COLLIER COUNTY, Fla. — It’s a sight that hasn’t been seen in more than a year: The runway at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport is a ghost town.
It comes after the state of Florida announced in late June that it was shutting down the migrant detention facility that had been operating on the land dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.”
The state swiftly constructed the immigration detention facility in the Everglades on land commandeered from Miami-Dade County — but located in Collier County — to aid the Trump administration with its mass deportation plan and related need for more federal detention beds.
Gone now are the industrial lights and white tents, generators and gas deliveries, and the blue “Alligator Alcatraz” sign some stopped to snap selfies with.
Sky 10 captured what appears to be the removal of fencing around the airstrip that anchored its previous use as a pilot training facility.
What remains includes questions as to when Miami-Dade County will regain control of the site.
The Florida Division of Emergency Management previously took control of the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport.
“We are waiting for the formal return of the property,” Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, who has announced plans to sell the site to the National Park Service, said on Tuesday.
There are also questions over what impact the facility may have had on the environment.
“Although much of the infrastructure has been removed and the detainees are no longer on site, we remain very concerned about the harm that remains, including at least 20 acres of new pavement that was laid out at the site without any environmental review,” Eve Samples, the executive director of the group Friends of the Everglades, said.
Friends of the Everglades is one of the groups suing in federal court. They claim government defendants failed to conduct an environmental impact study prior to construction, in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act, which the defendants said didn’t apply since the site was state-run and managed.
“Our work is not done, so we’re very eager to return to court and we are poised to do so,” Samples said.
Elise Bennett, the Florida and Caribbean director and a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, another plaintiff, said, “We’re very concerned about what the long-term impacts are going to be to species that are hanging on the brink of extinction.”
“From the Florida panther to the Florida bonneted bat to the Everglades snail kite, they were using this area before the facility was put in place and stood up,” she said. “Beyond the new paving, we know that there were gallons and gallons of contaminants on the site. We don’t know where those contaminants ended up and there’s a real investigation that’s going to need to take place for us to even begin to understand the full extent of impacts on these really vulnerable species and the waters and lands that they call home.”
Samples and Bennett say they are disappointed — but not deterred — by a federal appeals court ruling overturning a district court’s order that temporarily hit pause on the facility. That case was remanded back to district court. They say they feel that several claims are still in play.
“Our legal team is assessing all of our options as we’re poised to return to court, to Judge Williams’ courtroom, to ensure that the government is held accountable for the harm that occurred at the site and to ensure that remediation occurs and that our bedrock environmental laws in this country are complied with,” Samples said.
Bennett added that her organization will be “using every tool at our disposal to ensure that the site is restored and that this site is protected in perpetuity, so something like this can never happen again.”
Friends of the Everglades has also sent Miami-Dade County leadership what they call a post-Alligator Alcatraz “five-point plan” for remediation, restoration and protection, which includes prohibiting future development of the site and considering the removal of the existing runway.
Group’s ‘five-point plan’:
“We asked for a cost-benefit analysis of the runway removal to be conducted. So it’s quite possible that the benefits of removing that runway will outweigh the costs,” Samples said. “And a big motivator for considering that is to ensure that this kind of damaging operation is never built again in the middle of Big Cypress National Preserve, our country’s first national preserve.”
Bennett called that a “really beautiful end cap to a really horrifying story that started with one of America’s worst ideas.”
Local 10 News reached out to the state’s Division of Emergency Management but did not hear back as of the publication of this article.
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