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Last month, a judge ordered the state to start winding down a migrant detention center in the Everglades in response to a lawsuit claiming that Florida violated environmental law.

Plaintiffs in the case explained what this means on Wednesday on WMNF’s Midpoint.  

Elise Bennett is a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. 

“No new detainees can be brought to the site, and that is to facilitate the wind down of the really harmful activities. So that is the artificial lighting which is impacting endangered Florida panthers and Florida Bonnetted bats, and also to take all of the potential contaminants off the site, jet fuel, human waste, so that there’s not this risk to these world class wetlands that are in our Everglades and in Big Cypress National Preserve,” Bennett told WMNF.

Eve Samples is the president of Friends of the Everglades,

“There’s some painful irony in these projects being rolled out under the guise of law and order, because the state and federal government have violated the law, the National Environmental Policy Act, in doing them. So, so real irony to chew on there,” Samples said. 

Samples said the state has 60 days to dismantle the facility. 

“So by Halloween, we hope to see that the fences are gone, the industrial lighting is gone, and the site looks very different,” Samples said.

But the state has said that if an appeals court pauses the judge’s order, it plans to resume taking immigrants at the facility it calls Alligator Alcatraz.

The post Advocates discuss what the court-ordered winding down of ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ means for the Everglades appeared first on WMNF 88.5 FM.