Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has transferred detainees from Alligator Alcatraz to other facilities as Florida prepares for hurricane season.
“As we enter into hurricane season, ICE and the state of Florida have moved illegal aliens from the soft sided facility. For the safety of the illegal alien detainees, we transferred them to other facilities,” a spokesperson said in a statement reported by NBC News.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) noted that the facility was intended to be temporary. “The state doesn’t direct people there. It’s DHS that directs them there. And so if DHS stops directing them there, then we obviously are not just going to. It was never meant to be permanent,” he said. “I don’t think that it’s empty now, at least as of yesterday when I got briefed on it, but they’ve had tens, hundreds of billions of dollars plowed into that agency.”
He added that officials believed the facility would be needed for about “six months to a year.”
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told CBS News earlier this year that authorities “have plans in case of a natural emergency such as a wildfire or hurricane, to have to be able to bring it down and pull the individuals out.”
A September court ruling allowed the facility to continue its construction. “The mission continues on immigration enforcement. The media was giddy that somehow Alligator Alcatraz was ‘shutting down.’ Now we told them that that wasn’t true, there had been illegal aliens continuing to be there and removed and returned to their home country,” DeSantis said at the time. “But they ran with the narrative because some leftist judge ruled implausibly that somehow Florida wasn’t allowed to use our own property to help the federal government in this important mission because they didn’t do an environmental impact statement. Well, we said we would fight that, and we said the mission would continue, and I’m pleased to say that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has just stayed that ruling and stayed the case. So Alligator Alcatraz is, in fact, like we always said, open for business.”
