Internment Camp in the Florida Everglades
Floor Speech
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Mr. FROST. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to shine light on a moral atrocity going on in my home State of Florida, an immigrant internment camp that Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and his administration have propped up in the middle of an abandoned airfield deep in the Florida Everglades.
It is a place where nearly 1,000 humans are being forced to live in a tent city in the middle of the hot Florida summer, hot sun, where folks are not getting enough food. Detainees are exposed to the heat, and wildlife, and mosquitoes that can potentially carry disease. They are being stripped of their civil rights, and as of this past Saturday, they have been cut off from legal counsel.
While this humanitarian nightmare unfolds, soulless politicians like Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, and Kristi Noem grin and call this place--I am actually not even going to use the name that they are calling it and dignify it. Mr. Speaker, they sell merch. They make jokes. They print hats with cartoon alligators dressed up as ICE agents, and they laugh as people and families are suffering.
I can't tell you the amount of constituents I have heard from, for example, that their dad is in this facility and haven't heard from them for weeks. No one with eyes and a conscience can ignore what this really is. It is an internment camp. It is a place full of people who look like me, Latinos, Haitian men, subjugated to inhumane conditions under the guise of immigration enforcement. It is disgusting. It is un- American. It demands oversight.
Members of Congress have a legally protected right to conduct oversight of immigrant detention centers. That means that we have the power to show up unannounced, as I have on other occasions, and see what is going on with our own eyes.
That was my plan and the plan of my fellow Florida congressional Democrats last week. We were ready to do our jobs. Somehow word got out to the DeSantis administration that we were showing up, and so they decided to invite us at the same date and time we were going to show up anyway.
We took them up on that. We went in the facility. I am here to talk a little bit about my experiences there.
The State of Florida and DHS got wind of our visit. They got scared. They invited us. Of course, what we got was a sanitized version of the way things usually are. Even that sanitized version to me was abhorrent conditions.
I also heard reports that the night before we showed up, magically the detainees got their first shower they had in a while. Also magically, they got one of their first actually good meals. It just shows why the unannounced visits are so important. It is to see how things really are. Mr. Speaker, I have to tell you, a clean cage is still a cage.
At the end of the day, in this facility we have 32 men being crammed in each cage, about 4 to 6 cages in each tent. We brought a thermometer in there and each tent was about 84, 85 degrees, of course, in the hot Florida sun.
I will always remember walking in that front door and looking at these gentlemen in there, everyone screaming for help, one guy asking me to call his family. He was screaming out a phone number. I couldn't hear him. I couldn't get all the digits down.
Only three sources of water per cage, the spigots connected to the toilets, much like the jail units we have seen. Usually in those jails, it is one of those units for 2 to 4 people, not three for 32 people.
I have to tell you, one of the most emotional parts for me was when we looked at the cages from afar. We weren't let in the tent but stood at the doorway, hearing those chants: ``Freedom, freedom''; ``libertad, libertad.'' People were yelling.
This isn't security. It is cruelty. It is not immigration policy. It is dehumanizing people.
Trump said this was about keeping people safe. He said it was about going after criminals, but we all know it was one big lie. Hundreds of the people being held in this internment camp have no criminal charges.
I won't stay silent while our government turns the Everglades land-- protecting it used to be a bipartisan thing. The State is spending $450 million from our Division of Emergency Management to run this internment camp, and we are in hurricane season.
I don't care if you are a Democrat or Republican. I don't care what you are. The Division of Emergency Management has the ability to spend up to $500 million without going to the legislature for emergency money. They are going up to $450 million.
We are about to go into hurricane season, which means that when a hurricane is barreling toward our State, they are not going to do what they need to do immediately to save lives. Every minute matters, and they will have to go back to the legislature and beg for more money because they spent $450 million of our money on a damn internment camp in the middle of the Everglades.
Along with partners, we are going to do something about it. Of course, litigation has been filed.
I think what is important for people to know is that this is a Federal facility--we were told that ICE is calling the shots here--a Federal facility run and operated by the State.
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