A federal judge will dust for Trump administration fingerprints this week on Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center that critics say has spoiled a remote stretch of the Everglades.
What’s found at a court hearing Wednesday will shape the future of the facility abruptly plunked in the middle of Big Cypress National Preserve to bolster the administration’s mass deportation campaign.
The Center for Biological Diversity and the Friends of the Everglades contend that the site anticipated to eventually house upward of 5,000 detainees falls under the National Environmental Policy Act and so requires a full-bore environmental study.
“We’ve had to piece together the impacts, because the state of Florida has not done any environmental impact analysis,” Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, said in an interview.
