Megan Bowman

So it opened last summer in July in the middle of the Everglades, this swampy marshland in South Florida that has a lot of alligators.

That's how state officials came up with the name.

It's at a small training airport, and DeSantis took control of the facility using emergency power so it could be built in eight days.

Plus, everything had to be trucked in, like water, generators, even tents for housing.

So now it's a, you know, a tent city on the runway.

All sewage and trash gets trucked out and it's in the middle of nowhere, which was the idea behind it, that if people escaped, they'd run into alligators and other wildlife.

And ever since it opened, there have been complaints about inhumane conditions of detainees and environmental concerns of the facility operating in a very sensitive ecosystem.

Well, kind of.

Yes.

Since they built this facility from scratch and there was no existing infrastructure, it cost a lot of money and it continues to drain the state.

But public records show the state prepared this cost breakdown when they applied for a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The understanding was the state would be reimbursed and that the center would run at least through June of 2027.

So they show it cost Florida about $750,000 a day to operate.

The New York Times reports that number is actually a little closer to a million dollars a day.

So including a one-time cost to build it, the state's total yearly cost was nearly $1.4 billion.

So far, it's been the state covering that expense, not the federal government.

They did get a letter to get reimbursed by the feds, but no money has arrived yet.

Well, the governor has always said that the state will get reimbursed.

DeSantis says he talked to FEMA about it the other day and that it will happen soon.

He's always said he was just helping DHS and ICE get enough detention beds temporarily for their immigration enforcement.