"Deportation Depot" immigration center to open in shuttered North Florida prison, DeSantis says
The conversion of Baker Correctional Institution, which state corrections officials mothballed four years ago because of staffing shortages, into a second detention center in Florida will scrap a plan to house immigrant detainees at Camp Blanding west of Jacksonville, DeSantis indicated.
The cost to get the Baker County prison up-and-running will total around $6 million, compared to about $75 million to $100 million for a detention center at Camp Blanding, which is used as a training facility for the Florida National Guard, according to state Division of Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie.
Guthrie said the federal government has pledged to give his agency $608 million to house 5,000 undocumented immigrants as part of the state's support of President Donald Trump's mass-deportation efforts.
A controversial immigrant-detention center in the Everglades, Alligator Alcatraz was estimated to cost roughly $450 million to construct and operate for a year. The detention complex, located adjacent to an airstrip known as the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, began housing detainees roughly six weeks ago after being quickly built.
Baker Correctional Institution — dubbed "Deportation Depot" by state officials — has proximity to an airport in Lake City that can accommodate planes larger than an airstrip at Camp Blanding, DeSantis told reporters during a news conference Thursday at the prison.
DeSantis said members of the National Guard and private contractors will staff the Baker facility.
"I know we had talked a lot about Camp Blanding, and I think it was a viable option, but this is just better, ready-made. This part of the facility is not being used right now for the state prisoners. It just gives us an ability to go in, stand it up, quickly, stand it up cheaply, and then, ultimately, have something that can be 1,300 (person capacity). It could be more than that," DeSantis said, adding that "we won't hesitate" to add more beds if needed.
Hector Diaz, managing partner of the Miami-based Your Immigration Attorney firm, said the converted prison "seems to be overkill," as most of the people being detained "are not criminals and are being held for minor infractions and misdemeanors."
"Putting these people in a former state prison correctional center is out of line," Diaz said in an email.
DeSantis and other state officials "are making the immigration system more chaotic and are doing more harm than achieving their goal," Diaz said.
DeSantis' announcement about the prison came amid at least a temporary halt on additional construction at the Everglades site and as two federal-court fights continue. U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams on Aug. 7 temporarily blocked state officials from additional construction or infrastructure, paving or installation of new lighting at the remote facility.
Williams' ruling came in a lawsuit filed by Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity alleging state and federal officials failed to comply with a federal law that required an environmental impact study before construction began on the detention center, which is surrounded by the Big Cypress National Preserve. The Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida also joined the plaintiffs in the case.
Williams issued a 14-day temporary injunction blocking expansion at the facility and this week heard arguments on the plaintiffs' request for a longer-lasting preliminary injunction seeking the impact study. Williams said she plans to rule on the request before the temporary injunction expires on Aug. 21.
State officials initially said the Everglades center would house up to 3,000 detainees and could be expanded to add 1,000 people. Guthrie said Thursday the center has a capacity for 2,000 detainees and holds 1,000.
Meanwhile, U.S. District Judge Rodolfo Ruiz on Thursday held a conference with attorneys in a separate lawsuit filed by immigration lawyers alleging that detainees at the South Florida detention center have inadequate access to legal assistance and immigration courts. The lawyers also allege that detainees are unable to meet privately with their attorneys.
In court documents, state officials said they have made strides in establishing a process for detainees to confer with their lawyers by video conference or in person and attributed the delay to the speed with which the Everglades complex was set up.
The immigration attorneys, however, maintain that the process remains inadequate, difficult to navigate and lacks privacy as required by law. As an example, a declaration filed Wednesday said that attorney Vilerka Solange Bilbao has struggled to obtain signed forms that would allow her to meet with clients. The lawyer eventually held a video conference with client Yuniel Michell Figueredo Corrales, a detainee who has been incarcerated at the Everglades facility since July 11. But the declaration said the online meeting was "clearly not confidential" because "Mr. Figueredo Corrales sat in a sort of tent with soft-sided, makeshift fabric walls and no roof" with "guards standing close by."
