Freedom of speech in Florida, with respect and appreciation to Norman Rockwell. (Illustration: AI for Silverberg4Florida/ChatGPT)
April 13, 2026 by David Silverberg, candidate for Florida Senate, District 28
Most people don’t know this but until now America had a secret superpower.
That superpower was the relationship of its federal, state and local governments.
They were like the three legs of a stool, each one contributing to the strength of the whole. Each one could provide support for the others and fill in if gaps appeared.
This was especially true when it came to disasters and nowhere more so than in Florida.
If a local government couldn’t cope with a disaster—like a hurricane—then the state government could step in. If the state government needed assistance, it could count on the federal government. Each form of government, by being autonomous and making its own decisions, by functioning in a democratic fashion according to law, and by cooperating together, created a remarkably strong whole that served the needs of all the people, especially in emergencies or under duress.
Until now.
Unfortunately, the stool has been broken. At the federal level Donald Trump bullies and threatens all other governments in his quest for complete domination and dictatorial power.
In Florida a governor seeking to rule in the Trump mold, an ambitious, ideologically-driven attorney general, a rapacious chief financial officer and an extremist legislature are waging war on “home rule,” the ability of town, city and county governments to make their own decisions.
Overruling home rule is usually called “preemption,” in the sense that state government preempts local government powers and takes decisionmaking out of their hands.
I call it “Big Tallahassee”—and it’s been going on far too long.
If elected state Senator from the 28th District, the area including Collier and Hendry counties and the Lee County area east of Route 75, I intend to do everything I can to protect, strengthen and respect local governments, not just in my district, but in all of Florida.
We just had an example of Big Tallahassee bullying right here in the 28th District; the state took away the City of Naples’ power over the airport within its city limits. The city will no longer name the commissioners on the airport’s board. Instead, they’ll be elected by the surrounding county.
This was proposed in House Bill 4005 by Florida House Rep. Adam Botana (R-80-Estero), whose district doesn’t include the City of Naples. He had no relationship to the airport. He just decided to strip the Naples city council of its authority and the rest of the Republican legislature and the governor went along with it. Naples’ desires were simply ignored and overridden.
(Botana is being challenged this year by Meg Titcomb, whose website, VoteMegTitcomb.com, will soon be operational.)
Other examples of Big Tallahassee overreach are passage and enactment of bills preempting local governments from planning land use changes after disasters (Senate Bill (SB) 180, 2025), stopping local governments from trying to reduce harmful environmental emissions (Committee Substitute (CS) /House Bill (HB) 1217, 2026), prohibiting local governments from using non-gasoline power tools (SB 290, 2026), or from seeking diversity in hiring decisions (CS/CS/SB 1134, 2026).
Big Tallahassee even stopped local governments from mandating heat breaks for workers (CS/CS/HB 433, 2024)—and that’s really saying something in Florida’s sunbaked fields. I swear, Big Tallahassee would have denied water to Jesus on the way to Calvary.
I’m not the only one saying this. On Sunday, April 12, in the Naples Daily News, in an op-ed titled “Naples is losing its constitutional right to local control,” authors Gregory Fowler and Stacy Vermylen pointed out that, “Taken together, these actions point to a clear shift. Home rule is no longer functioning as a broad constitutional right. It is becoming a shrinking space in which cities can act only where the state ban has not yet intervened.”
Even legislation with relatively benign intent, like the Live Local Act, which was introduced and shepherded to passage by Sen. Kathleen Passidomo in 2023, has preemptive provisions—prompting the Sarasota County Commission to challenge it in court.
So far, these preemptions have had three overall purposes. The first is to end home rule and strip local governments of the power to make land use decisions, like determining their own zoning and preserving the natural environment.
The reason for this is simple and obvious: developers, their legislative puppets (and in many cases legislators who are also land speculators, realtors and developers themselves) don’t want any interference as they pursue profits by paving over Florida. They truly don’t care what we local residents want, think or need.
A second purpose is to prevent any effort to prepare for the effects of climate change. Big Tallahassee, following Donald Trump’s dictates, denies that climate change exists. But it’s not enough that they themselves deny it, they want to force everyone else to deny it and ignore it—and this particularly means crippling local governments that are more alert, aware and awake to the dangers climate change presents.
Nowhere is this truer than in Collier County, part of the 28th Senate District I’m running to represent. With its over 20 miles of shoreline along the Gulf of Mexico, Collier County’s beaches are ailing and eroding, after being battered by repeated hurricanes, sea level rise and salt water intrusion.
But if Collier County ever tried to change its zoning or planning in order to cope with this, it would be stopped by Big Tallahassee.
The third reason for preemption is to aid Donald Trump’s efforts to turn back the clock to fossil fuel use and stop any kind of renewable energy. Trump is insisting on fossil fuels, fossil wars, fossil pollution and fossil costs—no doubt to pour fossil cash into his own pockets.
Big Tallahassee is completely on board with this. What else are we to make of a law that prohibits local governments from requiring use of electric leaf blowers or any other non-gasoline landscaping equipment to tend its lawns? Big Tallahassee is seeking a new Florida fossil age and it’s trying to send all of us the way of the dinosaurs.
It’s time we were no longer led by dinosaurs with fossilized thinking.
If elected to the Florida Senate I intend to do everything I can to preserve, protect and defend the integrity and autonomy of our local governments.
I can’t say I’ll be able to stop all preemption but I can certainly say that I’ll be on the look out for it. I’ll fight it any way and any time that I see it. I want the people of Florida to have a say in how they’re governed; that’s just Democracy 101.
When it comes to the City of Naples, I will certainly explore ways to rescind HB 4005.
The next assault on home rule will come in a special session of the legislature that is likely to be held in the coming weeks. In that session Gov. Ron DeSantis and his cohorts will attempt to end property taxes.
They’re painting this effort as an anti-tax way to improve affordability for Floridians. But that’s because they don’t dare criticize the real reason Floridians are in an affordability crisis—Donald Trump’s wars, tariffs and mismanagement of the economy.
So don’t buy their bull: it’s a trap and a con—and another assault on home rule and Florida’s local governments.
If property taxes are eliminated, local governments will be starved for revenue along with the policemen, firemen and school teachers they employ. Local services—think of your water supplies and sewerage, repairs to roads and bridges, even things like marriage and business licenses—will be crippled. Public schools, already under assault by Big Tallahassee, will be further damaged.
What is more, ending property taxes will only mean that everyday Floridians will ultimately pay more, adding to their affordability woes. The revenue lost by ending property taxes will need to be made up somehow. That will likely be in the form of sales taxes. Those taxes will hit everyday Floridians hard, while billionaires with huge mansions taking up large tracts of property will get off Scott-free and avoid paying their fair share to support the services and facilities that make their lavish lifestyles possible.
