Advocates demand inquiry into Florida’s recently closed Alligator Alcatraz detention center

Environmentalists and immigrant-rights advocates demand accounting of damage done by notorious Everglades facility

While they welcome the recent closure of the controversial Alligator Alcatraz migrant detention center, leading environmental groups and their allies say they want an independent investigation into the environmental damage the facility inflicted on the surrounding wilderness during its 12 months of operations.

Those groups made that demand alongside immigrant-rights advocates and members of Florida’s Miccosukee Tribe at a news conference on Friday outside the entrance to the shuttered detention center, where the Friends of the Everglades (FOE) executive director, Eve Samples, condemned the camp as a “failure, an obscene waste of taxpayer dollars and an abuse of the Everglades”.