The Guardian reports:

Environmental groups, immigration rights activists and a Native American tribe have decried the construction of a harsh outdoor migrant detention camp in the Florida Everglades billed by state officials as “Alligator Alcatraz”.

Crews began preparing the facility at a remote, largely disused training airfield this week in support of the Trump administration’s aggressive goal of arresting and incarcerating 3,000 undocumented migrants every day.

It is among a number of controversial new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) jails appearing around the country as the number of detentions by the agency surges dramatically.

Florida officials say the Everglades camp, which has been criticized by the Democratic congressman Maxwell Frost as “a cruel spectacle”, will open in the first week of July – a month in which south Florida’s daily heat index regularly exceeds 100F (37.8C).

Paid for by Florida taxpayers and homeland security department funds, the project came about after the state seized the 39-square-mile site from its owners, Miami-Dade county, under emergency powers enacted by the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. It now faces staunch opposition from an alliance of groups.

These groups say housing up to 5,000 detainees in tents in the heat and humidity of the Florida summer, at a site surrounded by marshes and wetlands containing alligators, Burmese pythons and swarms of mosquitoes, amounts to inhumane treatment.

James Uthmeier, the state’s hard-right attorney general, laughed off the criticism.

“We believe in the swamp down here in Florida. We are swamp creatures,” he told the conservative podcast host Benny Johnson in a reveal of the scheme on Monday that bordered on mockery.

“There’s no way in and no way out. The perimeter’s already set by Mother Nature. People get out, there’s not much waiting for them other than pythons and alligators.”

The airfield’s 11,000ft runway, he said, was perfect for large planes bringing in scores of undocumented persons detained by Ice from all over the US.

“There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit,” said Uthmeier, who was held in civil contempt by a federal judge this month for continuing to enforce a state immigration law she blocked.

The Miccosukee Tribe of Indians condemned the use of its ancestral lands in the Big Cypress national preserve for detention purposes, citing parallels with the government’s mass roundup and forced removal of Native Americans in the 19th century. [Continue reading…]