Lawyers for state and federal officials are asking Ruiz to transfer the case, which was filed in the federal Southern District of Florida to the Middle District of Florida, which includes Collier County. The majority of the detention center is located in Collier County, but the airstrip is in Miami-Dade County, which is in the Southern District.
Ruiz on Thursday appeared to be grappling with the court venue issue, which he will consider during a hearing Monday before addressing the plaintiffs' request for a preliminary injunction.
"There is a strong possibility that some counts that have been alleged cannot be brought in this district and should have been brought in the Middle District of Florida. There is also a possibility that some counts do indeed belong in the Southern District of Florida. These are some of the issues that I'm struggling with to determine whether or not I think we've met the threshold for injunctive relief," Ruiz said.
Ruiz raised the possibility that the case could be split between the two judicial districts.
"Perhaps it's a false hope from the court that everybody would say to themselves, judicial economy serves that a judge who spent this much time going through this record should hold on to this case," Ruiz said. "As I've stated, there may be problems with keeping this whole case here, and they're starting to really crystallize for me."
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4 minutes ago
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Analysis: The common thread in Trump's latest moves: squeezing big blue cities
Donald Trump Immigration Federal agencies US militaryFacebookTweetLink Follow President Donald Trump is moving systematically to tighten his grip on Democratic-leaning big cities — the geographic center of resistance to his agenda — by undermining their autonomy and eroding their political strength. Those militant goals are the common thread that links the high-profile initiatives Trump has launched in recent days to seize control of law enforcement in Washington, DC; pressure red states to draw new congressional district lines; and potentially pursue an unprecedented 'redo' of the 2020 census. These new efforts compound the pressure Trump is already placing on major cities with an agenda that includes aggressive immigration enforcement; cuts in federal research funding to universities central to the economy of many large metros; and threats to rescind federal funding for jurisdictions that resist his demands to impose conservative policies on immigration, education, homelessness and policing. Trump is pursuing this confrontational approach at a time when major metropolitan areas have become the undisputed engines of the nation's economic growth — and the nexus of research breakthroughs in technologies such as artificial intelligence, which Trump has identified as key to the nation's competitiveness. The 100 largest metropolitan areas now account for about three-fourths of the nation's economic output, according to research by Brookings Metro, a center-left think tank. Yet Trump is treating the largest cities less as an economic asset to be nourished than as a political threat to be subdued. Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, said Trump's approach to the nation's largest cities is 'colonial' in that he wants to benefit from their prodigious economic output while suppressing their independence and political clout. This administration is 'treating America's great economic engines as weak and problematic colonial outposts,' Muro said. 'They view them as the problem, when (in reality) they are the absolute base of American competitiveness in the battle against China or whoever (else).' Antagonism toward major cities has long been central to Trump's message. Several times he has described American cities with mayors who are Democrats, members of racial minorities, or both, as dystopian 'rodent-infested' 'hellholes.' Trump in 2024 nonetheless ran better in most large cities than in his earlier races, amid widespread disenchantment about then-President Joe Biden's record on inflation, immigration and crime. Still, as Trump himself has noted, large cities, and often their inner suburbs, remain the foundation of Democratic political strength and the cornerstone of opposition to his agenda. A series of dramatic actions just in the past few days shows how systematically Trump is moving to debilitate those cities' ability to oppose him. The most visible way Trump is pressuring big cities is by deploying federal law enforcement and military personnel into them over the objections of local officials. In his first term, Trump sent federal law enforcement personnel into Portland, Oregon, and Washington, DC, in the aftermath of George Floyd's 2020 murder. But after he left office, Trump, who does not often publicly second-guess himself, frequently said that one of his greatest regrets was that he did not dispatch more federal forces into cities. In his 2024 campaign, he explicitly pledged to deploy the National Guard, and potentially active-duty military, into major cities for multiple purposes: combating crime, clearing homeless encampments and supporting