Governor DeSantis announced Friday that deportation flights have started transporting detainees back to their home countries from the immigration detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” with the first flights departing in recent days.

Nearly 100 detainees have already been deported this week as the Department of Homeland Security begins conducting flights from the facility that was built quickly earlier this summer on an abandoned airport site in the middle of Everglades National Park.

The facility “was never intended to be something where people are just held and we just kind of twiddle our thumbs. The whole purpose is to make this be a place that can facilitate increased frequency and numbers of deportations of illegal aliens,” Governor DeSantis said during a press conference at the facility on Friday morning.

“One of the reasons why this was a sensible spot is ’cause you have this runway that’s right here. You don’t have to drive them an hour to an airport. You go a couple thousand feet and they can be on a plane and out of here,” he said. 

“So I’m pleased to report that those flights out of Alligator Alcatraz by DHS have begun.”

The governor said that the frequency of the flights has already increased, with several taking place over the past few days.

“This provides an ability to enhance the mission to increase the number and frequency of deportations,” Mr. DeSantis added. “What’s been done here has really been … remarkable. There’s full ground-to-air communications from the airfield. There’s air tracking radar capabilities on site.”

The new facility was announced in June was erected quickly, as the remote prison consists mostly of large tents.

“Alligator Alcatraz: the one-stop shop to carry out President Trump’s mass deportation agenda,” Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, said in a post on X at the time, accompanied by a slickly produced video announcing the facility.

Among the hundreds confined at the makeshift detention center are more than 250 people who have no criminal history in America and are accused only of immigration violations, according to a recent report from the Tampa Bay Times. These individuals were swept up alongside those accused or convicted of crimes.

“That place is supposedly for the worst criminals in the U.S.,” the nephew of a 56-year-old Nicaraguan man taken to the facility following a traffic stop, Walter Jara, said to the newspaper. The uncle, Denis Alcides Solis Morales, is accused of immigration violations but the list makes no mention of convictions or pending criminal charges.

Critics have denounced the facility as cruel and inhumane, while Mr. DeSantis and other Republican state officials have defended it as part of the state’s broader effort to support President Trump’s immigration enforcement policies. 

“We’ve been down this road before with Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County in Arizona where he had a tent city,” a policy analyst for the Florida Immigrant Coalition, Thomas Kennedy, told CNN earlier this month. “The fact that we’re going to have 3,000 people detained in tents, in the Everglades, in the middle of the hot Florida summer, during hurricane season, this is a bad idea all around that needs to be opposed and stopped.”