Governor DeSantis is building a detention facility for migrants in the middle of the Florida Everglades that will have a 30 square mile footprint in these wetlands. I’ve watched Fox News personalities exult at the brilliance of this plan and the horrors that migrants would experience if they tried to escape. The cruelty of the plan and of the people who cheer it exceeds the cruelty and persecution migrants fled in their own countries to seek asylum in ours. We should collectively be mortified that this is what our country is becoming.
There is much wrong with this plan. Logistically, it is hard to imagine that the facility will provide humane living conditions or protect detainees from the blistering heat they will encounter in that location. It is also hard to imagine that they will have access to emergency medical care. This facility will likely add to the mounting death toll that the roundup of migrants is exacting.
But it will also create an ecological disaster. The wetlands are a natural filtering system for spillover from Lake Okeechobee and other flooding as water makes its way to the sea. Without filtering, water that spills into the ocean carries concentrated nutrients that feed algae blooms, including Red Tide, which has been a scourge of the Florida coastline. Red Tide causes massive fish kills and kills and endangers coastal mammals including dolphins and manatees, an already endangered population. Red Tide toxins cause respiratory illness that, along with rotting fish in the waterways, drives coastal residents indoors and discourages tourism, the economic lifeblood of the state. Even the birds abandon areas where Red Tide prevails.
Alligators and pythons are more than a metaphor for the security of this facility. They are a metaphor for the cruelty, chaos, and shortsightedness of the way migrants are being treated by the people in power who vilify them.