his mass deportation program. In office, Trump has steadily fulfilled those promises. When protests erupted in Los Angeles in June over an intense Immigration and Custom Enforcement deportation push, Trump deployed not only the National Guard (which he federalized over the objection of California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom), but also active-duty Marines. Then, the administration used those forces not only to guard federal buildings, but also to accompany ICE (and other agencies) on enforcement missions — including a striking deployment of armored vehicles and soldiers in tactical gear to a public park in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood. The underlying immigration enforcement that precipitated the LA protests constituted a different show of force. As a recent CNN investigation showed, ICE is relying much more on street apprehensions in cities in blue states than in red states, where it is removing more people from jails and prisons. The administration says that imbalance is a result of 'sanctuary' policies in blue states and cities limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. But civil rights groups see the administration's confrontational blue-state approach as an attempt to intimidate both local officials and immigrant communities. (The fact that ICE last week conducted an immigration sweep directly outside a Newsom press conference bolstered the latter interpretation.) Whatever the rationale, research by the University of California at Merced suggests the administration's enforcement approach is hurting blue cities. Using census data, the school's Community and Labor Center recently found that from May to July the number of California workers holding a private-sector job fell by about 750,000 — proportionally an even greater decline than during the 2008 Great Recession. Hispanic people and Asian Americans accounted for almost all the falloff. Sociology professor Ed Flores, the center's faculty director, said he believes the decline is 'absolutely' tied to economic disruption flowing from 'the presence of ICE and the way that (people) are being apprehended' on the street. New York City, too, has seen a notable drop in the labor force participation rate among Hispanic men. Now, with the military (if not ICE) presence in LA winding down, Trump has sent hundreds of National Guard troops into Washington, DC, while also utilizing a section of federal law that allows him to temporarily seize control of the city's police department. In his news conference last week announcing the DC moves, Trump repeatedly said he would supplement the National Guard forces, as he did in LA, with active-duty troops if he deems it necessary. And he repeatedly signaled that he is considering deploying military forces into other cities that he described as overrun by crime, including Chicago, New York, Baltimore and Oakland, California — all jurisdictions with Black mayors. 'We're not going to lose our cities over this, and this will go further,' Trump declared. Most experts agree that Trump will confront substantial legal hurdles if he tries to replicate the DC deployment in other places. 'What they are doing in DC is not repeatable elsewhere for a number of reasons,' said Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice. Nunn said Trump can order this mission because of the DC National Guard's unique legal status. On the one hand, Nunn noted, the DC Guard is under the president's direct control, rather than the jurisdiction of a state governor. On the other, he said, the Justice Department has ruled that even when the president utilizes the DC Guard, its actions qualify as a state, not federal, deployment. That's critical because state guard deployments are not subject to the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act's ban on federal military forces engaging in domestic law enforcement. If Trump tries to deploy the National Guard to address crime in the big cities of blue states, such as Chicago or New York, Nunn argued, he would face a catch-22. Since there's virtually no chance Democratic governors would agree to participate, Trump could only put troops on those streets by federalizing their states' National Guard or using active-duty military, Nunn said. But, he added, 'once they are working with federalized National Guard or active-duty military forces, the Posse Comitatus Act applies' — barring the use of those forces for domestic law enforcement. Trump could seek to override the Posse Comitatus Act's ban on military involvement by invoking the Insurrection Act. The Insurrection Act has not been used to combat street crime, but the statute allows the president to domestically deploy the military against 'any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.' Richard Briffault, a Columbia Law School professor who specializes in the relationships among different levels of government, agreed that invoking the Insurrection Act to justify sending the National Guard into cities over mayors' objections would shatter the generally understood limits on the law's application. But he also believes that precedent provides no firm assurance that this Supreme Court, which has proved extremely receptive to Trump's expansive claims of presidential authority, would stop him. Trump 'could try' to win court approval of military deployments to fight crime by citing the Insurrection Act's language about ''domestic violence' and 'unlawful combinations'' and then claiming that is 'depriving the people of their right to security,' Briffault said. Whatever the legal hurdles, more widely deploying the military on domestic missions would bring substantial consequences. Mayor Jerry Dyer of Fresno, California, who spent 18 years as the city's police commissioner, says that putting military forces onto the streets of more cities would create problems of coordination with local officials and trust with local communities. 