In the middle of the night the Everglades are loud. The soundtrack of Florida’s swamplands is a constant call of cicadas. But an hour from downtown Miami there are almost no people. The narrow offshoots of the main road take you deeper into the grasses, where snakes and alligators lie lazily in and around still water. One bend in the road, however, is busy. A blue sign for “Alligator Alcatraz” marks the turnoff where pickup trucks circle hours before dawn. When your correspondent approached the perimeter, a guard inside a car rolled down her window an inch. She couldn’t talk, she said: “the bugs are too bad.” She was right: if you reached out and grabbed a fistful of air you could catch dozens of mosquitoes.

Alligator Alcatraz is Florida’s newest immigration detention facility. On a strip of land once used as an airfield the state is housing over 900 immigrants in the kind of plastic tents used for big parties. The facility opened at the beginning of July. The governor, Ron DeSantis, eager to get back in MAGA’s good graces after challenging Donald Trump in the presidential primary, pitched the administration on Florida being the site of its next big immigration project. James Uthmeier, his attorney-general, suggested putting a detention facility in the Everglades where fugitives would have “nowhere to go, nowhere to hide”. The administration embraced the idea. Within just over a week Florida used emergency powers to seize land from Miami-Dade County and build a 3,000-bed prison in the middle of a national preserve.

Until now, states have not played such a proactive role in detention. Unlike most civil detention facilities in America designed for immigrants, Alligator Alcatraz is not funded by the federal government, at least initially, nor run by private contractors with experience detaining people. Instead Florida is footing the bill—so far Mr DeSantis has allocated $245m—and the state’s emergency-management agency is in charge of operations. Because of that the facility looks more like a base camp set up for first responders after a natural disaster than the fenced-in concrete complexes that house immigrants awaiting deportation in places like Texas and Louisiana. The contractors hired for logistics are equally unfit for purpose. Dynamic Integrated Security, a firm that does school security, is recruiting correctional officers for the site. Listings on a job forum say the gig pays $10,000 a month and does not require prison experience, and that guards will receive “on-site orientation” and start “ASAP”.

According to Anna Eskamani, a Democratic state representative who toured Alligator Alcatraz last month, each tent contains eight cages with bunkbeds that sleep 36 men. There is no running water or electricity, so water is trucked in and generators keep the power on. Detainees have reported that the water makes them sick. Despite having air-conditioning pumped through big pipes, the tents are hot. After sunset they fill with frogs and biting bugs. Critics worry that if a hurricane hits southern Florida—as often happens in late summer and early autumn—the tents will flood. It is not clear if the state has made proper evacuation plans.

The facility expects up to 4,000 detainees by the end of August, which would make it America’s biggest. Construction crews continue to build it out as busloads of immigrants arrive from Krome, another Miami detention facility, and local jails. Because it is not under federal purview there is no readily available public data on who the detainees are and how many have criminal records. Attorneys have sued over not having access to their clients there; in the second week of July there were no visiting rooms. One of two doctors conducting medical exams told Ms Eskamani that she did not know where the nearest hospital was. Kevin Guthrie, the place’s boss, said that ambulances are called daily for emergencies but so far no one has died.

This is not the first time that immigrants have been held in tents. Barack Obama put up tents in San Antonio for children who had crossed the border alone and couldn’t legally be held in adult detention centres; Joe Biden housed Afghan refugees in tents in El Paso. Neither of those camps were set up for performative punishment, however, as Alligator Alcatraz clearly is. Republican leaders are revelling in their achievement. Both the Republican Party of Florida and the National Republican Campaign Committee are selling Alligator Alcratraz merchandise. “ICE WITH A BITE”, one T-shirt reads. Mr Trump says that menacing alligators will keep immigrants in. Those who know the swamps understand that the threat is overblown: alligators do not attack people unprovoked.

In Miami, where 70% of people are Hispanic, the deportation theatre is not going over well. Many expected the Trump administration to pick up gang members, but not cleaning ladies and Uber drivers. “Arbitrary measures to hunt down people who are complying with their immigration hearings” is “not what we voted for”, the co-founder of Latinas for Trump wrote on X in June. Conditions at Alligator Alcatraz resemble prisons in places their grandparents escaped. “Pick them up, throw them out, but don’t mock them,” one veteran Republican says of criminal immigrants. Another party strategist who “loves everything else Trump is doing” wonders how a country known for taking in “the poor and huddled masses” can also be “dragging them out to be tortured in the Everglades”.

A majority of Americans agree. In recent polling 52% said the government is trying to deport more people than they expected; 57% opposed building new detention centres. Last month Mr Trump’s net approval rating on immigration flipped from positive to negative. On July 25th the administration announced it would give states $608m in federal emergency-management funds to build detention facilities. Other Republican governors may soon follow Florida’s lead. They might be wise to wait and see if their own base revolts.■

Header: The White House