Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced Thursday that a currently abandoned state prison in the northern part of the state will serve as a new migrant detention center, which he called a “Deportation Depot,” just over a month after the opening of ‘Alligator Alcatraz’.
“We are authorizing and will soon open a new illegal immigration processing and deportation center here in North Florida. We will call it the Deportation Depot,” the Republican governor said in a statement to the media from the Baker County Correctional Institute.
This jail, currently abandoned and located about 70 kilometers west of the city of Jacksonville, will have the capacity to house more than 1,300 migrants. It will be ready to receive inmates “soon,” according to DeSantis.
“It will be operational soon; it won’t take forever, but we’re not rushing to do it today either,” he said.
This will be the second new migrant-specific detention center in Florida after ‘Alligator Alcatraz’, located in the south of the state, which was inaugurated in early July at an event also attended by U.S. President Donald Trump.
‘Alligator Alcatraz’ has capacity for 3,000 migrants, and DeSantis had warned that as soon as they approached that limit they would open a new detention center.
“We’ve reached that point where I’m sure we need additional capacity,” the governor said today, without specifying, however, whether the first center had reached its maximum capacity.
Although they had initially planned for the new facility to be located at the Blanding National Guard Base, the governor said the abandoned prison better met the authorities’ expectations.
Florida is one of Trump’s main allies on immigration issues, and is the only state that has required local law enforcement agencies to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement(ICE) to detain undocumented migrants, according to Efe.
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