Florida to open second immigrant detention center
Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said temporary dorms could increase the new center's capacity to about 2,000. The Division of Emergency Management operates the Everglades detention center, which state officials hope will be able to accommodate 4,000 detainees by the end of August.
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DeSantis has continued his push to help the Trump administration enforce immigration laws despite legal challenges to the Everglades center, reports of poor conditions for its detainees, questions over the state's authority to hold federal detainees in the first place, and criticism from some fellow Republicans over how much the center has cost.
Without addressing any of those concerns, DeSantis said Thursday that the 'build-out' of the second detention center would cost about $6 million. That is a fraction of the $330 million the state has spent on contracts for the Everglades detention center in less than two months. State officials have said it would cost about $450 million to operate the Everglades center for a year.
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The federal government will reimburse the state for all of its detention center spending, the governor said. Other states have said they planned to follow a similar model to open their own centers for federal immigration detainees.
DeSantis had said since the opening of the Everglades detention center that his administration was considering a second facility in North Florida if there was 'demand' for more space to hold federal immigration detainees. That time has come, he said Thursday, without offering data.
'This will really, I think, meet a need that is there,' he said, standing outside the Baker Correctional Institution. Florida, he added, has 'done more on this than any other state by a country mile.'
The governor had initially suggested Camp Blanding, a training site for the Florida National Guard outside of Starke, between Jacksonville and Gainesville, as the likely location for the detention center. But unlike the Everglades detention center, Camp Blanding's runway could not accommodate aircraft large enough to transport many detainees at once, DeSantis said Thursday. The Baker Correctional Institution is near an airport in Lake City.
Last week, a federal judge in Miami ordered a 14-day stop to construction at the Everglades detention center, pending the completion of a hearing in a case brought by environmentalists.
That case and a civil rights case in federal court have raised questions about how the state can run the detention center when the Department of Homeland Security is in charge of immigrant detainees.
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The state and federal governments have said Florida's authority to run the center stems from agreements known as 287(g), which delegate some federal immigration powers to state and municipal law enforcement agencies. But the center is run by the state Division of Emergency Management, which is not law enforcement.
Last week, lawyers for the state submitted documentation to a federal judge in the civil rights case that for the first time pointed to a specific provision establishing the state's authority. The provision details how state corrections officers can detain federal immigration detainees at noncorrectional facilities, such as the Everglades detention center.
The provision was added this month to a 287(g) agreement from 2020 between the Florida Department of Corrections and federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The addition came more than a month after detainees began to arrive at the Everglades detention center and a day before the court filing was due.
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