Florida’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Everglades prison ignores both environment and history

Last week, Florida’s recently appointed attorney general, James Uthmeier, announced that he had a pretty snazzy idea: Build the state’s biggest immigrant detention center in the middle of the Everglades and call it “Alligator Alcatraz.” (Presumably “Gator Guantánamo” was already taken.)

“You don’t need to invest that much in the perimeter. People get out, there’s not that much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons,” Uthmeier said in a video he posted on X. “Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.”

I predict Uthmeier’s next brainstorm will call for transforming Marjory Stoneman Douglas’ historic home in Coconut Grove into a big public urinal. For toilet paper, he will no doubt provide copies of Florida’s Government in the Sunshine Law.

This week the state began building the prison, rushing the project while ducking questions the same way Gov. Ron DeSantis tried to duck the public last year while rushing construction of golf courses, hotels, and pickleball courts in state parks.

The official designation for the site is TNT, by the way — the governor should take care that this project doesn’t blow up in his face like his parks plan did.)

As with the failed state parks scheme, pretty much every environmental group in Florida has been screaming bloody murder about it. Watching them reminded me of that scene in “Airplane!” when everyone lines up for a turn to slap one hysterical passenger. It’s clear they’d like to give Uthmeier the same treatment, along with the guy who appointed him.

Hundreds of people turned out Sunday afternoon for a protest at the site off U.S. 41, waving signs that said things like “NO ICE IN THE EVERGLADES.” Even as they protested, though, they could see work was already starting.

The crowd of protesters included Miccosukee tribal elder Betty Osceola, acclaimed nature photographer Clyde Butcher, often called “the Ansel Adams of Florida,” and the daughter of a legendary NFL quarterback who helped lead opposition to DeSantis’ golf course ploy.

This protest “was less about the kind of facility and more about the location of the facility,” said Jessica Namath, daughter of “Broadway Joe” Namath. “I mean, is anything sacred anymore?”

Namath wasn’t just talking about the fact that the Miccosukee Tribe opposes the prison because it’s adjacent to land the tribe regards as sacred. No, the site Uthmeier and DeSantis have picked for their Alligator Alcatraz happens to be one of the most holy places in Florida’s environmental history.

That lonely 10,500-foot-long airstrip is the reason Big Cypress National Preserve exists all around it. It’s the reason writer Marjory Stoneman Douglas became, at age 79, an environmental crusader for the rest of her 108 years of life.

 It’s the place where Miami officials tried to build the world’s largest jetport. They figured that by putting it in the middle of a swamp, no angry neighbors would object.

Boy, were they wrong.

‘A new city’

In 1968, the Dade County Port Authority acquired a 39-square mile parcel just six miles north of Everglades National Park and laid out plans for runways six miles long where jets would take off every minute.

For easy access to the site from either side of Florida, they proposed new interstate highway and a high-speed transit system (this is where fans of “The Simpsons” should start chanting, “Monorail!”). There would even be a “recreational waterway” for airboats.

Authority officials saw this massive investment of tax dollars as a way to set off an explosion of private development in what they viewed as a soggy and valueless land.

“A new city is going to rise up in the middle of Florida,” the authority chairman boasted.

Imagine his surprise when an odd coalition formed to oppose this supposedly foolproof plan. Hunters, anglers, high school students, Native Americans, and birdwatchers all said, “Whoa, that’s a terrible idea!”

Thriller writer and Sarasota resident John D. MacDonald even weighed in, writing in “Life” magazine that the jetport would “kill what was left of the Everglades.”

The most politically savvy opponent, Joe Browder, approached Douglas about joining the fight. After all, she’d written THE book on the Everglades. Surely, she wanted to save it.

She demurred, telling Browder nobody would listen to a half-blind old lady like her. They would only pay attention to organizations.

“Well,” Browder asked, “why don’t you start an organization?”

Together, Douglas and Browder founded Friends of the Everglades. (Yes, that venerable organization is in the thick of the current fight too.)

“It was that project that drove Marjory into the ranks of active environmentalists,” said Jack Davis, who wrote the definitive biography of this Florida icon.

