Florida has joined the growing list of states where President Donald Trump’s mass incarceration and deportation plan is causing headaches for local officials, as the state faces a financial crunch for its choice to fund a name-brand jail that has come to epitomize the administration’s racist anti-immigrant crackdown.
Last summer, Republican officials, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, promoted the jail built in the Everglades, which MAGA branded “Alligator Alcatraz,” and said its costs would ultimately be paid by the federal government. But the state attorney general was forced to admit in a legal filing last week that those funds might never come.
“The State took the risk (and still does) that federal funding will not materialize,” Attorney General James Uthmeier said in his filing, which came as his office fights a lawsuit brought by local activists to shut down the jail. Uthmeier said he still believes the feds will “largely” cover the funds, citing the fact Trump visited the facility as one reason.
Per Florida Politics:
‘I do believe that the state will largely be reimbursed for those costs, given that we were delegated by the federal government. It was approved. The President went down there for the grand opening. We were helping out as they were trying to get Congress to strike a deal and provide resources for this important mission,’ Uthmeier said in Titusville.
The hastily constructed Everglades facility is one of several where detainees have reported being subjected to human rights abuses. Historian Andrea Pitzer wrote a compelling argument for MS NOW last year that the facility meets the definition of a concentration camp, similar to those used by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.
On Monday, as Local 10 News in Florida reported, lawmakers in the state Senate held a bipartisan hearing at which various stakeholders fretted over whether and how the state will continue to withdraw money from its emergency coffers — typically reserved for responding to crises like natural disasters — to pay for Florida’s anti-immigrant projects, including the facility in the Everglades.
DeSantis took a victory lap last fall, when he said the feds had agreed to reimburse funds spent on the jail using a $608 million grant. But the reimbursement still hasn’t been approved, as the Florida Tribune reported in early February, citing official documents. In the meantime, it looks like Floridians are still on the hook for the astronomical costs for the anti-immigrant boondoggle known as “Alligator Alcatraz.” Just how astronomical? The Tribune reported on Sunday that court documents show that at one point, DeSantis’ administration was spending more than $1.2 million per day to open and operate the Everglades facility.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
