Megan Bowman
speaker
54 appearances
5 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 29 Jun
Megan Bowman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 4.
Appearances
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis confirmed the state is talking with the Trump administration about closing the detention center due to costs, following a New York Times report.
The detention center is in the Everglades at a small airstrip and was built in eight days last summer.
The state estimated the first year's cost at nearly $1.4 billion in a grant request from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
FEMA awarded about $600 million for the detention center, but hasn't released the money.
Environmentalists say they'll keep fighting to close the facility.
For NPR News, I'm Megan Bowman in Tampa.
Right.
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.
Showing 21–40 of 54 · page 2 of 3
← Previous
Next →