Ending property taxes is a bad idea hatched by Big Tallahassee to crush home rule and local governments. Floridians should fight it and I certainly intend to do so.
America’s strength has always been in its local governments where people have the most say. We shouldn’t let Big Tallahassee bully and order our towns around. If elected, I can’t promise a perfect outcome—but I can certainly promise a vigorous effort.
Florida should be run by and for Floridians; not developers, not speculators, not dinosaurs—and certainly not for the convenience and profit of Big Tallahassee.
I hope you agree and you’ll join me in this fight. Please volunteer and donate and in November vote for David Silverberg for state Senate from District 28.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) will stepping down next year after eight years in office—and 39 people are running to replace him.
That’s according to the Florida Department of State as of Feb. 18. The cutoff date for candidates to qualify for the ballot is June 12 and there’s no telling how many more people will declare themselves candidates by then.
Of course, of the 12 Republicans, 11 Democrats and 16 candidates from other parties, non-party affiliates and write-ins currently declared, only a very small handful are considered serious, credible contenders for the seat.
Among these is Rep. Byron Donalds (R-19-Fla.). He is certainly the leading contender for the Republican nomination.
For the past four years Donalds has represented the 19th Congressional District of Florida, a coastal area running from Cape Coral at its northern end to Marco Island in the south.
Because this is the home of The Paradise Progressive and Donalds is the highest-ranking federal official in Southwest Florida, he has been the subject of considerable coverage in these pages, and that coverage can now help inform all Florida voters about the person who is seeking to lead them.
This article focuses only on Donalds, what kind of governor he would be and what policies he might pursue, rather than personal issues or scandals.
It is, as anything looking into the future must be, highly speculative; a sort of “thought experiment” as Albert Einstein would have called it.
The Republican race
The Republican assumption in this race is that the primary election, taking place on Tuesday, Aug. 18, will decide the contest.
Because Republicans have over a million-voter advantage in registrations, the candidates are clearly calculating that the primary will be the decisive election, with the general election on Nov. 3 a mere formality.
Accordingly, to date the Republican campaigns are clearly aimed at a narrow base of extreme, committed Make America Great Again (MAGA) party members who are certain to vote and who respond to Donald Trump-like appeals.
As a result, in imitation of Trump, the campaigns have been petty, personal and insulting. Candidates have attacked opponents’ failures, crimes and weaknesses. They are questioning each other’s loyalty to Trump himself, allegiance to his agenda and belief in his infallibility.
What is missing in this approach is virtually any discussion of running Florida, how the state will be managed, what policies will be pursued and how to handle the challenges it will face in the future.
Donalds has massive advantages in this race, chief among them Trump’s urging him to run before he declared in February 2025. Trump’s Feb. 20 X-post at that time was a “complete and total endorsement” after years of snubs, indifference and neglect.
Donald Trump’s endorsement of Rep. Byron Donalds on Feb. 20, 2025.
Trump’s blessing opened the endorsement and money floodgates.
That flood included endorsements from 17 members of the Florida congressional delegation, 27 sheriffs, three quarters of state Republican legislators and numerous donors—perhaps most importantly, Elon Musk.
It also included a cascade of cash. The campaign reported raising over $45 million during 2025.
Clearly, there’s a belief by many in the state that a Donalds victory is all but assured and they want to bask in his favor.
So what would Florida likely be like under Gov. Byron Donalds?
Goodbye Tallahassee, hello Mar-a-Lago
The Tallahassification of Mar-a-Lago. (AI for TPP/ChatGPT)
For all intents and purposes, under a governor Byron Donalds the capital of Florida might as well move from Tallahassee to Mar-a-Lago.
As Donalds puts it in his first priority listed on his campaign website: “Enact the Trump Agenda: Byron is committed to implementing President Trump’s agenda to Make America Great Again.”
Make no mistake: Donald Trump will be governor of Florida in all but name. That’s because Donalds has pledged his fealty to Trump so completely, extravagantly, and excessively that the idea of a shred of independence or autonomy or even a stray individual thought is unimaginable.
That’s not to say that Trump is likely to be deeply involved in the day to day running of the state. He’s got a whole world to run—and he’s still trying to prove that he won the 2020 election. It’s doubtful that he has much interest in insurance rates or water purity beyond the confines of property that he actually owns outright (Mar-a-Lago, Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, and Trump National Doral in Miami, plus adjacent properties and affiliated branded properties).
But it’s also unimaginable that Donalds would make any major move, take any major initiative or even breathe in any way contrary to the desires of Trump. What is more, this is an impression that Donalds himself has nurtured and promoted, especially with a non-stop stream of Trumpist social media posts, particularly on X. He has mounted an indefatigable and unrelenting defense of all of Trump’s most extreme excesses.
For MAGAs this will no doubt be cause for joy. They will be dwelling in the belly of the beast, a Trumptopia that is even more purely ruled by him than the nation he currently dominates. But it also means they will be even closer to the man himself and his rages, unpredictability, and sheer meanness and feel them even more acutely than elsewhere.
For those who oppose his hatred, prejudice and rage—or who are the targets of it—there will be no recourse, salvation or haven in the Sunshine State. A governor Donalds is unlikely to ever make an effort to protect them. The state will no longer effectively be independent—and woe to any state politician who dares to think anything other than Trumpthought or exhale a breath of heresy from Trump doctrine. Certainly no such heresy on any subject is likely to come from the governor himself.
A foreigner-free Florida?
The new welcome to Florida under a governor Byron Donalds? (AI for TPP/ChatGPT)
Given his blindly loyal Trumpism and reflecting his and the Florida Republican Party’s anti-foreigner sentiment, as governor Donalds will likely continue and intensify the state’s efforts against all foreigners of all origins and legal statuses on all fronts.
From the time he rode down the elevator in Trump Tower in 2015 Trump has been anti-foreigner. His first and most infamous declaration was that Mexicans were “rapists” and “criminals” and he has not deviated from those perceptions during his entire time in public life.
Trump considers immigration (other than by white, eastern European women he marries) as an invasion that has to be stopped and reversed. Accordingly, upon taking office his second time he began a nationwide purge, not only of undocumented migrants, but of immigrants of all kinds from virtually all other countries (especially, as he once put it, “shit hole” countries).
He is certainly seconded in this by his Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, of whom Trump once reportedly said “If it was up to Stephen, there would only be 100 million people in this country — and all of them would look like him.”
Certainly, both the legislative and executive branches of Florida’s government have enthusiastically joined this effort to date. Indeed, where there has been disagreement between the governor and the legislature it has been in differences over the severity of their anti-migrant, anti-foreigner measures. Florida has also been the most enthusiastic state in the union in forging bonds between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities, with all of its 67 counties and its cities signing 287(g) agreements, sometimes under duress from the state’s governor and attorney general.
