OCHOPEE, Fla. — Deep in the Everglades, where a half-built runway from a scrapped 1970 jetport slices through sawgrass and slow-moving water, a federal judge is deciding whether “Alligator Alcatraz” should remain open or be shut down for good, according to Gulf Coast News’ courtroom coverage by Kendall Brand.
The detention site, built on land and long opposed by environmentalists and the Miccosukee Tribe, was revived to hold thousands of immigration detainees. Attorneys for the Friends of the Everglades, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Miccosukee Tribe told the court that the Department of Homeland Security failed to conduct a federally required environmental impact study before moving detainees into the old airfield, in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), according to Gulf Coast News.
The coalition’s lawsuit details how the facility’s waste, light pollution, noise, and traffic threaten fragile water conservation areas that sustain endangered species and the tribe’s homelands, wetlands that carry the memory of centuries, according to Gulf Coast News.
“The federal and state defendants are dancing a wild two-step together,” one attorney told the court, accusing DHS and Florida of “bending over backwards to avoid accountability,” Gulf Coast News reported.
According to the outlet, attorneys for the environmental groups reminded the court that the single runway at the site was originally part of a massive Everglades Jetport project halted in 1970 after scientific studies showed severe environmental damage. Half a century later, they noted, the same stretch of tarmac lies in the middle of ancient grasslands once again at the center of a battle over whether development should outweigh environmental and tribal protections.
DHS attorneys argued in court that Florida, not the federal government, operates the site, and that no pre-operation environmental data exists to show harm, according to Gulf Coast News. The judge has already issued a temporary order blocking new construction while crews prepared the facility to hold up to 3,000 detainees, the outlet reported.
For the Miccosukee Tribe, the stakes extend beyond environmental science. The land sits within their ancestral territory, where the grass bends to seasonal monsoons and the water carries stories older than any runway. The transformation of that ground into a high-capacity detention camp raises questions about sovereignty, consent, and the right to defend waterways from industrial-scale use, Gulf Coast News reported.
The legal fight doesn’t stop at the wetlands’ edge. A second lawsuit, brought by civil rights groups, claims that detainees are being held without charges, denied meetings with lawyers, and stripped of immigration bond hearings after a federal court abruptly canceled them, according to Gulf Coast News. That case is scheduled for a hearing next Monday, and the judge in the environmental suit has not yet issued a decision, the outlet reported.
Until then, the Everglades’ ghost runway built on ancient wetlands remains both a relic of one halted project and the contested ground for another.