'Whenever you start sending federal resources into local jurisdictions and actually take over the policing of that jurisdiction, it can become very disturbing to that community and quite frankly can create some neighborhood issues and ultimately a lack of trust,' said Dyer, who co-chairs the Mayors and Police Chiefs Task Force for the US Conference of Mayors. Even more profound may be the implications of numbing Americans to the sight of heavily armored military forces routinely patrolling the streets of domestic cities — an image that historically has been common only in authoritarian countries. New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a leading scholar of authoritarian regimes, wrote last week that the ultimate aim of Trump's domestic deployments 'is to habituate Americans to see militarized cities and crackdowns against public dissent in cities as normal and justified.' Step by step, she argued, Trump is seeking 'to disempower and delegitimize all Democratic municipal and state authorities.' In less obvious ways, the battle that has erupted over redistricting — and the likely fight approaching over the census — constitutes another Trump-backed effort to 'disempower' large metropolitan areas. The unusual mid-decade congressional redistricting that Texas Republicans are pursuing at Trump's behest would increase the number of Republican-leaning US House seats largely by reducing the number of districts representing the state's biggest metropolitan areas, including Dallas, Houston and Austin, which all lean Democratic. The new map would further dilute the political influence of Texas' major metro areas, even as they have accounted for about four-fifths of the state's population and economic growth over recent years, said Steven Pedigo, director of the LBJ Urban Lab at the University of Texas' Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. 'The growth in Texas has been driven by urban communities, but those communities are not going to be represented in these additional maps,' Pedigo said. In that way, the new Texas map extends the strategy that Republicans there, and in other growing Sun Belt states, used in the maps they drew after the 2020 census, said John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. States such as Texas and Florida that added the most House seats and electoral votes after the 2020 census — and are poised to gain the most again after 2030 — are adding population primarily among non-White people and in Democratic-leaning metro areas, Bisognano noted in a recent memo. Yet both of those groups will be denied the additional House representation generated by that population growth if the Republicans controlling Sun Belt state governments continue to draw district lines that splinter metro populations and favor rural ones. 'They are subjugating (metro voters) to produce a partisan outcome that is not reflective of the people of those cities,' Bisognano said. The calls from Trump and Vice President JD Vance to 'redo' the 2020 census, partly to exclude undocumented immigrants, could marginalize cities even more. Even if Trump could surmount the many legal and logistical obstacles to conducting a mid-decade census, a reapportionment of House seats and electoral votes that excluded undocumented immigrants would not result in the shift of influence from blue to red states that many conservatives envision. John Robert Warren, a University of Minnesota sociologist, concluded in a 2025 paper that if unauthorized immigrants were excluded from the 2020 census, California and Texas would each lose a House seat and New York and Ohio would each gain one. 'It would make literally zero difference,' Warren said. 'If you assume Texas and Ohio go red and California and New York go blue, then it's just a wash.' Excluding undocumented immigrants from the count, though, could offer Trump another way to squeeze urban centers. Many agricultural communities have substantial undocumented immigrant populations, but half of all undocumented immigrants live in just 37 large counties, according to estimates by the Migration Policy Institute. 