Ironically, this comes in a state that before Trump was one of the most diverse in the nation and benefited from foreign contributions and investment. In Florida, especially Miami, immigrants and refugees from around the world flocked to find refuge and built businesses and communities that reflected their origins and enriched the state. In the state’s groves and fields migrants—many undocumented and minimally paid—picked its fruits and vegetables. They also built its buildings, staffed its hotels and resorts and were the sinews of a robust economy.
Beyond businesses and labor, foreign tourists and visitors were a key element in the state’s tourism industry, filling hotels, buying tickets and flocking to Disney World and Universal Studio in Orlando. Even here DeSantis pursued an anti-woke cultural crusade that succeeded in attacking the Disney corporation to the point where the company chose not to make a billion dollar investment in new facilities.
Donalds has proven himself a willing standard-bearer in Florida’s fight against foreigners of all sorts.
When the city council of Fort Myers in his district hesitated to sign on to the 287g program, Donalds was quick to condemn them.
“These officials that don’t understand their role, which is to implement a federal and state law, not circumvent and create sanctuary cities,” he said in an interview on the conservative NewsMax channel. “They simply need to be removed from office. They’re not going to follow the law. It’s that simple.”
He also ostentatiously defended the actions of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) directorate of the Department of Homeland Security.
On Jan. 21, after American citizen Renee Good was killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis, Donalds posted on X: “What Democrats are doing to obstruct, impede, and sabotage ICE is treasonous. The American people granted President Trump a mandate to deport illegal aliens and Make America Safe Again. As Governor, any Florida official who blocks these lawful actions will be removed from office.”
After Alex Pretti was killed by ICE agents on Jan. 24, Donalds told NewsNation: “Nobody wants to see any American lose their life like this…But we also have to be honest about what’s happening in Minneapolis. You have paid agitators. You have a coordinated operation going on in Minneapolis for the sole purpose of doxing ICE officers, impeding ICE officers, stopping them from following and executing federal law.”
While he denied saying that Pretti was a paid agitator he said, “I’m not saying that. I’m saying that what people are seeing on their phones and on news networks around the country is the result of paid protests and paid agitators.”
Ironically, for all its Trumpist loyalty, the state that created the Alligator Alcatraz concentration and detention camp to facilitate Trump’s anti-foreigner effort is also being shortchanged by that president. Despite spending $600 million to build camps and round up, detain and deport migrants, when it came to promised federal reimbursement, Florida’s state government is belatedly discovering another aspect of Trump management—his infamous welching on promises and commitments.
As governor Donalds will no doubt spend whatever he thinks—or is told—it takes for the state to curry Trump’s favor and carry out his wishes, no matter how extreme, harsh or unconstitutional. However, like so many others he will likely discover for himself that a Trump promise isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Still, Florida taxpayers are unlikely to ever hear him complain or make an effort on behalf of the hard-earned dollars they pour into state coffers.
Public de-education
The future of Florida’s public schools and universities? (AI for TPP/ChatGPT)
Florida public education is unlikely to find a friend in a governor Byron Donalds. Indeed, it looks like it will be facing an enemy.
Public education is not something that is top of mind in the current gubernatorial race. Only Republican candidate James Fishback has mentioned it and that only to pledge that he would mandate student uniforms and local businesses should provide student meals.
Public education is being squeezed from all sides in Florida. The current governor attacked it as part of his anti-“woke” crusade and reached down to remove, replace or endorse opponents of local school board members he didn’t like. Republican politicians inveigh against it. At every legislative session measures are introduced to restrict or regulate it, whether that applies to classroom content, teacher conduct or state funding. A private voucher program for parents to send children to non-public or parochial schools that came at the expense of public education was voted into being by the legislature and left Florida with $400 million in unused vouchers. Teachers are viewed with suspicion by vocal MAGA parents and even the teachers’ expressions of personal opinion—like heretical statements criticizing the late Charlie Kirk—have been cause for investigation and suspension.
A governor Donalds coming into this mix would likely add a massively anti-public education force. Donalds can be expected to always side with private, anti-public education activists, favor private, for-profit schools and shortchange funding for public education at every opportunity—and this would come on top of the end of federal standards and funding given the dissolution of the Department of Education.
Teachers’ unions can expect no favor, no support and no mercy from a governor Donalds’ office.
As Erika Donalds put it in a 2022 Fox Business interview: “Teachers unions are the enemy of our children when it comes to their education in America.” There’s no reason to believe that her husband holds any different opinion.
Nor would higher education likely be spared. Accreditation, tenure and board membership of Florida universities were all attacked under DeSantis for a variety of perceived sins, particularly for practicing diversity, equity and inclusion. He put very expensive cronies in charge of colleges, who in turn enriched their friends.
There is nothing to indicate that this would be any different under Donalds and in fact it would likely get worse.
Public un-health?
A child with measles is examined by a doctor. (Photo: World Health Organization/Danil Usmanov)
Florida is arguably the most regressive state in the nation when it comes to public health. Under a governor Byron Donalds it would likely regress to the Middle Ages.
As in the rest of the world, the COVID pandemic of 2020 to 2022 marks a break point in Florida’s history of public health provision. It was a time when a small but extremely vocal minority of people, encouraged by a dismissive President and a complicit governor, turned against science and the whole edifice of modern health protections, favoring instead unproven potions, quack prescriptions and conspiracy theories.
As a congressional candidate and then as a congressman, Donalds inserted himself into local debates over mask mandates (he was against them), vaccination mandates (also opposed), and consistently opposed federal efforts to protect the population at large from the ravages of COVID.
“Biden and the radical Left are coming for your freedom,” he wrote in a fundraising e-mail on Aug. 12, 2021, which warned that President Joe Biden might intervene against a mask mandate ban put in place by Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida. “They’re trying to use the federal government to FORCE Anthony Fauci’s anti-scientific mandates and lockdowns on Florida and take away our ability to make our own decisions.”
While never denouncing vaccines per se, Donalds did what he could to feed vaccine skepticism and fight all recommendations to protect the public from COVID and its variants. (For a full discussion of this, see “The Donalds Dossier: Anti-vaxxer or not?”)
Ironically enough, Donalds himself tested positive for COVID on Oct. 16, 2021, causing Trump to shun him and not even mention him in remarks when he came to Fort Myers that day. (Donalds recovered after a two-week quarantine.)
Nor has Donalds been any kinder to health care insurance and coverage for Floridians, whom he believes don’t need “full-blown, gold-plated” health insurance coverage.
“The biggest thing we need is we need a system where there are catastrophic health care plans … You can have a health care policy around catastrophic care, but that doesn’t really mean you need a full-blown gold-plated health care policy,” he said in a radio interview in October 2025.
He also said at the time that he wanted to get rid of the Affordable Care Act (better known as “Obamacare”)—this in a state that, with 4.4 million enrollees, has the highest number of enrollees in the country.
