Florida to Open Second Immigrant Detention Center

Florida will soon open a second state-run immigration detention center in an empty prison west of Jacksonville, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced on Thursday, growing the state’s contentious effort to crack down on illegal immigration.

The new detention center will be named the “Deportation Depot,” Mr. DeSantis said, again trying to brand a facility that will house federal immigration detainees for maximum political effect. His administration named its first state-run detention center “Alligator Alcatraz,” based on its location in the Florida Everglades. The Republican Party of Florida promptly began selling merchandise featuring that name.

Unlike the Everglades facility, which was built in June on a remote airfield with little to no infrastructure, the new detention center will operate out of the Baker Correctional Institution in rural Sanderson, Fla. The Florida Department of Corrections closed that facility, which can house about 1,300 detainees, in 2021 as it consolidated several North Florida prisons.

Kevin Guthrie, the executive director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said that temporary dorms could increase the new center’s capacity to about 2,000. The Division of Emergency Management operates the Everglades detention center, which state officials hope will be able to accommodate 4,000 detainees by the end of August.

Mr. DeSantis has continued his push to help the Trump administration enforce immigration laws despite legal challenges to the Everglades center; reports of poor conditions for its detainees; questions over the state’s authority to hold federal detainees in the first place, and criticism from some fellow Republicans over how much the center has cost.

Without addressing any of those concerns, Mr. DeSantis said on Thursday that opening the second detention center would cost about $6 million. That is a fraction of the at least $450 million that Florida has said it would cost to operate the Everglades detention center for a year.

The federal government will reimburse the state for all of its detention center spending, the governor said.

Mr. DeSantis had said since the opening of the Everglades detention center that his administration was considering a second facility in North Florida if there was “demand” for more space to hold federal immigration detainees. That time has come, he said on Thursday, without offering data.

“This will really, I think, meet a need that is there,” he said, standing outside the Baker Correctional Institution. Florida, he added, has “done more on this than any other state by a country mile.”

The governor had initially suggested Camp Blanding, a training site for the Florida National Guard outside of Starke, Fla., between Jacksonville and Gainesville, as the likely location for the detention center. But unlike the Everglades detention center, Camp Blanding’s runway could not accommodate aircraft large enough to transport many detainees at once, Mr. DeSantis said on Thursday. The Baker Correctional Institution is near an airport in Lake City, Fla.

Last week, a federal judge in Miami ordered a 14-day stop to construction at the Everglades detention center, pending the completion of a hearing in a case brought by environmentalists.