She knew that the Everglades wasn’t just vital habitat for panthers and gators, Davis said: “She knew that the Everglades recharges the Biscayne Aquifer where South Florida gets its water supply. She made the connection between the ecological health of the Everglades and the quality of human life in South Florida.”

This week, when Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava wrote to state officials posing lots of questions about the Alligator Alcatraz project, she brought that up too: “As a longtime champion of our Everglades and clean drinking water, I am committed to ensuring we continue to provide bipartisan protections for our greatest natural resource.”

Douglas’ greatest ally turned out to be science with a capital S. But, as has often happened during the DeSantis administration, science seems to be getting short shrift this time around.

The first impact statement

To gauge the ramifications of building a giant jetport in the Everglades, a team from the U.S. Geological Survey put together the nation’s first environmental impact statement.

They were led by a senior scientist named Luna Leopold, the son of “A Sand County Almanac” author Aldo Leopold.

Their analysis found that the jetport would produce 4 million gallons of sewage and 1.5 million gallons of industrial waste every day, plus scatter 10,000 tons of air pollution across the natural landscape. When you added in all the related development, the numbers ballooned.

Nathaniel Reed, then a top aide to Gov. Claude Kirk, used the USGS report to convince his boss to withdraw the state’s support. That led to President Richard Nixon canceling federal support too, which ended the jetport before it got off the ground.

Then, under Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, the feds spent $150 million to buy up Big Cypress and turn it into the nation’s first-ever preserve.

Thus, we can thank three Republican politicians — Kirk, Nixon, and Ford — for halting the jetport and preserving a big swamp, Davis pointed out.

But that pro-conservation Republican Party seems to be a thing of the past now.

Crossing his fingers

The first thing most people knew about this push for a big detention center in our most famous marsh came June 19, when Uthmeier posted about it on X.

That’s hardly the proper forum for alerting the public to a major Florida land-use change, but apparently that’s DeSantis’ preferred method.

Uthmeier’s post emphasized the lonely airstrip, calling it “an old, virtually abandoned facility” that could be used for flying detainees in and out.

Actually, the only thing that’s been abandoned is the pretense that DeSantis cares about fixing the Everglades.

“I’m proud to keep advancing these efforts in Everglades restoration and water quality, which will have lasting benefits to our state for years to come,” he said six months ago. Guess he had his fingers crossed when he spoke those words.

On Wednesday, in his first public comments on the Alligator Alcatraz controversy, DeSantis insisted that adding so many humans and manmade infrastructure to the Everglades will have “zero effect” on the River of Grass, and insisted all the environmental groups and others objecting to the project were just using it as a pretext because they disagree with his anti-immigration stance.

This isn’t just an environmental concern. Last year, the state and federal government earmarked more than $1 billion for restoring the River of Grass, on top of the $5 billion or so spent over the past 20 years. That’s all wasted taxpayer money now, poured down a really big drain.

A study last week found that a healthy Everglades is worth more than $31 billion to the South Florida economy every year. Real estate, tourism, fisheries, and recreation all benefit, the study reported.

Sorry folks, DeSantis is saying, we only support the lock-em-up business now. We can’t do anything to help other Everglades-related industries.

If this DeSantis scheme is disastrous for you, perhaps you can apply to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for help — assuming FEMA still exists.

Tents in hurricane season

Speaking of FEMA, how about that brilliant plan to house more than 1,000 detainees (plus all their guards) in tents and trailers in a remote area with a single road in and out during hurricane season.

And on property that, according to the Miami mayor’s letter, consists of 96% wetlands.

This turned into the topic of a lively discussion at this week’s Collier County Commission meeting.

Although the airstrip has belonged to Miami-Dade for decades, the detention center sits in Collier. The commissioners made it plain they’d been blindsided by the state like everyone else and wanted nothing to do with whatever happens when the next Ian storms ashore.

“Sitting here in the middle of hurricane season, I sure would hate to see this plop in our lap,” Commissioner Rick LoCastro said. “A thousand detainees that were sitting in tents [and] now need food, shelter, transportation, and all that.”

