An immigrant detention camp in the Everglades, financed with hurricane-response funds

Florida in Five: Five stories to read from the past week in Florida politics.

Jul 06, 2025

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Welcome to another installment of Florida in Five: Five* stories you need to read from the past week in Florida politics.

On June 23, the administration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seized a landing strip in the middle of the Florida Everglades from Miami-Dade County. The same day, records show, the Governor’s Office handed out an $18 million, no-bid deal to a construction firm hired to build a new immigrant detention facility on the mosquito-infested site.

The site-prep agreement with Lemoine CDR Logistics LLC — a joint venture that includes one of Ron DeSantis’ biggest campaign contributors — is one of at least five new contracts and purchase orders totaling more than $25 million issued in recent days for work at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, the isolated airfield now home to a hastily constructed prison camp that is already holding immigrants swept up under the Trump administration’s mass deportation program.

That’s not all. Separate records show that the Governor’s Office has paid out more than $85 million over the past two weeks to the dozen or so vendors known to be working on the detention facility that Florida officials have gleefully dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.”

And almost all the cash for these contracts and vendor payments is coming from the same place: A massive “emergency management” fund that has been seeded with $2 billion in taxpayer money — money that Ron DeSantis is free to spend virtually however he wants.

The no-strings-attached bank account was a gift from Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature, which created the fund in 2022 at DeSantis’ request. Technically known as Florida’s “Emergency Preparedness and Response Fund,” it’s a pot of money that the governor can tap into during any declared state of emergency without any oversight whatsoever from the Legislature — the branch of government that is, at least in theory, supposed to control the state’s purse strings.

DeSantis’ allies in the state House and Senate repeatedly implied at the time that they were simply trying to help the governor more nimbly respond to natural disasters like hurricanes. But soon after the account was up and running, DeSantis gave himself perpetual access to it by declaring a “state of emergency” over immigration — effectively turning it an opaque slush fund he is free to exploit for projects like “Alligator Alcatraz.”

And the reality is that Republican leaders in Tallahassee knew full well that this is what would happen.

“Outside of a hurricane, outside of or apart from a pandemic, can you think of any other possible emergencies that might qualify?” Sen. Jason Pizzo, a former Democrat from Hollywood who recently dropped his party affiliation, asked during a January 2022 hearing on the legislation creating the governor’s emergency fund.

“I can think of quite a few,” responded Sen. Danny Burgess, a Republican from Zephyrhills who sponsored the bill on behalf of the Governor’s Office. “My neck of the woods has sinkholes. There are floods, fires. I was surprised to find out in a previous committee meeting…they highlighted several earthquakes in Florida. That was something I was not aware of. So, yes, there’s many variations of a disaster.”

“Would immigration fall under an emergency or disaster situation, in your interpretation?” Pizzo asked.

“I’m not going to speculate on the myriad of disasters that could be out there,” Burgess answered — a mere seconds after he had speculated about sinkholes, floods, fires and earthquakes.

Over in the House, Rep. Frentrice Driskell, a Democrat from Tampa, tried to tighten the legislation just before it passed so that DeSantis could only tap into the emergency account when responding to natural disasters — rather than manmade ones.

“If we were to pass this bill without this amendment and just let the governor declare whatever he wants to be a disaster, my personal fear in these polarized times [is], what is to stop a governor from declaring an immigration emergency and then going to spend these funds…?” Driskell said on the House floor.

Nothing, it turns out.

Altogether, Florida lawmakers put at least $2 billion into DeSantis’ emergency account since the inception of the fund. But that’s not the only way they have enabled Florida’s new immigrant prison camp in the swamp.

They have also turned a blind eye as Ron DeSantis has kept Florida locked in a permanent state of emergency over immigration — a situation that gives the governor an array of extraordinary legal powers. Those extra powers include the ability to ignore regular contract-bidding rules and to commandeer property, which is how DeSantis was able to seize the Everglades airfield from Miami-Dade County.

The governor first declared an initial, 60-day state of emergency over immigration in January 2023. But the governor has since extended it 15 times.

The result is that Florida has been in a statewide state of emergency for two-a-and-half years now — and there is still no end in sight.

The Florida Legislature has the power to terminate a state of emergency at any time. But lawmakers have allowed this one to continue without question.

Perhaps they have been too busy posing for pictures.

*To paraphrase Barbossa, five is more what you’d call a guideline than an actual rule.