A big question is whether if elected governor Donalds would keep on the state’s current Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who has been DeSantis’ anti-vaxx, anti-mandate, anti-public health right hand man. Ladapo announced in September 2025 that the state would be abolishing all vaccine mandates for schoolchildren—“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and, and, slavery, okay?” he said of mandates, emphasizing all “are going to be gone for sure.”
It didn’t take long for measles, a previously suppressed disease, to break out in Florida, with one center being Ave Maria University in Collier County. That outbreak is still ongoing and appears to be increasing as of this writing.
So the record indicates that a Byron Donalds governorship would be devastating for Floridians’ health and healthcare—this at a time when previously suppressed or eradicated diseases are making a comeback, widespread vaccination is under attack and public health agencies are being dismantled at the federal and state levels.
In November 2025 Trump reversed a 10-year moratorium he had previously imposed on allowing oil exploration and exploitation in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, along with other sensitive locations. The moratorium was imposed in the runup to the 2020 election to gain the favor of Florida voters.
All of these are assaults on the natural environment and all will acutely affect the state of Florida—and they come on top of challenges to the environmentally sensitive state like climatic warming, intensifying storms and sea level rise.
Donalds is a member in good standing of the climate change-denying contingent in Florida, which includes the past and current governors and the Republican majority of the state legislature, which has gone so far as to outlaw the term “climate change” from state documents.
When asked in 2023 if he thought there was a correlation between heat waves and climate change Donalds simply replied “No, I don’t.” He has opposed what he called “weaponization” of Section 401 and fought efforts by President Joe Biden to stop water pollution.
In the case of oil drilling, Donalds did sign on to a letter along with seven other Florida representatives disapproving of Trump’s action, saying that drilling would interfere with operations at Eglin Air Force Base in the Panhandle. It was his only action to protect the Florida environment from Trump’s drive to encourage pollution, despoliation and exploitation in the service of the fossil fuel industry.
As governor—and as a submissively Trumpist governor at that—Donalds cannot be expected to defend Florida’s natural environment, protect its waters or safeguard its Gulf shores from oil pollution and defilement. He will most likely go along with Trump’s insistence that climate change is a “hoax” and do everything he can to eliminate measures to contain, restrain or prepare for it.
This comes on top of a strong movement in the Florida state government to “pre-empt” local governments’ efforts to take immediate steps to prepare or counteract the undeniable effects of climate change in their immediate areas.
Indeed, the pre-emption movement affects a broader swath of life in Florida. Driven by developers, many of whom are also state legislators, it is designed to eliminate all local barriers to development and exploitation.
Adding to this is an assault on the funding sources of local government by the governor and his allies to end property taxes. Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia is seeking the power to overhaul local budgets and remove officials in the name of his Florida Agency for Fiscal Oversight (FAFO, a deliberate play on a profane definition). Ostensibly intended to root out fraud, waste and abuse in local government financial matters, in fact it appears to be an attempt to end all local autonomy.
The logical end result of these efforts and the state over which a governor Byron Donalds would preside, would be a fully paved over Florida, run entirely from the governor’s office at Trump’s direction, with no local autonomy of any kind. There would be no conservation of the natural environment and the air, land and sea would be completely polluted. Natural barriers or wetlands would likely be paved over and no longer protect the population, which would be utterly at the mercy of intensifying hurricanes and rising waters.
Further, Florida would likely cease to be a major citrus-producing state, its trees ravaged by citrus greening, its reliance on citrus imports destroyed by Trump’s tariffs and its groves sold to developers for housing developments.
Ironically enough, Florida’s great natural renewable energy resources, its sun and wind, which might at least mitigate climate change would not only be neglected but would likely be actively opposed by both Donalds and Trump.
Trump is known for his pathological fear and hatred of wind turbines for generating energy. There are currently no wind farms in Florida or offshore, so this is a phantom menace and there certainly wouldn’t be any built under a governor Donalds.
But Florida was making efforts to develop its solar generation capabilities and this too Donalds has opposed.
There can be no clearer statement of his attitudes on this subject than the headline on a 2023 op-ed under his byline for the Fort Myers News-Press: “The Dishonest Fantasy of Wind and Solar.”
“In sum, I’m not opposed to wind turbines and solar panels, but if we seriously want an affordable, reliable, secure ‘green energy’ grid, we cannot rely on the dishonest fantasy of utilizing spiky intermittent energy sources like wind and solar,” he argued. “Instead, we must embrace nuclear power and include nuclear in future green alternative energy discussions. Ultimately, we must base our future energy-related decisions on logic and objective facts—not politics.”
The high likelihood is that this op-ed wasn’t really written by Donalds but by a nuclear energy lobbyist—because in his second term, Donalds signed on as a shill for the nuclear power industry.
In the 2023 Congress Donalds sponsored 14 bills related to the nuclear power industry, mostly deregulating it or in some way favoring it, often in a highly technical manner. None had anything to do with his district, the concerns of its residents, or fell within his usual areas of expertise. (The nuclear industry also didn’t get much for its investment since none of his bills went anywhere.)
Donalds benefited greatly from fossil energy industry political action committees (PACs) and seven of them contributed a total of $25,500 to his campaign in the 2024 cycle. Fossil fuel PACs included those from the companies Sinclair, Valero, Marathon and Exxon Mobile as well as NextEra Energy, a utility infrastructure company, and Duke Energy, an energy holding company. Also contributing was the overall trade group for fossil fuels, the American Fuels and Petrochemical Manufacturers Association PAC.
The race card
Michelle and Barack Obama depicted as apes in a Xerias_X video reposted by President Donald Trump on Feb. 6. (Image: Truth Social via Laura Loomer on X)
If elected, Byron Donalds would be Florida’s first black governor.
It’s not a precedent or breakthrough that he’s playing up. On the contrary, he’s doing all he can to get Floridians to overlook his race.
In an atmosphere where racism is condemned and merit emphasized, this would be unremarkable. However, that’s not the current atmosphere.
On Feb. 6, Trump re-posted a 55-second artificial intelligence-generated video by the extreme X-site Xerias_X depicting former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as apes. The video didn’t end there: it depicted a variety of other Democratic figures as African animals, including US House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-8-NY) as a meerkat or lemur, former President Joe Biden as a baboon and former Vice President Kamala Harris as a tortoise. At the end of the video, all the animals bow before Trump as a lion king.
The animal-politicians bow before Lion King Trump in the Xerias video reposted by the White House. (Image: Truth Social via Laura Loomer on X).
The video was a clear display of Trump’s utter contempt for other politicians, the public, and his blatant, undisguised racism—with the exception of the unfailingly devoted and politically useful cover of Byron Donalds.
But of all the Republicans, the one black candidate, the person who stood most to be offended, whose outrage was most to be expected, was silent. His office released a statement to the Tampa Bay Times that “Team Byron Donalds has called the White House and learned that a staffer had let POTUS down”—accepting uncritically the White House explanation that the posting was the work of a staffer, who remains unnamed to this day.
