U.S. Democratic representatives characterized the state-run immigrant detention center in the Everglades as a cruel and wasteful political stunt following a guided tour Saturday.
Members of Congress and state legislators who visited the site described seeing bugs on mattresses, toilets and showers that lacked privacy, small food portions, and temperatures between 83 and 85 degrees in the air-conditioned areas.
“There are really disturbing, vile conditions, and this place needs to be shut the hell down,” said South Florida U.S. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of the detention center at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport.
The South Florida Democrat said 32 men slept in each of the cages with bed bunks and three sinks attached to the toilets. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced hundreds of people started arriving on July 2.
Democrats labeled the tour as sanitized because they couldn’t speak to any of the detainees or staff. Detainees have told the Miami Herald and CBS News that they hadn’t been able to shower, the toilets didn’t flush, and that the food had maggots.
Anna Eskamani, a state representative from Orlando, said Kevin Guthrie, director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, led the tour. The agency is in charge of the site.
“It was just incredibly dystopian, and a lot of lack of clarity on what rules and procedures are actually being followed as it pertains to those being detained, as it pertains to what their status is,” Eskamani said in a phone interview with Florida Phoenix.
Eskamani is one of five Democrats in the Florida Legislature suing the state after they weren’t allowed to enter the detention center on July 3. FDEM invited Congress members and state lawmakers on Wednesday for the tour Saturday, when U.S. representatives said they were already planning on conducting an oversight visit.
Meanwhile, Kristi Noem, secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, defended conditions at the detention center during a press conference in Tampa on Saturday, saying it was held to the same standards as federal facilities. However, she sidestepped specific questions about the site because it is state-run.
“Any issues that were there have been addressed,” she said. “It’s a fantastic resource for us to be able to utilize in order for a detention facility to repatriate people back home to their home countries.”
Governors in five Republican states have told Noem they want to build detention centers like the one in the Everglades, Noem said. She refused to say which governors expressed interest.
Spring Hill Republican Sen. Baise Ingoglia, an ally of Gov. Ron DeSantis, also visited on Saturday. The senator, possibly in line as DeSantis’ pick as chief financial officer, wrote on X that Democrats’ rhetoric about the detention center didn’t match reality.
“I actually laid down in one of the beds and it was really comfortable, Ingoglia wrote. “So, any complaints about squalor conditions is nothing more than bullsh*t and political theater.”
“Alligator Alcatraz” is the name Florida’s Republican leadership have give to the camp.
Despite the poor conditions Democrats described, South Florida Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz said the detention center shouldn’t be compared to a concentration camp. Moskowitz served as the head of FDEM for two years under DeSantis.
“Listen, it is as bad as it can be, but it is not a concentration camp, and people should not use Holocaust references to describe what’s going on behind us,” he told reporters following the tour.
–Jackie Llanos, Florida Phoenix
