Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz,” built as an immigration detention center in the Everglades to house thousands of people, is part of President Donald Trump’s goal to “dehumanize” immigrants, said Ira Kurzban, who is based in Miami and recognized as one of the nation’s top immigration attorneys.
“It's an effort to dehumanize people, period, because a lot of these people aren't undocumented,” Kurzban told the PBS NewsHour on Tuesday, the same day Trump and administration officials toured the facility.
Kurzban said the administration’s decision last week to end Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for 500,000 Haitians is part of its strategy to boot out legal U.S. residents by suddenly changing them to “illegal status.”
“What they want to do is ramp up civil detention of people,” said Kurzban, the former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, noting that it’s a civil offense to be in the U.S. illegally.
Gov. Ron DeSantis argues the facility is a necessity to address what he calls the “emergency” of illegal immigration in Florida.