And that was all there was.
Donalds’ reaction—or non-reaction—is instructive of his likely actions and attitudes if elected governor. Florida’s minorities, of all kinds, will find no aid, assistance or support from this governor if they face challenges or prejudice. Racism will go unanswered. And any Trump excess or outrage will not only be uncritically accepted, it will likely be defended, rationalized and when directed, implemented by this governor.
Indeed, Donalds’ whole political career is built on a gargantuan contradiction that will be unavoidable if he accedes to the highest office in the state.
“I am everything the fake news media tells you doesn’t exist,” Donalds stated in his opening campaign video when he first ran for Congress in 2020. “A strong, Trump-supporting, gun-owning, liberty-loving, pro-life, politically incorrect black man.”
He hasn’t changed positions since making that statement. But increasingly, holding to that Trumpist faith means accepting authoritarian coups, mob and state-sanctioned violence, concentration camps, constitutional violations, mind-boggling corruption, election rigging, dictatorial dominance and increasingly overt and extreme racial prejudice.
Byron Donalds would not be in a position to seek the governorship of a state that was once slave-holding and secessionist, segregationist and lynching-prone if not for the giant steps away from that barbarity over the last 160 years. If not for Emancipation, he would be a slave. If not for Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, he would not be able to vote. If not for the Civil Rights Act, his children would be consigned to second-class schools and separate water fountains. If not for repeal of Florida’s miscegenation law in 1969, he would not have been able to date—much less, marry—his current spouse. If not for the election of Barack Obama, who showed that Americans could accept a capable black man and elect him president, he could not aspire to the state’s highest political office or even the highest office in the land.
Instead, he has embraced a movement and man who wants to go in exactly the opposite direction, to return to a time when in his view America was “great.” But when was that time? Was it before the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857, which ruled that a black man could never be an American citizen? What is more, this is a president who is ferociously and aggressively turning back the clock and trying to bend the arc of history to an imagined time when prejudice reigned, racial violence was common, and intolerance ruled—and there was no place in that world for an ambitious black man like Byron Donalds.
As a loyal, submissive, Trumpist governor, this is what Byron Donald can be expected to bring to Florida.
Donalds may well win the Republican nomination on Aug. 18. But when Florida voters go to the polls in the general election on Nov. 3, they will have a choice. Assuming the election is held as scheduled, assuming every legitimate voter is allowed to cast a ballot, and assuming that the votes are counted fairly, accurately and reported truthfully, the people of Florida can chart a very different destiny for their Sunshine State—if they dare.
Floridians face a fork in the road in the year ahead in this artificial intelligence-generated illustration. (Art: AI for TPP/ChatGPT)
Jan. 5, 2026 by David Silverberg
This year Florida voters will face choices that will determine how they live their lives as well as the direction and destiny of their state—even more so than in “normal” election years.
At the top of the list will be the race for governor.
Then there is election of a senator. The current senator, Sen. Ashley Moody (R-Fla.), is running in her own right after being appointed in January by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to fill in the unexpired term of Marco Rubio, who was appointed Secretary of State.
The race for Chief Financial Officer will be unusually important and competitive this year as well and the race for Attorney General will see the incumbent, James Uthmeier, creator of the Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp, defending his seat.
On the same ballot will be elections for offices at all levels including members of the House of Representatives but also state, county and municipal offices. Because President Donald Trump will be on the road stumping for his candidates, Floridians should expect some Trump rallies to boost their chances.
In the legislature two major issues will dominate the session that begins Jan. 13, or possibly a special session: whether to redistrict Florida in mid-decade and whether to abolish property taxes.
Beyond these political occurrences, Florida is scheduled to host two major scheduled events this year: Miami will be one of 11 American cities hosting Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup games.
In December, Miami will again be the host city for the G20 summit of the world’s leading economic powers at the Trump National Doral Miami resort and spa.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is term-limited and so his seat is up for grabs.
Media coverage of the race conveys the impression that only three Republicans and two Democrats are seeking their parties’ nomination.
In fact, as of Jan. 3 there were 11 Republicans, 9 Democrats and 14 non-party, independent, other party and write-in candidates running for Governor, according to the Florida Department of State.
Declared candidates for governor, as of Jan. 3, 2026. (Chart: TPP from FDoS)
The ultimate filing deadline is noon, June 12, 2026, so this list can be expected to get perhaps a bit shorter as candidates drop out—but more likely a lot longer.
It’s in this kind of situation that a free and independent media should play its democratic role in winnowing the field to what are generally considered the “serious” candidates.
On the Republican side, the leading candidate is Rep. Byron Donalds (R-19-Fla.), who was endorsed by President Donald Trump even before he declared his candidacy in February. Donalds has also been endorsed by businessman Elon Musk, other large donors and a slew of Republican officeholders in the state and has a reported war chest of $40 million. However, this includes contributions to his congressional campaign, which the Federal Election Commission ruled must be refunded to donors, a dispute that was unresolved as of this writing.
Two other credible Republican candidates are former Florida House Speaker Paul Renner, and businessman James Fishback.
Hovering in the wings are Lt. Gov. Jay Collins (R) and Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis, who was long considered a possible contender. By the end of the past year she had not definitively stated her status one way or another, although a run seemed doubtful, and Collins had not declared his candidacy, despite much media speculation.
On the Democratic side the leading contender is David Jolly, a former congressman and converted Republican who has been actively campaigning throughout the state. To the degree that he has any serious challenger within the Party, it comes from Jerry Demings, the Orange County mayor and former sheriff.
(Editor’s note: The most notable candidate in the running, based entirely on name alone, is Republican Shea Cruel. A Cruel versus Jolly race would generate headlines for the ages.)
Two big issues hovering over the gubernatorial race are the degree to which the new governor will continue DeSantis’ culture war against “woke” and policies—particularly against immigration and migrants—and the new governor’s relations with Trump if Trump is in office during the governor’s full tenure.
Despite the seriousness of these issues, the contest on the Republican side has already turned nasty and personal and can expected to become more so as Primary Election Day, Aug. 18, approaches. Candidates clearly see the race turning on personal factors and there is no indication this will change as the year progresses.
(The Paradise Progressive will be covering the gubernatorial race and candidates in much more detail in days to come.)
The Senate race
Sen. Ashley Moody (R-Fla.) will be defending her seat this year. Serving as the state attorney general, she was appointed senator by DeSantis in January when sitting senator Marco Rubio was named Secretary of State. In this election Moody will be seeking the office in her own right.
There are already a slew of candidates both on the Republican primary side and among Democrats and independents.
An early Democratic opponent, Joshua Weil, who made a name for himself as a very effective fundraiser in a special congressional election, dropped out of the race in July due to medical conditions. Alexander Vindman, a resident of Broward County and retired US Army colonel whose whistleblowing on Trump’s phone call leading to his first impeachment, has also fueled speculation about a Democratic run for the seat.
