Alligator Alcatraz, start to finish

Layer 1, the record

What the state built

On January 6, 2023, the governor declared a state of emergency, citing what he called "alarming levels" of illegal immigration that had imposed "an unmanageable strain on local resources." That declaration designated the Executive Director of the Division of Emergency Management to coordinate the response.

More than two years later, on June 23, 2025, that Director used those emergency powers to commandeer the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, a small airfield inside Big Cypress National Preserve in the Everglades. The plan was a temporary immigration detention facility. Its official name is the South Florida Soft-Sided Facility South. Almost nobody calls it that.

This is the part worth being precise about, because the record is unusually clear on it.

In the words of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit: "Using state employees and state funds, Florida officials, on their own initiative, constructed a detention center at an airport on state property in the Florida Everglades."

Federal immigration officials did a post-construction compliance check to confirm the site met federal standards for detention, and then began sending people to it. When the district court later issued its injunction, the court found, Florida "had received no federal funding." Hundreds of state officials and contractors were on site every day. Four federal officers were.

Florida planned to seek reimbursement. That is a different thing from having been paid, and a different thing again from having been asked to build it.

How the case came out

Two environmental groups, Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity, sued on June 27, 2025, joined later by the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida. They argued the facility was built without the environmental review the National Environmental Policy Act requires. Judge Kathleen Williams of the Southern District of Florida granted a preliminary injunction.

On April 21, 2026, the Eleventh Circuit undid it. The panel was Chief Judge William Pryor and Circuit Judges Brasher and Abudu. Writing for the majority, Pryor held that the plaintiffs "failed to prove either a final agency action or federal control," and that the injunction in part "violates a statutory prohibition of enjoining immigration enforcement." The disposition was to "vacate and remand," which sends the case back to the district court rather than ending it.

The plaintiffs lost. Read carefully, though, the reasoning is a finding about who owns this project. The state won an appeal on the ground that the federal government did not control the facility enough to trigger federal environmental review. Having won on that ground, the state cannot also describe this as something Washington asked it to do.

Judge Abudu dissented. NEPA defines a major federal action as one "subject to substantial Federal control and responsibility." In her view the majority "rewrites the term 'substantial' in NEPA to mean complete and forevermore," reading a statute that asks whether federal control is substantial as though it asked whether federal control is total.

What the Legislature did about it

Start with a detail that is easy to skip. The Emergency Preparedness and Response Fund, the account all of this spending ran through, had already ceased to exist. It terminated automatically on February 17, 2026 under section 19(f) of Article III of the state constitution, which sunsets trust funds unless the Legislature re-creates them. Section 1 of the act re-creates it. Section 3 makes the act operate retroactively to February 17, 2026, which closes the gap.

The Legislature also set the fund to terminate again on July 1, 2028, and attached a reporting requirement that did not exist before.

Under the act, the Division of Emergency Management "shall submit a report to the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives" beginning July 15, 2026, and "on or before the 15th day of the month following each quarter." Each report has to show the projected year-end cash balance, an updated cash flow statement, an update on pending and received federal reimbursements, "an accounting of all inventory and assets purchased, itemized by emergency event and agency," and "an accounting of all pending invoices, itemized by emergency event and agency, including the date the invoice was received."

Read the assets clause again, because it does something the others do not. It requires not just what was bought but "the current status of such assets." The Everglades facility was demobilized. Generators, fencing, lighting, housing units, and equipment were bought with public money and are now somewhere. The statute requires the state to say where.

That is an itemized public accounting of emergency spending, required by statute, filed with the two people who run the Legislature.

The same act sets the approval path for spending from the fund. For a natural emergency, budget amendments go through the notice, review, and objection procedure in section 216.177. For a manmade emergency, which is the category this one falls in, the act adds a sentence: "the chair and the vice chair of the Legislative Budget Commission may authorize such amendment to be approved." Two members can clear it. The act also newly bars the fund from being used to buy aircraft, boats, or motor vehicles, though it still permits short-term leases of them.

SB 7040 became law as Chapter 2026-180. The Governor approved it on June 29, 2026, it was filed with the Secretary of State the same day, and section 4 makes it effective upon becoming a law.

The first report was due on July 15, 2026. As of this writing we have not seen it, and we have found no indication that anyone else has read it either. It is the most current document in this story and it is sitting in an inbox. One fairness note: the law took effect on June 29 and the first deadline fell sixteen days later, which is a tight turnaround. We had this date wrong when the page first went up, and the fix is in our corrections log.

One more thing about the emergency that authorized all of this. Executive Order 23-03, titled Emergency Management and Illegal Immigration, has been extended repeatedly. The Governor's own index shows extensions on January 27, March 24, June 5, and July 21, 2026. That last one came roughly four weeks after the facility closed. The emergency is still running.

