‘We’ve saved taxpayers money’ • Florida Phoenix

As Florida prepares to wind down the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” lockup amid high costs and claims that it’s now obsolete, Gov. Ron DeSantis  reflected Wednesday on the remote facility’s nine-month run.

“We’ve saved taxpayers money,” he told onlookers at an unrelated Brevard County press conference. “We’ve saved taxpayers from medical care and schooling [of undocumented immigrants] and all these different things. … I’d rather do what’s right, and I’d rather protect the people that I was elected to serve.”

Although the Department of Homeland Security has not told him whether it’ll stop sending unauthorized migrants to the facility — located in the heart of the Everglades — DeSantis said he’s glad Florida can take a back seat in the Trump administration’s war to quash undocumented immigration.

“Ideally, I wouldn’t want to be involved in this business at all. If the federal government … could do that with no state support, all the better,” he said, contrasting former President Joe Biden’s policies to President Trump’s overtly hardline campaign against entering the nation without authorization.

The federal government runs five detention centers in Florida, the largest being Krome North Services Processing Center in Miami. 

The governor’s comments came a day after The New York Times reported that officials are preparing to shutter operations at the detention center by June — less than a year after it opened. The center had 1,383 detainees booked on April 2, the latest data available.

The site’s sunset also marks an end of an era for DeSantis, who captured global attention for pushing Florida to the front of the anti-illegal immigration debate. Under his leadership, the state opened two detention centers, revived a World War II-era civilian force in part to buttress the Southern border, and muscled through first-in-the-nation laws to crack down on unauthorized migrants residing in Florida.

But that slow march to the end is starkly juxtaposed against the state’s ever-increasing expenditures on the facility.

The Florida Division of Emergency Management, the agency in charge of the center, just last week told state officials that they’d spent an additional $45 million to cover expenses incurred since the lockup began.

Roughly $13 million of that is going to GEO-CDR Baker and Lemoine CDR, two contractors responsible for creating the center, and nearly $400,000 to Taser International, according to state spending records.

This brings the total spent on “Alligator Alcatraz” and “Deportation Depot” — Florida’s other state-run detention center — to at least $460 million. The highest bill — $92 million — went to Doodie Calls, a portable toilet and sanitation company.

But the final price tag is expected to be much higher: Previously reported records revealed that DEM spent $370 million on Alligator Alcatraz alone in just its first three months of operation, while burning more than $1 million per day.

Waiting on Washington

In November, the agency projected the center would cost roughly $1.1 billion by June 2026. However, state officials have long expected the Federal Emergency Management Agency to reimburse $608 million. Those dollars have yet to come in.

DeSantis has maintained from the outset that the center was designed to be temporary. That claim was supported by DEM’s ever-evolving cost projections for the center, often oscillating between how much it would cost for either one to two years.

On Wednesday, the governor defended the state’s payments as a necessary drop in the bucket compared to both the financial costs of migrants illegally living in Florida and the “human cost” from those who harm citizens.

“What is the cost of allowing illegal immigration to continue to overrun our society? I think those costs are staggering,” he said.

A 2025 state report found that undocumented immigrants cost Florida taxpayers roughly $660 million that year.