However, Moody as the incumbent has the clear advantage in name recognition, funding and endorsements. She won attorney general seats twice in statewide races in 2018 and 2022, although without serious opposition.
However, the unexpected always lurks around the corner.
Candidates for Florida’s Senate seat as of Jan. 3. (Chart: TPP from FDoS)
The Chief Financial Officer race
The state of Florida created the office of Chief Financial Officer (CFO) in 2002, consolidating several finance-related positions into a single Office of Financial Regulation.
This is an elected, Cabinet-level position that is third in line to succeed the governor after the lieutenant governor. There have been four CFOs since its creation, three Republicans, one Democrat as well as a brief acting CFO.
Blaise Ingoglia (R) is the fifth CFO, appointed in July 2025 when the previous one, James “Jimmy” Patronis, stepped down to run for a congressional seat in a special election in the 1st Congressional District to replace the resigning Matt Gaetz.
This year Ingoglia is running to fill a full, four-year term in his own right.
Ingoglia served as a state senator from the 11th District, which covered the largely rural Citrus, Hernando, and Sumter counties and part of Pasco County. Before that he served as a member of the state House of Representatives.
Ingoglia, originally from Queens, NY, moved to Spring Hill, Fla., in 1996 where he worked in real estate and then entered politics in 2008.
Ingoglia has been a consistently extremely conservative politician, often pushing the most radical ideas on issues like immigration enforcement, voting accessibility and taxation.
While there are 6 candidates running for the office, the most credible other candidate is state Sen. Joe Gruters (R-22-Sarasota) who is currently also serving as chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC). He was also former treasurer of the RNC and served as chair of the Florida Republican Party from 2019 to 2023.
Gruters received Trump’s “complete and total” endorsement for CFO in 2024 and is promoting himself as the true America First, Make America Great Again (MAGA) believer, in contrast, he says, to Ingoglia. At the same time DeSantis attacked Gruters as insufficiently conservative.
There is only one non-Republican candidate for the office, John Smith, an Orlando businessman with a hurricane storm shutter business, who is running as non-party affiliated. As of Jan. 3 there were no Democratic Party candidates.
Smith’s candidacy closes the Republican primary to non-Republicans, effectively disenfranchising Democratic voters unless a Democratic candidate appears before the deadline. In this he is effectively functioning as what is known as a “ghost” candidate.
Unless the field changes, this will be a cramped, internecine Republican Party battle based on the fervor of the various candidates’ belief, the purity of their extremism and the ability to appeal to a hardcore MAGA base. It will likely be decided in the August 18 primary.
Candidates for the position of Florida CFO as of Jan. 3.(Chart: TPP from FDoS)
Attorney General
This year James Uthmeier (R) will be defending his seat as Florida Attorney General against a Republican challenger and two Democratic Party candidates.
Uthmeier, 38, was appointed in February 2025 to take the place of Ashley Moody when she was made senator by DeSantis. Prior to that he served as the governor’s chief of staff.
In his short time as Attorney General, Uthmeier has proven an aggressive, heavily ideological and outspoken partisan.
Uthmeier’s Republican opponent is Steven Leskovich, a trial attorney who has lived in Florida for 30 years and states that he’s running to defend the Constitution, eliminate corruption, fight crime, “and political weaponization in the justice system.”
There are two Democratic candidates.
Jim Lewis is a political aspirant who previously ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic attorney general nomination in 2022 and mayor of Fort Lauderdale in 2023 as well as a variety of other state and county offices.
Jose Javier Rodriguez served in the Florida House and Senate and was Assistant Secretary of Labor for Employment and Training from April 2024 to the end of President Joe Biden’s term in office.
Candidates for the position of Florida Attorney General as of Jan. 3. (Chart: TPP from FDoS)
Commissioner of Agriculture
While the Florida Commissioner of Agriculture has broad responsibilities and authorities to support and regulate the state’s agriculture, consumer protection and environment, the office is usually a non-controversial one. However, as a Cabinet position it has also proved a platform for aspiring statewide candidates.
In 2018 Nicole “Nikki” Fried won the seat, the only Democratic Party candidate to attain statewide office that year. After leaving office in 2023 she became chair of the Florida Democratic Party. In 2018 Adam Putnam was the leading contender for the Republican gubernatorial nomination until Trump endorsed DeSantis.
This year, as of Jan. 3 there were three candidates for Agriculture Commissioner: Republican Matthew Taylor, Democrat Chase “Andy” Romagno and non-party affiliated Kyle Gibson, who is currently seeking petition signatures to run for governor, rather than commissioner.
Candidates for the position of Florida Agriculture Commissioner as of Jan. 3. (Chart: TPP from FDoS)
Midterms and The Big Rig
Florida appears on the brink of joining Trump’s effort to gerrymander congressional districts nationwide in order to determine the election’s outcome in his favor. Given his use of the word “rig,” “rigged” and “rigging” to denote manipulation of a process, it seems only appropriate to dub his gerrymandering project “The Big Rig.”
It is very difficult to say how the rigging process will play out in Florida. At the end of the year, as the legislature began its early committee hearings, DeSantis and House Speaker Rep. Daniel Perez (R-116-Miami) were both pushing for it. However, DeSantis was floating the idea of a special session while Perez wanted to get it done by the end of the regular session on March 13. By contrast, Senate President Sen. Ben Albritton (R-27-Bartow) was more cautious and in agreement with DeSantis.
Regardless of the timing, there seems agreement to rig Florida’s districts among the legislature’s Republican supermajority. Democrats, as to be expected, are opposed and are backed by grassroots opponents. However, when the House held its first procedural committee hearing on redistricting, the public was shut out and no comments from the floor were allowed—no doubt a preview of what is likely to be a forced, arbitrary and undemocratic effort by lawmakers.
If Florida does rig its congressional map, every federal representative and challenger will be affected. Even if Republicans pick up some additional ostensibly Republican districts, that may not matter as much as it would in previously “normal” elections. There is also virtually no doubt that any new map will be challenged in court.
However it ultimately turns out, the battle is already introducing a new level of tumult and turmoil in this year’s already roiled Florida political scene.
Affordability and the property tax debate
Life for everyday Americans is getting more expensive and difficult. The only person who seems to disagree with this assessment is President Donald Trump, who has dismissed discussion of affordability as “a Democratic hoax.”
Florida Democrats, like their counterparts across the country, recognize voters’ stress and are making affordability key plank in their 2026 platform.
“Prices are rising, period. And we are seeing Republican politicians pander to DC and squabble amongst themselves instead of fixing the problem, so Democrats are offering ideas,” Florida House Democratic Leader Rep. Fentrice Driskell (D-67-Temple Terrace) told a press conference on Dec. 8.
