https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/07/05/alligator-alcatraz-immigrants-detention-florida/

Heat, storms, mosquitoes the big threats at Alligator Alcatraz, experts say

Florida’s hastily constructed detention camp in the Everglades, which began processing immigrants late this week, has been praised by President Trump.

July 5, 2025 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

By Lori Rozsa
and
Rachel Hatzipanagos

The hastily constructed detention camp in the Everglades that began processing immigrant detainees late this week has already flooded once, may not meet hurricane codes and is not officially approved or funded by the federal government.

Experts say detainees and staff will face far more common hazards than the swampland terrors gleefully envisioned by state and national Republicans to discourage escapes. Mosquitoes and hurricanes are more likely to harm the expected 3,000-plus detainees and 100-member staff than are alligators and Burmese pythons.

“The risk of mosquito-borne disease at this site is significant,” said Durland Fish, a professor emeritus of epidemiology at the Yale University School of Public Health. And the viruses detected during a mosquitos study he conducted in the Everglades — including at Big Cypress Swamp, where the detention center is located — can cause neurological damage, including encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain.

“There’s no treatment for these,” Fish said.

The detention camp, named Alligator Alcatraz by state officials, has been enthusiastically endorsed by President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem. Trump visited Tuesday, saying the camp soon will have “some of the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet.”

The facility, which includes large tents over cells erected with chain-link fencing, portable showers and portable toilets, was put together in eight days. State lawmakers who have spoken about it say that work was done secretly, after they had ended their annual legislative session.

A group of Democratic representatives tried to tour Thursday but were denied entry — “despite clear statutory authority” allowing them to inspect prisons and detention facilities, they said in a joint statement. “This is a blatant abuse of power and an attempt to conceal human rights violations from the public eye.”

The camp is located on an infrequently used airfield in the heart of the protected Everglades. Before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) commandeered it, the site consisted of a long runway built in the late 1960s as an initial stage in a project intended to create a mega-airport. But environmentalists and Indigenous tribes successfully fought back, and the area, surrounded by the Big Cypress National Preserve and next door to Everglades National Park, is now part of an ongoing $25 billion Everglades restoration project.

Trump views the location as a plus for his crackdown with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “We’re surrounded by miles of treacherous swampland, and the only way out is really deportation,” he said.

State officials are defending their rapid construction of the facility and its “soft-sided” cells — some of which started to flood during Trump’s visit, as seen in videos shot by local media. According to the state’s emergency management director, Kevin Guthrie, the 158,000 square feet of housing is “a fully aluminum frame structure rated for winds of 110 miles an hour,” the top-end equivalent of a Category 2 hurricane. He said Wednesday that the department has an evacuation plan in case a major storm threatens but released no details.

Some building experts note that the site is in a High-Velocity Hurricane Zone, where local code requires that a building’s entire envelope — including windows, doors and eaves — incorporates lab-tested, wind-resistant design.

“The 110 mile an hour wind design hasn’t existed in Florida since Hurricane Andrew in 1992,” said Anthony Abbate, a professor and director of the MetroLAB in the School of Architecture at Florida Atlantic University. “Nowhere in the state of Florida is 110 acceptable, according to the Florida building code.”

Environmentalists are again suing the state, as well as the federal government and Miami-Dade County, to halt use of the site. Among other concerns, they fear widespread insecticide spraying to kill mosquitoes would also kill off other insects and animals in the federally protected wetlands.

Photographer Clyde Butcher has been documenting the Everglades for 40 years and calls it “one of the most beautiful areas in the country. … The water is pure and clear.” He worries about the environmental impact from the generators supplying electricity and the security lights glaring through the night, potentially disrupting the delicate ecosystem. He also highlights the climate, having “roasted” in sweltering heat there last weekend.

“Hurricane season is just starting to come, will that blow everything away?” he said. “This is not a wise thing to do.”

At the same time, immigration rights groups have raised human rights concerns. Also high on their list: the heat and humidity.

Officials are relying on portable air conditioners to cool tents in a place where the average maximum temperature in July hits 91 degrees. The wet season, which extends from mid-May to November, is when most of an average year’s 60 inches of rainfall soaks the ground, according to the National Park Service.

Carlos Martinez, an assistant professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz who studies the health consequences of deportation, said that what he has seen so far of the facility is “alarming and disturbing.” While many of the health concerns about Alligator Alcatraz are the same as those for any detention center — overcrowding, inadequate sanitation and food, inadequate medical care — he said some, like the heat and mosquitoes, are particular to the Everglades location.

He called out the administration’s aggressive messaging about the site. On social media, the Department of Homeland Security posted an AI-generated picture of massive alligators wearing ICE hats in front of barbed-wire fence and a large concrete structure.

“I think it’s aimed at portraying the people that are going to be held at these facilities as incredibly dangerous and needing to be surrounded by killer alligators,” Martinez said.

Immigrant advocates have criticized the remote location of the facility and impact that will have as detainees await disposition of their cases.

“They are in a facility that is very inaccessible to lawyers, to family members, to oversight,” said Renata Bozzetto, deputy director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition. “So the location being so remote and isolated is a problem. Being in an environmentally fragile ecosystem is a problem. Being constructed with temporary materials will be catastrophic in case of a hurricane.”

In response to the environmentalists’ federal lawsuit, Homeland Security attorneys filed a motion stating, “DHS has not implemented, authorized, directed, or funded Florida’s temporary detention center.”

Noem has said the Federal Emergency Management Agency will reimburse Florida for the detention center’s first year of operation — estimated at $450 million. The DHS motion suggests otherwise, however: “Florida is constructing and operating the facility using state funds on state lands under state emergency authority and a preexisting general delegation of federal authority to implement immigration functions.”

DeSantis wants to build a series of such centers around the state, as outlined in a 37-page plan “to find, sort, detain, and deport illegal aliens within the State of Florida.” The plan anticipates housing women and children in some of the facilities.