'Within a state that Republicans control, by not including (undocumented people), it would be much easier to draw Republican districts because you would have a smaller minority population base to work with,' said Jeffrey Wice, a redistricting expert at New York University's law school. Not only congressional representation but also the many federal funding sources tied to population would shift toward rural areas if the census undercounts the urban population, he noted. Wice, who formerly consulted for Democrats on redistricting, says blue states and cities can't assume Trump won't pursue any of these possibilities, no matter how far-fetched they now seem. The same is surely true on the deployment of federal force into blue places. The New Republic's Greg Sargent recently published an internal Department of Homeland Security memo that described the joint ICE-National Guard mission in Los Angeles as 'the type of operations (and resistance) we're going to be working through for years to come.' (Emphasis added.) During World War II, the German siege of Leningrad famously lasted nearly 900 days. Big blue American cities may be counting down the hours as anxiously for the 1252 days remaining in Trump's second term.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Tallahassee's CB Lorch challenges Rick Minor for District 3 seat
While all eyes have been focused on the political battleground at City Hall, a single newcomer now has entered the ring for a chance at one of the four seats up for reelection in the Leon County Commission. CB Lorch, a local videographer and longtime Tallahasseean, is running for Leon County Commission District 3, which is currently held by Rick Minor. "It starts with, you know, what I fundamentally feel like is the role of elected officials, which is not a career or a job. It is something you do to serve the community," Lorch told the Tallahassee Democrat. "It was just never the right time and I felt like now was the right time." Born and raised in Tallahassee, Lorch is a product of the local school district. He graduated from Leon High School where he met his wife Michele. Her job as a meteorologist took them to Columbus, Georgia, but when the two wanted to settle down and start a family there was no place like home. The couple now are proud parents of two boys, attending high school at their parents' alma mater. Lorch has been a longtime businessman in Tallahassee and is the owner of Charlie Bravo Pictures. He said he is no stranger to the local political scene, but is usually behind the scenes capturing video and working with ad agencies and PR firms. Lorch is set to attend this weekend's Tallahassee Chamber of Commerce conference in Amelia Island as the beginning for his campaign – and Minor also plans to attend. Minor has been one of several names thrown around as a potential candidate for mayor, but in an interview he said he does not intend to run: "I've been very grateful for people who have suggested I run for mayor," Minor said, adding he is dedicated to his reelection. He noted the ongoing work his office has been doing "in terms of improving North Monroe, developing the economy, working with the sheriff's office to improve public safety," all of which he looks to continue. Lorch says he'll serve a maximum of two terms For Lorch, getting into politics has nothing to do with creating a career: "I'm never going to be a career politician. It's not my goal." If elected, "I'll say right now that I would never serve more than two terms. There is no plan for a next campaign in terms of running for a different office or doing anything else. It is solely to serve as a county commissioner." When asked how he felt Minor had done during his time in office, he noted the two served in a "catalyst group" for the Knight Creative Communities Institute some years ago. Lorch has some issues with his public service. "I don't fundamentally feel like he's willing to step up and really be a voice for effective change," Lorch said. Speaking up "is something I'm willing to do and I think part of that stems from not looking for another office." Lorch said if he was able to be elected into office he would want to work on improving the North Monroe corridor, claiming that over the years "that hasn't happened." When asked if there were any other issues he would be running on, he didn't have many to mention. A hot topic ongoing between the city and the county is the continuing conversation surrounding the fire services fee, when asked, he said teamwork between the city and county was crucial. "We got to find solutions to keep people safe ... I wish we could just work more with the city in terms of communication and I think that's a big answer to a lot of issues." All in all, Lorch wants to give back to the community that raised him and made him. "We got to look out for everyone ... I don't believe in vilifying our business community. I don't believe in ignoring our most vulnerable either. I think if you work on all those fronts, we can keep being a pretty great community." Arianna Otero is the trending and breaking news reporter for the Tallahassee Democrat. Contact her via email at AOtero@ and follow her on X: @ari_v_otero. This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: CB Lorch vows two-term limit in Leon County Commission bid Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
DC police to aid in federal immigration enforcement
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