The Democrats are already offering legislation to make inroads on high costs but as a minority in a supermajority Republican legislature, the road to passage is steep and the odds are long.
In Florida the affordability crisis is especially acute and the result of a variety of factors like the high proportion of seniors on fixed incomes.
But playing a major role are natural factors like prevalent and frequent disasters like hurricanes, which drive up insurance costs while at the same time making insurers flee the state. Furthermore, climate change is driving up the risks to the state’s residents while the Republican-dominated state government determinedly denies its existence. That in turn dampens efforts to build climatic resilience, increasing the state’s vulnerability to disasters, which in turn drives up costs and insurance rates, in a vicious cycle.
This has had the practical effect of devastating Florida’s low-cost labor pool, which previously provided migrant and immigrant labor, particularly in the construction, hospitality, tourism and agricultural sectors. That in turn has driven up the costs of goods and services as labor becomes scarcer and more expensive, the cost of which is passed on to consumers.
(Additionally, Trump’s threats to Canada and his enmity to visiting foreigners has dampened a once-robust tourism industry important to Florida’s economy.)
That their own policies might be exacerbating the affordability crisis for Floridians is not an admissible notion for the Florida Republicans in power, so they must seek some relief in a different remedy.
Taxation has never been popular in Florida and now DeSantis wants to take anti-taxation to a new level and abolish property taxes altogether.
Florida is already a low-tax state. It has no income tax, estate or inheritance taxes. Its tax collection is very low per capita. Most importantly, it features a homestead exemption that reduces the assessed, taxable value of a lived-in home and limits annual property tax increases.
DeSantis floated the idea of ending property taxes in his annual State of the State address on March 4, 2025.
“While Florida property values have surged in recent years, this has come at a cost to taxpayers squeezed by increasing local government property taxes,” he said. “Escalating assessments have created a gusher of revenue for local governments—and many in Florida have seen their budgets increase far beyond the growth in population. Taxpayers need relief. You buy a home, pay off a mortgage—and yet you still have to write a check to the government every year just to live on your own property? Is the property yours or are you just renting from the government?”
Since then the debate over the future of property taxes in Florida has been percolating at a relatively low level but this year when the legislature convenes on Jan. 13 it will be coming to a full boil.
Local governments depend on property taxes to provide basic services, income for schools and infrastructure maintenance and improvement—and the revenue has hardly been a “gusher.” Experts and local officials have been making the case that an end of property taxes would cripple their operations.
“Local governments would lose fiscal autonomy as they would no longer collect property taxes, and they would become dependent on the state for funding (whether it is for schools or other public services like police and fire services),” warned the Florida Policy Institute in an in-depth paper, “A Risky Proposition: Weakening Local Governments by Eliminating Property Tax Revenue,” issued in February.
At the same time CFO Ingoglia has been prowling the state in imitation of Elon Musk and the now-abolished Department of Government Efficiency (locally renamed FAFO, which has a profane generic meaning but in this case stands for the Florida Agency for Fiscal Oversight).
Ingoglia was trying to highlight what he said was wasteful spending by local governments but they pushed back.
“This whole thing is a made-for-television event, and it’s specifically made for television for the CFO’s re-election,” said Seminole County Commissioner Lee Constantine (R-District 3) at a forum in November. At the same event Broward County Democratic Commissioner Steven Geller (D-District 5) was similarly scornful. “Check the numbers,” he said of Ingoglia’s audit of his county. “Because they are fictitious. Made-up. Phony. False.”
In addition to its impact on local governments, experts are warning that abolishing property taxes would have to be made up with sales taxes that fall most heavily on the least wealthy Floridians, the working and middle classes, while benefiting the rich. Florida is already the most “regressive” tax state in the nation and ending property taxes would make the burden even more extreme.
Realtors have also warned that ending property taxes would drive up home prices by 9 percent, repelling new home buyers and renters from the market.
These are thorny, difficult and ultimately increasingly emotional issues that will likely dominate the legislative session and all of 2026.
Two paths diverged
The year’s elections will take place amidst an increasingly fragmented Republican legislative majority.
The days of automatic obedience to DeSantis when he was running for president are over. State Republicans, especially House Speaker Perez, are proving contrarian and intractable—or skeptical and independent, depending on one’s point of view.
This is in no way implies a repudiation of Trumpism. In fact, during the 2025 session the battle between DeSantis and Perez was over who was more passionate and committed in the service of Trump’s hatred of migrants and immigrants. DeSantis viewed the proposals by Perez and the legislature as too weak and when the legislature passed its own TRUMP (Tackling and Reforming Unlawful Migration Policy) Act, (CS/SB 2B), DeSantis vetoed it.
While the rest of the country may be revolting against Trump’s threats and bullying, in Florida legislative pushback against an equally bullying and autocratic state government remains relatively tepid and weak.
Ultimately, the fissures and faults in Florida’s governance will have to be resolved by the primary and general elections this year.
It’s as though Floridians stand at a crossroads: one path leads into sunshine and a brighter future, the other into a dark, watery swamp—and as every Floridian knows, where there’s water, there may be alligators.
When you live in Florida, you have to pick your steps with care, whether in the streets, by the streams—or in the voting booth.
Gazing into a crystal ball, not to look to the future but to understand the past. (Art: AI for TPP/ChatGPT)
Nov. 17, 2025 by David Silverberg
Sometimes clearly seeing the future brings no joy. There is such a thing as being too prophetic.
Since 2022, as each year has dawned, The Paradise Progressive has tried to look ahead at domestic political trends and likelihoods in the year to come, trying to objectively think through the direction events were taking. What would be the big stories that would bear watching in the coming days?
But it’s not enough to just make predictions; when the year ends, anyone peering ahead has an obligation to evaluate his or her accuracy and ability as a seer.
Accordingly, in 2023 The Paradise Progressive began grading its own predictions when the year ended, first on an A to F scale and then, last year, as simply “prophetic” or “pathetic.”
It is doing this again this year, if a bit early. There’s still a month and a half to go in 2025 and given this president and regime virtually anything may happen in the next 44 days.
But in a year of momentous events it makes sense to take a pause on the eve of Thanksgiving. People who are able to afford to sit down to a full table, free from fear of sudden seizure or detention, should truly give thanks for the abundance of their blessings.
It is sad and startling to report that the predictions made by The Paradise Progressive at the beginning of 2025, just before Donald Trump was inaugurated for the second time, were horrifyingly accurate and the darkest prospects and most extreme dangers came to pass.
This analysis only includes those firm predictions that can be judged in light of later events, not the many questions and uncertainties that were raised by Trump’s election and inauguration.
Together, these predictions provide a view of what historians will surely record as one of the most—if not the most—grievous years in American history.
What were they? Let us review them together, first the predictions in italics, then the results.
