Just fewer than 70 Florida National Guard troops have been sent to guard the remote migrant detention center in the state’s Everglades known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” the Pentagon’s top spokesperson announced Wednesday.
“Nearly 70 Florida National Guard are on state active duty … conducting base camp security at Alligator Alcatraz,” chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell told reporters.
The activation comes after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said he would send 100 guard troops there, with people arriving at the facility as early as Wednesday.
President Trump on Tuesday toured the site in southern Florida at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, saying afterward the complex is “surrounded by miles of treacherous swampland and the only way out is really deportation.”
The facility, estimated to cost $450 million annually, will hold migrants awaiting deportation and could house around 5,000 people, officials have claimed.
But Democrats have denounced the complex, with Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) describing the site as an “internment camp,” and 24 House Democrats on Wednesday began lobbying for the site’s closure.
“They target migrants, rip families apart, and subject people to conditions that amount to physical and psychological torture in facilities that can only be described as hell on Earth,” Frost said in a statement last week. “Now, they want to erect tents in the blazing Everglades sun and call it immigration enforcement. They don’t care if people live or die; they only care about cruelty and spectacle.”
Trump has increasingly used the military in his immigration crackdown, placing 8,500 service members at the U.S.-Mexico border and 5,000 in Los Angeles to protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who have received pushback due to their sweeping immigration raids.
Deportations are expected to ramp up after Senate Republicans overnight advanced a major spending package that injects tens of billions of dollars into immigration enforcement spending.
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