What it cost

We said on this page that we would not print cost figures until we had the records rather than coverage of the records. We have them now. Friends of the Everglades sued for them, a court ordered their release, and the group published the production. It is eleven spreadsheets. We pulled all of them and read them.

Three things have to be said before any number, because without them the number is misleading.

First, six of the eleven files contain the same dataset. Adding them together would produce a total roughly six times the real one. We used one file and checked it against the others.

Second, the summary sheet is stamped "THIS IS A DRAFT" across its top and bottom rows. These are the state's internal working papers, not an audited accounting.

Third, and most important, the records stop on October 19, 2025. The facility ran into 2026. What follows is roughly the first four months. It is not what the place cost.

With all three of those attached: the Everglades site alone, separated from the North Florida site by the spreadsheet's own location column, records $390,237,808.50 in costs through October 19, 2025. That is $286,824,545.14 in recurring costs and $103,413,263.36 in one-time costs. We added up all 16,690 individual line items and got the same figure the state's summary page shows, to the penny.

The state's own sheet does the next piece of arithmetic for us. It divides the recurring total by 110 days to get a daily burn rate of $2,607,495.86, and it records an average population of 771 detainees per day over that period.

Set that against the projection. A separate file in the same production projected the South Florida facility at $1,311,869.60 per day, assuming 1,000 detainees. The facility actually ran at about twice the projected daily cost, with fewer people in it than the projection assumed. Both of those figures are primary documents from the same release, so this is a comparison rather than an inference.

Eleven vendors account for every dollar. The largest is a sanitation company, Doodie Calls, at $85,909,173.44, which is 22 percent of all spending at the site. Then IRG at $76.3 million, Garner at $48.4 million, SLS at $35.7 million, LCDR at $26.2 million, LTS at $25.9 million, GardaWorld at $25.0 million, CRS at $18.7 million, CDR Health at $17.7 million, Gothams at $17.3 million, and Granny's at $13.0 million.

We are giving you the names and the amounts and stopping there. We have not yet run these companies against contract awards, corporate registration, or political giving, and the file does not carry their full legal names. When we have done that work, we will write it up. We are not going to imply anything in the meantime.

Florida planned to seek federal reimbursement. The records show that request being assembled, and they show it going badly.

Every line item carries a FEMA determination. At this snapshot, $119,273,525.80 had been classed allowable, $31,382,340.80 unallowable, and $239,581,941.90 undetermined. That is 30.6 percent approved, 8 percent refused, and 61 percent unresolved.

One file builds the reimbursement request itself. It starts from the cost to date, projects a 365-day total, and then zeroes out five whole categories, including transportation, communications, and mobilization, to reach a proposed figure of $850,045,163.22.

A request is not a payment. What Florida actually received is not in these documents.

One figure we are still not printing: the number circulating publicly for this facility does not appear anywhere in this production. We scanned every numeric cell in all eleven files and found nothing close to it. We do not know where it came from, so we are not repeating it.

There is one more thing we still do not have. The most damaging item in this story is a sentence the state's own lawyers wrote to the Eleventh Circuit, acknowledging Florida took the risk that federal money might never arrive. That is a party filing on the docket. It is not in the opinion, and we did not obtain it. A claim that strong has to come off the docket, not out of a summary of it.

What we cannot tell you yet

There are accounts of conditions inside: an organizational investigation by a human rights group, and separate allegations made by attorneys in court filings about how detainees were treated.

Those are two different kinds of statement and neither is an adjudicated fact. No court has made findings on conditions at this facility. We are not going to summarize either one here until we have the underlying report and the underlying filing in hand, because this is precisely the material where a reader's existing views will do the work if we let them.

Where this leaves it

The facility is closed. The accounting is not.

What is established is that Florida decided to do this, used its own emergency powers to take an airport, built the thing with state employees and state money, defended that characterization successfully in federal court, ran it at about twice its own projected daily cost, and then had a reporting requirement attached to the fund it spent from.

We know what the first four months cost, because a nonprofit sued for the records and won. $390,237,808.50 at the Everglades site through October 19, 2025, paid to eleven vendors, with the largest share going to a sanitation company. We know FEMA had approved less than a third of it and refused $31 million outright.

What we still do not know is what the whole thing cost, what Florida was actually paid back, and whether anyone has read the report the Legislature required. Note what those three have in common. Each one is answerable only from a document somebody has to go get. The first four months took a lawsuit. The quarterly report is sitting in two offices in Tallahassee and needs a public records request, which is a form and a stamp rather than a lawsuit.

We would rather leave these visibly open than fill them in from secondhand accounts. But open is not the same as unanswerable, and we are going after all three.