Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, spent $1.2m of taxpayers’ money per day to open and operate the notorious immigration jail known as Alligator Alcatraz, court records obtained by the independent investigative news website the Florida Tributary reveal.
A switch in position by Donald Trump’s administration also now looks likely to leave Florida on the hook for at least $608m spent on the harsh Everglades detention and deportation facility and other immigration jails, the outlet said. That was despite gloating by DeSantis in September that the state would be reimbursed from federal funds.
James Uthmeier, DeSantis’s former chief of staff and Florida’s unelected attorney general, admitted last week the possibility that a federal reimbursement grant the governor had insisted was locked in might not be delivered after all.
“[Florida] took the risk (and still does) that federal funding will not materialize,” Uthmeier and fellow defendants conceded in a court filing in a lawsuit brought by Friends of the Everglades and a number of other environmental and civil rights groups.
“Promised funds are still only ‘likely’.”
The admission essentially confirms that the DeSantis administration took at face value verbal assurances from the federal government that it would pay the state back, a position the justice department appeared to reverse in its own court filing last month.
The department indicated its lawyers had reviewed grant program rules for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and determined that it could disallow some or all of the grant request made by the Florida department of emergency management (Fdem) that operates “Alligator Alcatraz”.
“Crucially, the documents show that Fema may not reimburse Fdem for construction costs, and may ultimately disallow the requested costs altogether,” the filing said.
The wrangle over funding is tied to the long-running lawsuit that seeks to close down the jail permanently. Plaintiffs argued that DeSantis’s promise of US government funding exposed the jail to strict federal environmental laws, Miami district court judge Kathleen Williams agreed, and ordered the facility shuttered in August.
But a three-member appeals panel, including a judge whose attorney husband works for a company with extensive business ties to the DeSantis administration, blocked the ruling in October. They agreed with the defendants, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the homeland security department, that because the jail was built using only state funds, federal regulations did not apply.
“This detention facility was planned in secret, built in secret and operated in secret, concealing devastating impacts to Big Cypress National Preserve and the Everglades,” Eve Samples, executive director at Friends of the Everglades, said in a statement.
“We won’t stop fighting until it’s safe and the government complies with all environmental laws.”
The Tributary revelations, meanwhile, provide a clearer picture of the murky finances of the remote jail, which include allegations by critics that tens of millions of dollars in lucrative no-bid contracts were doled out in secret to the governor’s political allies.
The Associated Press reported in July that DeSantis officials were being vague to local authorities about plans for the construction of the jail, but were already sending in preferred contractors having used an executive order and emergency declaration to seize the site, a remote, barely used airport partially situated on ancestral Indigenous American tribe land, and owned by Miami-Dade county.
The governor’s office has been contacted for comment.
Noelle Damico, director of social justice at the Workers Circle, an advocacy group that has organized weekly vigils at “Alligator Alcatraz” since it opened in July, said the developments did not surprise her.
“The lawlessness, woeful unaccountability, and apparent corruption that are part and parcel of these cruel abductions, detentions and deportations has corroded trust in our government,” she said.
