As the Republican leader attempts to put his state at the forefront of President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has revealed that deportation flights have started to leave from a far-off place known as Alligator Alcatraz.
DeSantis cited his efforts as a model for other states attempting to collaborate with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as he addressed the site’s south Florida audience on Friday.
DeSantis informed reporters, “I’m pleased to report that DHS has begun those flights out of Alligator Alcatraz.”
“The reality is that this enables the mission to grow, boosting the deportations’ frequency and number. And so the work done here has been truly remarkable.
Garrett Ripa, a representative for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), confirmed that additional removal flights had already been conducted from the Alligator Alcatraz facility and that additional ones were planned.
According to him, “up to 100 people who were illegally present in the state of Florida” were on those flights.
distributing resources
Last November, President Trump campaigned for re-election with the assurance that his deportation operation would be the largest in American history.
However, critics have suggested that his ambitions may outweigh the government’s available detention space and resources given that there are more than 11 million undocumented people believed to reside in the country.
The Trump administration has since requested assistance from foreign governments as well as additional resources from state and local authorities.
He has also deployed the military to assist with immigration enforcement operations, which have traditionally been outside his purview.
Deputizing state and local leaders through Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act has been a part of Trump’s toolkit.
Section 287(g) opens a gap that allows ICE to enter written agreements with state and local authorities to carry out specific immigration-related tasks despite the fact that the federal government is solely in charge of enforcement.
Larry Keefe, the head of Florida’s newly established State Board of Immigration Enforcement, claimed his team had already profited from these arrangements when he spoke with DeSantis on Friday.
More than 1,200 Florida sheriff’s deputies, over 650 FDLE [Florida Department of Law Enforcement] agents, and other state and local law enforcement agencies have been given credentials by the federal government, according to Keefe.
“Our ability and capability to carry out arrests has more than doubled.”
Florida is in the lead.
However, Florida has been experimenting with its own abilities to stop illegal immigration within its state lines.
For instance, earlier this year, Florida’s Republican-led administration passed a law known as SB 4-C (PDF), which imposes severe criminal penalties on adult undocumented immigrants who knowingly enter the state.
However, federal courts issued an injunction to stop the law from being implemented on the grounds that it violates the federal government’s legal authority in all matters relating to immigration.
President Trump has welcomed the aggressive immigration policies in Florida, his adopted state, where he maintains his Mar-a-Lago residence and golf courses.
He visited Alligator Alcatraz earlier this month, applauding its quick construction, and took a tour. Trump once said, “This is what you need.” “Many bodyguards and many cops acting like alligators”
With reports of poor conditions inside Alligator Alcatraz, critics have labeled the facility as a cruel exercise. Some immigrants claim to have been kept in fenced-in units with no lights and had to deal with floodwater, poor sanitation, clogged toilets, and mosquito-eating clouds.
The facility’s location in the middle of the Everglades wetlands, a delicate ecosystem prone to seasonal flooding, has drawn criticism from environmental groups and indigenous Seminole and Miccosukee tribe residents.
using an outdated airport
Alligator Alcatraz, which was constructed over the course of eight days in June, is situated in Ochopee, Florida, near the site of the former Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport.
Plans to use the facility for deportation flights have benefited from that arrangement, DeSantis said on Friday. He compared the ease with which immigrants were transferring from their detention cells to airplanes.
Because you have this runway right here, DeSantis explained, one of the reasons this was a sensible location.
You are not required to travel to an airport for an hour. They can be on a plane and leave from here if you fly a few thousand feet.
He added that the site already has runway lighting and 18, 927 gallons of jet fuel, or 5, 000 gallons, of course. He anticipates that will encourage an increase in deportation flights in the upcoming weeks.
DeSantis claimed that “the cadence is growing.” In the past few days, we’ve already had a number of flights.
According to Florida officials, Alligator Alcatraz has a capacity of up to 3, 000 people and is named for a forbidding island prison that closed in the San Francisco Bay in the 1960s.
DeSantis has long envisioned Florida as the “blueprint” for Republican leadership in the US, and he launched a run-in with Trump in 2023.
Increasing the flow
DeSantis briefly criticized Trump’s mass-deportation plans in his remarks on Friday, blaming the Alligator Alcatraz system’s effectiveness.
He claimed that “ICE has been understaffed and is not even scratching the surface of what would need to be done” to bring about the largest mass deportation in history.
You must therefore speed up that tempo. You have only a short amount of time to complete it. To truly accomplish the job, I believe we must assume that the Trump administration has four years to complete the task.
DeSantis also brushed aside concerns that the isolated facility prevents immigrants from seeking legal counsel and hearing their legal arguments in court.
He mentioned his intention to install immigration judges there. He questioned whether undocumented people should enjoy the same level of legal protection as US citizens and immigrants.
DeSantis remarked, “To me, it’s like there’s a whole lot of due process that goes into that” compared to a traditional criminal procedure.
Source: Aljazeera
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