Weekly Roundup: Alligators and ICE

By Jim Turner, The News Service of Florida

TALLAHASSEE — Amid what Gov. Ron DeSantis called the “sauna stage of Tallahassee weather,” attention shifted this week to a proposed migrant detention center in the Everglades and speculation about what the governor will redline from the state’s 2025-2026 budget.

During an appearance Thursday in Boca Raton, DeSantis downplayed the Legislature’s $115.1 billion spending plan as not delivering “any type of sea change” while later acknowledging “there’s a lot to go through” as he preps his veto pen.

The state budget (SB 2500), along with a tax package (HB 7031) and various implementing and conforming bills, were delivered to DeSantis on Friday. The next fiscal year begins on Tuesday.

“There obviously will be vetoes,” DeSantis said Thursday. Other unsigned bills will be handled “over the next three or four days,” the governor added.

“And at that point we will have the fiscal year 2525-26 budget in place, and people can go and do their thing,” he said.

ALLIGATOR ALCATRAZ II

Intensifying an escalating controversy about a plan to quickly open a detention facility for undocumented immigrants at an airstrip in the Everglades, DeSantis on Wednesday said the state is collaborating with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to launch a similar facility at North Florida’s Camp Blanding.

DeSantis said state Division of Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie is working on the plan for Camp Blanding, a 73,000-acre site used by the Florida National Guard for training, as an addition to an Everglades facility that Attorney General James Uthmeier dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.”

“We have some capacity there, so Kevin Guthrie (and the) Division of Emergency Management are working on that,” DeSantis said during an appearance in Tampa. “So we’ll have a formal announcement on both of those very, very quickly.”

Meanwhile, Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit Friday in the U.S. District Court challenging the South Florida site.

The lawsuit accused DeSantis of having “plowed ahead” with plans to detain up to 5,000 people roughly two hours west of Miami without a federally required environmental review.

“This scheme is not only cruel, it threatens the Everglades ecosystem that state and federal taxpayers have spent billions to protect,” Friends of the Everglades Executive Director Eve Samples said in a release.

DeSantis on Thursday emphatically reiterated that there will be “zero” environmental impact on the land that is already used as an airport and training facility. He also shrugged off criticism from people he said “don’t want Florida assisting with the deportations.”

Speaking to reporters on Friday, state Sen. Carlos Smith, D-Orlando, called the detention plans “dangerous,” “inhumane,” and “a political stunt” intended to “grab headlines.”

The Republican Party of Florida quickly embraced the “Alligator Alcatraz” alliteration to promote T-shirts, caps, coffee mugs and beverage coolers.

A RUSH TO NEW ACCREDITING

Florida is working with university leaders from Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas to form a new higher-education accrediting body, DeSantis and officials from the other Southern states announced Thursday.

The new Commission for Public Higher Education, which will need federal approval, would be an alternative to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, a longtime accrediting agency often known as SACS that has clashed with Florida education leaders in recent years.

“We want to focus on real, serious academic rigor. We want to focus on things that really matter, things that are enduring. We don’t want to waste someone’s education,” DeSantis said during an appearance at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.

Accreditation plays a critical role in making schools eligible for students to receive federal financial aid.

But Florida in recent years took steps to move away from SACS, and battled in federal court with the Biden administration about accreditation.

DeSantis, who has tried to reshape Florida’s higher-education system to become more conservative, emphasized a need Thursday to get the new commission approved while President Donald Trump is in office.

“The reality is if it doesn’t get approved and stick during that time, we can have a president come in next and potentially revoke it, and they could probably do that very quickly,” DeSantis said.

DOZIER MONEY

Hundreds of men who were abused as children at two notorious state reform schools — Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna and Okeechobee School in South Florida — are in line to receive more than $21,000 as part of a $20 million reparations program approved last year by Florida lawmakers.

Jeremy Redfern, a spokesman for Attorney General James Uthmeier, said Thursday that the state Department of Financial Services is processing an initial round of checks in the amount of $21,253.98 to 926 applicants who were approved for payments.

A group of Dozier survivors known as the “White House Boys” — a moniker derived from the white concrete building where boys were beaten and raped by school workers — for over a decade traveled to Tallahassee to share their traumas with state lawmakers.

“Let’s remember that although there isn’t enough money in the world to compensate us for the abuse, this is at least an acknowledgement of the abuse by the state, which we doubted could ever happen,” Charles Fudge, one of the group’s leaders, posted on Facebook.

STORY OF THE WEEK: Florida plans to expand immigration detention beyond a remote air strip in the Everglades that is now the subject of a federal lawsuit.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “These men are dying every day, and we need to get something in their hands, the state of Florida, to say ‘I’m sorry for what you’ve suffered and what you went through at the hands of state employees.’” — State Sen. Darryl Rouson, a St. Petersburg Democrat who was instrumental in the passage of a 2024 measure that created a $20 million compensation program for survivors of abuse at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna and the Okeechobee School in South Florida.