COLLIER COUNTY, Fla. — Miami-Dade County is back in control of the land used for the migrant detention facility dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.”
On Thursday, Local 10 News received an inside look of what state officials left behind when they demobilized the facility earlier this summer.
“This is essentially what is left of the operation,” Miami-Dade Chief Resilience Officer Loren Parra said while touring the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport. “This is where there were grounded poles for the fencing and operational infrastructure, but here, where you see the different colors, is everything that has been filled in since demobilization.”
Parra showed what remains of the swiftly constructed immigration detention facility now that the state has formally returned the property to Miami-Dade County.
“The entirety of the operations were hosted here, specifically on this platform here on this runway, and you can still see areas where there was previously infrastructure, mostly some fencing,” Parra said.
County officials said new pavement was laid as part of the operation.
“So here you can see clearly the difference,” Parra said. “This was the existing pavement according to our aviation department here in Miami-Dade, and this is the new pavement that was part of the operation. And what was here before was really just hard-pack fill.”
A row of fence post patching marks the detention center’s perimeter fence.
“This is where you had the fencing located across all those little holes,” Parra said.
Parra said there are two different ways to fill the holes from infrastructure that was previously on the site.
“A lot of the areas you have seen were hot patched,” Parra said. “Here we are coming upon some of the cold patch areas. We need to make sure that they are all hot patched so that this runway can hold the weight of airplanes coming in, so making sure that these are all repaired properly is part of the corrective action that we are asking the state for.”
Remaining asphalt also needs to be addressed, Parra said.
“This is remaining asphalt, and as part of the corrective actions through our environmental report, we are asking that the state properly remove and dispose of everything that is left here,” Parra said.
With an aim to aid the Trump administration’s need for more federal detention beds as part of its mass deportation plan, the state of Florida commandeered the remote property located within Big Cypress National Preserve in Miami-Dade County under emergency powers, trucking in infrastructure needs from fencing and a provisional sewer collection system to industrial lighting and fuel.
“As soon as we were able to gain access to the site, the Department of Environmental Resource Management actually came out here and started to conduct its field tests,” Parra said.
They took soil and water samples over the course of three different visits and “conducted field assessments across multiple dates to identify any areas of environmental concern,” Parra explained to Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava in a recent memo.
“What is important to remember is because of the speed and the manner in which the operation came about, the department wasn’t able to have any baseline data of what the site looked like before the operations, but based on the sampling we were able to take and all of the historical records that we were able to find both between Miami-Dade and Collier County, at this moment in time there are no environmental impacts here at this site,” Parra said.
In a memo to the mayor, dated Aug. 18, Parra explained that “visual inspections and laboratory results do not provide evidence for any violation of the Miami-Dade County Environmental Protection Code, Chapter 24. Any remaining stockpiles of reclaimed asphalt pavement must be properly gathered, disposed of, and removed from the property.”
Levine Cava told Local 10 News the property is critical for habitat and water flow and should be preserved.
“We know that this property is very critical for habitat, for the water flow, for really as part of an area that needs to be preserved. It’s already part of the preservation area officially, so that is what we are pursuing. That was my intention originally, and we had this little interruption of a year, but our plans are to continue moving forward to find a permanent conservation home for these essential properties,” Levine Cava said. “My intention is for it to be permanently protected as a conservation area, and we are going to proceed to make that happen.”
Parra said the ultimate goal is to convey the land into permanent conservation.
“So really all of the operations, both the environmental testing, the aviation reports, are all in an effort to make sure that we can convey these lands in conservation for perpetuity,” Parra said.
Until those corrective actions are taken and county leaders make a decision on the future of the site, the runway will remain closed, officials said.
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