“You’re spot on, because even [the land] in between the taxiways is quite low and quite wet,” agreed county emergency management director Dan Sherman. “The contractors are going to have their hands full with anything temporary, even on a good day during the rainy season.”

Hey, maybe the contractors building the site are using undocumented immigrants for all the hot and sweaty construction work. After all, that’s the way we do construction here in Florida.

Environmental harm

Sherman told the Collier commissioners that state officials had first visited the airstrip in February, but didn’t tell anyone what they were up to.

“It’s a location we’ve been looking at with law enforcement for a while,” Uthmeier told right-wing podcaster Benny “I Swear I Didn’t Know I Was Being Paid Handsomely for Spreading Russian Propaganda” Johnson this week.

He called the swampy site a low-cost alternative to an actual prison and bragged, “As of this morning, the federal government has approved our detention facility plan. … We’ll have 5,000 beds out there by early July.”

Uthmeier didn’t mention anything about consulting environmental experts about the prison’s effect on the Everglades. It’s too bad, because there are likely to be plenty.

“Negative environmental impacts would include wetland degradation, building construction (even if temporary), water and sewer facilities, light pollution, traffic and emergency services,” Eve Samples, the current executive director of Friends of the Everglades, wrote in a letter to DeSantis. So far, he hasn’t responded, and I bet he never will.

The letter that state Emergency Management Division Director Kevin Guthrie sent to Miami-Dade and Collier officials over the weekend doesn’t mention any of that stuff. Instead, it simply urges the two counties to “work collaboratively … to complete the transaction in an expedient manner.”

The letter shows Guthrie failed to do his homework. He didn’t know who the Collier commission chair was, or that Collier had no claim on the airstrip. He also thought $20 million would be a good price for the property, apparently unaware that recent appraisals said it’s worth $190 million.

Instead of negotiating, the state just swooped in and seized the property on Monday. As justification, Guthrie cited a two-year-old emergency declaration from DeSantis that claimed immigrants are a dire threat to the state — not the boon that farmers, construction companies, and hotel managers know them to be.

The premise of our huge state and federal immigration crackdown — 3,000 arrests a day! — is the implied promise that the detainees will be evil drug dealers, human traffickers, and violent gangbangers. Instead, we’re seeing ICE scoop up an evangelical pastor in Wimauma, a breast-feeding mom in Orlando, and even a born-in-America U.S. citizen in Leon County.

Now picture those poor folks having to sleep in a tent in the Everglades in the heat of summer, fending off skeeters while squishing through the mud to use a Port-A-Potty, fleeing in terror as a hurricane bears down.

Fortunately, I think the opponents of this Gator Gulag have a secret weapon to stop it.

It’s Uthmeier.

Mr. Oopsie-Daisy

No one voted for Uthmeier. DeSantis appointed him attorney general to reward him for doing such a bang-up job running the governor’s failed presidential campaign.

In his short time in office, he’s already earned the dubious distinction of being the only Florida attorney general to be found in contempt of court.

He also did such a terrific job running the campaign to defeat the ballot initiative to legalize weed that he embroiled both DeSantis and his wife in the Hope Florida scandal (or as I like to call it, “Hope Florida Doesn’t Notice”). One Florida House Republican even accused Uthmeier of fraud and money laundering, and now there’s a criminal investigation.

Before that, as DeSantis’ chief of staff, Uthmeier coordinated the program that fooled asylum-seekers in Texas into boarding taxpayer-funded flights to Martha’s Vineyard. That stunt backfired spectacularly when those immigrants were granted visas as crime victims.

My point is that Uthmeier has been a colossal jinx for DeSantis. He’s a human whoopie cushion, a pratfall waiting to happen. I’m surprised his nickname isn’t “Oopsie-Daisy” Uthmeier.

Who knows? With his track record, maybe we’ll accidentally wind up with enough money to fully restore the Everglades the way we’ve been trying to do for 25 years. I think Marjory would like that.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.