BAKER COUNTY, Fla. — Action News Jax is getting a first look at some of the construction going on at Baker County Correctional Institution as it transitions to become ‘Deportation Depot’.
This once-empty prison is now starting to show some life again, after Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) ordered the facility to become the state’s second immigration detention center.
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The Governor said the immigration detention facility will have the capacity to house over 1,300 detainees.
We told you earlier this week about an email obtained by the Associated Press revealing that Alligator Alcatraz is expected to be empty within days.
If that were to come to fruition, this could leave Northeast Florida as the state’s epicenter for immigration detention.
The construction is sparking activists like Maria Garcia, the organizer of the Jacksonville Immigrant Rights Alliance, to speak out.
“We are organizing in downtown Jacksonville because we want all of North Florida to be paying attention to these developments with our Governor, wasting again more taxpayer dollars to try to build what we’re calling a ‘cruelty camp’ in an abandoned prison,” Garcia told Action News Jax.
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Jessica and John Hadden are from Live Oak, Florida which is about an hour west of Baker County. They are also strongly against the construction of the ‘Deportation Depot.’
“It’s getting closer and closer to home. You know we can’t deny the reality of what’s happening all around us,” said Jessica Hadden. “It’s scary.”
“Sometimes we need to put ourselves in other people’s shoes and in this case in the shoes of the immigrants,” said John Hadden. “They are just trying to improve their lives.”
Action News Jax reached out to the State Division of Emergency Management to find out what the timeline is for the deportation depot’s completion, but they did not respond to our questions.
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