote disused airstrip about 50 miles (80km) west of Miami, it drew waves of criticism. Several lawsuits sought its closure, and there have been claims that hundreds of those detained had no criminal records or active proceedings against them.
Williams’s ruling was a significant victory for a coalition of environmental groups and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians, who claimed the camp had caused permanent and irreparable damage to the ecologically fragile wetland and its wildlife.
Another lawsuit, filed by groups including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), claimed detainees were abused by jail staff, and that their human and constitutional rights were denied because they were refused access to attorneys and due process.
The plaintiffs said the Everglades facility was not needed, especially because Florida plans to open a second immigration detention facility in the north of the state that DeSantis has dubbed “deportation depot”.
Williams had not ruled by Wednesday on a request by attorneys for the state to stay her order of closure. In her original 82-page ruling, she said she expected the population of the facility to decline within 60 days by transferring detainees to other facilities, and once that happened, fencing, lighting and generators should be removed.
She wrote that the state and federal defendants could not bring anyone other than those who are already being detained at the facility onto the property.
The environmental groups and Miccosukee tribe had argued in their lawsuit that further construction and operations should be stopped until federal and state officials complied with federal environmental laws. Their lawsuit claimed the facility reversed billions of dollars spent over decades on environmental restoration.
State officials have signed more than $245m in contracts for building and operating the facility at a lightly used, single-runway training airport in the middle of the rugged and remote Everglades. The center officially opened on 1 July.
In their lawsuits, civil rights attorneys described “severe problems” at the facility which were “previously unheard-of in the immigration system”. Detainees were being held for weeks without any charges, had disappeared from the online detainee locator maintained by the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice), and nobody at the facility was making initial custody or bond determinations, they said.
Detainees also described worms turning up in the food, toilets that did not flush, flooding floors with fecal waste, mosquitoes and other insects everywhere and malfunctioning air conditioning that alternated the temperature between near freezing and extreme heat.
