Environmental groups, immigration rights activists and a Native American tribe have decried the construction of a harsh outdoor migrant detention camp in the Florida Everglades billed by state officials as “Alligator Alcatraz”.
Crews began preparing the facility at a remote, largely disused training airfield this week in support of the Trump administration’s aggressive goal of arresting and incarcerating 3,000 undocumented migrants every day.
It is among a number of controversial new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) jails appearing around the country as the number of detentions by the agency surges dramatically.
On Friday, two of the groups, Friends of the Everglades, and the Center for Biological Diversity, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Miami seeking to halt the project, arguing that a required environmental study had not taken place.
Florida officials say the Everglades camp, which has been criticized by the Democratic congressman Maxwell Frost as “a cruel spectacle”, will open in the first week of July – a month in which south Florida’s daily heat index regularly exceeds 100F (37.8C).
Initially, about 100 Florida national guard troops will provide “security” at the base, a spokesperson said on Thursday, a number likely to increase as its detainee population grows.
Paid for by Florida taxpayers and homeland security department funds, the project came about after the state seized the 39-square-mile site from its owners, Miami-Dade county, under emergency powers enacted by the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. It now faces staunch opposition from an alliance of groups.
These groups say housing up to 5,000 detainees in tents in the heat and humidity of the Florida summer, at a site surrounded by marshes and wetlands containing alligators, Burmese pythons and swarms of mosquitoes, amounts to inhumane treatment.
James Uthmeier, the state’s hard-right attorney general, laughed off the criticism.
“We believe in the swamp down here in Florida. We are swamp creatures,” he told the conservative podcast host Benny Johnson in a reveal of the scheme on Monday that bordered on mockery.
“There’s no way in and no way out. The perimeter’s already set by Mother Nature. People get out, there’s not much waiting for them other than pythons and alligators.”
The airfield’s 11,000ft runway, he said, was perfect for large planes bringing in scores of undocumented persons detained by Ice from all over the US.
“There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit,” said Uthmeier, who was held in civil contempt by a federal judge this month for continuing to enforce a state immigration law she blocked.
The Miccosukee Tribe of Indians condemned the use of its ancestral lands in the Big Cypress national preserve for detention purposes, citing parallels with the government’s mass roundup and forced removal of Native Americans in the 19th century.
“The state would save substantial taxpayer dollars by pursuing its goals at a different location with more existing infrastructure and less environmental and cultural impacts to the Big Cypress and Tribal lands,” Talbert Cypress, chair of the Miccosukee Tribe, said in a statement posted to social media.
Environmental fears have been raised by, among others, the mayor of Miami-Dade, Daniella Levine Cava, who sent the Guardian a statement detailing her “significant concerns about the scope and scale of the state’s effort”.
She said the project would have a “potentially devastating impact to the Everglades”, and noted that the state and federal government had invested billions of dollars in Everglades restoration efforts, some of which she fears could now be undone.
“We continue to have concerns about how a facility at this scale can operate without impacts to the surrounding ecosystem,” she said.
Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, said the site was found unsuitable for development in the 1960s, when ambitious plans to make it a six-runway Everglades jetport with monorail service ferrying tourists to Florida’s east and west coasts, was thwarted by environmental activism.
“All the reasons this was terrible back then still exist today,” she said, warning it posed “an existential threat to the Everglades”.
“These are really valuable and protected Everglades wetlands, and if we move forward with a thousand-bed prison detention facility, whether it’s temporary or not, there will be impacts from ancillary development, water and sewer impacts, water supply needs, traffic impacts. Those impacts were analyzed a half-century ago, and we know that they would be negative.
“Combined with the assault on Florida state parks last summer, and the rock mine proposal that we’re currently fighting in the Everglades, it suggests the DeSantis administration is out of touch with what Floridians want, which is to protect the Everglades and our last remaining green spaces.”
Neither the Florida department of emergency management, which is managing construction of the camp, nor Uthmeier’s office responded to requests for comment.
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Immigration advocates, meanwhile, say the Everglades camp represents a sinister ramping up of the DeSantis’s already vigorous endorsement of Donald Trump’s agenda. The Tampa Bay Times reported on Wednesday that a second new detention facility, at the Florida national guard’s Camp Blanding training center west of Jacksonville, was in the works.
“He just always has to throw red meat to his base, always has to generate controversy and polarization,” said Thomas Kennedy, spokesperson for the Florida Immigrant Coalition.
“So obviously, they pick the most controversial site possible, right in the Everglades, using language like the alligators and the snakes, making it seem like it’s going to be like a medieval castle with a moat.
“There’s no adequate running water or plumbing facilities. Uthmeier is out there saying we don’t need to build brick and mortar because we’ll just throw some tents up in the middle of the swamp, in July, in hurricane season, with the heat, no proper infrastructure and the mosquitoes.
“It’s designed to enact suffering.”
Frost, in a statement, called Uthmeier “a Trump sycophant”, and said the Everglades project was “disgusting”.
“Donald Trump, his administration, and his enablers have made one thing brutally clear: they intend to use the power of government to kidnap, brutalize, starve, and harm every single immigrant they can,” he said.
“They target migrants, rip families apart, and subject people to conditions that amount to physical and psychological torture. Now, they want to erect tents in the blazing Everglades sun and call it immigration enforcement. They don’t care if people live or die; they only care about cruelty and spectacle.”
