Heavy-duty generators are driven into Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport last week. Trump is due to visit the site of Florida’s newest immigration detention center on Tuesday.
D.A. Varela/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service
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D.A. Varela/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service
President Trump is due in Florida on Tuesday to visit what’s been dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” a controversial migrant detention center in the Everglades that the state has stood up in a matter of days.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis spoke about the president’s trip at an unrelated news conference on Monday.
“When the president comes tomorrow he’s going to be able to see … What’ll happen is you’ll bring people in there, they ain’t going anywhere once they’re there unless you want them to go somewhere, because, good luck getting to civilization,” DeSantis said. “So the security is amazing — natural and otherwise.”
Florida officials announced early last week that they’d gotten federal approval to build a detention facility at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, an isolated, 39-square mile airstrip located within the wetlands of the Big Cypress National Preserve, next to Everglades National Park.
Its sole, roughly 11,000-foot runway has largely been used for training purposes, but officials say it will soon accommodate deportation flights.
“So you’ll be able to bring people in, they’ll get processed, they have an order of removal, then they can be queued and the federal government can fly — right on the runway, right there, you literally drive them 2,000 feet, put them on a plane and then they’re gone,” said DeSantis.
The site’s nickname — coined by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier — is a nod to the infamous island prison off the San Francisco coast and to its proximity to the predators of the marshy Everglades, from pythons to alligators to mosquitoes.