“Trump and his legions can be expected to hit hard and move fast. There will be sweeping disruptions, especially in the first 100 days of the regime, indeed probably even announced in the inaugural address on Jan. 20. Even on his first day, Trump has said he will be a dictator and issue an avalanche of executive orders to—at the very least—encourage fossil fuel exploration and usage, round up migrants and pardon January 6th insurrectionists. But numerous other orders are likely to go much further.”
Trump and his regime knew they needed to act before opposition could coalesce and their measures could be challenged through litigation or legislation. So, as predicted, they hit hard and moved fast.
Indeed, on his first day in office, Trump issued 26 executive orders, covering everything from establishing the Department of Government Efficiency to withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accord. As of this writing, he has issued a total of 212 executive orders. Some have been challenged in court and remain unresolved. But they nonetheless upended the United States government and the lives of all Americans.
Of the three matters explicitly named, when it came to fossil fuel exploitation, Trump declared a national energy emergency and prioritized oil exploration on federal lands—including in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. When it came to rounding up migrants, the Trump regime initiated what has amounted to an ethnic and racial war against Hispanics and all immigrants, sweeping up US citizens of long duration in its dragnet. When it came to the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, on his first day in office Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of the insurrectionists—and he has issued over 1,600 pardons for all kinds of federal criminals and miscreants since.
“It will be a year when Donald Trump attempts to dominate all thought, action, law, media, policy, and government and where he fails to do this personally, his cultists, followers and enablers will work on his behalf and toward his ends.”
That certainly proved prophetic. The second Trump administration not only pursued total dominance in all areas of government, it initiated a cultural revolution that attempted—and continues to attempt—a brutish cultural assault, from bullying and extorting institutions of higher learning to stop free inquiry, to suppressing critical media through threats and litigation, to disparaging and canceling individual artists and performers.
If any one act expressed this cultural revolution more than any other, it was Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, having himself named chairman of its board and even floating the idea of re-naming it for himself or his wife, neither of whom had any connection to it, its culture or its mission.
“This regime will be characterized by pettiness, cruelty, hatred, prejudice, rage, disparagement, racism, misogyny, and criminality. It will rule through threats, intimidation and defamation. It will be corrupt to its very marrow.”
This prophecy was fulfilled in so many ways that listing them would be exhausting—and redundant. Any American can recite a litany of Trump regime outrages, offenses and crimes. All one has to do is look at Trump’s Truth Social postings to document this prediction. What is more, every day brings new and often bizarre examples.
Fear has now been institutionalized as a governing principle and the regime is at war with the people whom previous presidents once served.
“For everyday consumers, anti-immigration measures will mean higher prices and harsher inflation and with national anti-immigrant measures coming on top of the ones that Florida has already enacted, the price at checkout is likely to be steep—to say nothing of the human suffering that will underly it.”
Prices are rising steeply, as anyone can see from their grocery bills (the price of coffee was up 18.9 percent in September). But it’s not just anti-immigration measures that are causing this; a major driver is Trump’s tariffs (more about them below).
Government-issued statistics on matters like inflation can no longer be automatically considered reliable. In August, Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics when he disliked a revised report on the unemployment rate. The prolonged government shutdown and purges of vital government officials severely weakened the federal government data-gathering abilities.
This affected even vital functions like setting the Federal Reserve’s prime interest rate. When Chairman Jerome Powell held a press conference on Oct. 29, he acknowledged the lack of reliable data for Federal Reserve decisionmaking and likened it to driving in fog.
“What do you do if you’re driving in the fog?” he asked. “You slow down.” In this context he meant the Federal Reserve might not change interest rates at its next meeting.
However, a variety of sources, both government and non-government put the real current inflation rate at 3 percent.
When it came to immigration, The Paradise Progressive predicted:
“…the Trump roundup can be expected to be spectacular, very public and as harsh as possible. It will likely be conducted as a television spectacle, a reality show intended to send a message of mercilessness to the world that discourages all immigration, legal and otherwise.”
This prediction is horrifically borne out daily as stories emerge of brutality by masked agents of the Department of Homeland Security’s directorate of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In every corner of the United States, people suspected of illegal residence are being snatched off the streets and in courtroom corridors by anonymous men without warrants, in unmarked vehicles, with dubious justifications. Then they’re whisked away into a gulag of unaccountable and untraceable detention facilities and denied due process or the opportunity to prove their innocence—or citizenship, or legal resident status.
Lest residents of Southwest Florida believe that they are immune, their communities are in the crosshairs too, as ICE agents descend on the town of Immokalee, round up agricultural workers and simply stop vehicles on Southwest Florida roads with people they deem suspicious or who are simply the wrong color.
“For the first time there will be concentration camps on American soil and Americans will see them on their television screens.”
Of all the 2025 predictions, this one came most horrifyingly and surprisingly true. That there would be concentration camps for the regime’s undesirables was entirely predictable. But The Paradise Progressive did not foresee that the first of these camps, the archetype and model for an American gulag, would be established in its own back yard, in Collier County, Florida, in the heart of the Everglades and that it would be designated “Alligator Alcatraz.”
“These roundups and deportations will likely be fought in the courts but with its placement of obedient judges, the regime will probably plow through the court system the same way Trump plowed through his criminal cases. Those cases that reach the Supreme Court will be adjudicated by a Trump-appointed majority of justices—and he may gain more appointments as sitting justices retire.”
The US courts have proved an occasional impediment to Trump’s arbitrary actions but they also proved little more than speed bumps on the road to autocracy. Nonetheless, some of the most egregious actions were at least delayed or reconsidered as they were tried, appealed and judged.
The judiciary, established as a co-equal branch of government, was intended by the Founders as an important check and balance on the other two branches. It has not always gotten things right.
But, extraordinarily, the six-member majority of the current Supreme Court, three of whose justices were appointed by Trump and confirmed in his first administration, has not only aided, abetted and enabled dictatorship but specifically and actively sought to confirm and elevate a Trump dictatorship. They want him as king and they’ve done everything they can to ensure his unfettered rule—not governance, but rule.
Of all this Supreme Court’s decisions—and that includes its 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade—the most fundamentally damaging one came with its ruling in Trump v. United States in 2024 holding that presidents are immune from the law in their official actions. That ruling, which overturned the concept of equal justice under law, the bedrock of American legal principle, enabled the wild, unchecked dictatorial rampage that characterized 2025.
“If Trumpflag-waving Southwest Floridians think they will be spared crippling inflation and a scarcity of goods, they should think again. At the very least the prices for the Canadian-made replacement parts for their sticker-covered pickup trucks are going to rise to the point where they’ll have to jury-rig their swamp buggies like Cubans keeping their 1959 Chevvies on the road.”
This absolutely came true. Tariffs have placed an enormous non-tax burden on the American consumer, according to both government and non-government estimates.
The rise in prices of common food items in September 2025. (Chart: CNBC)
“The accession of Donald Trump to the presidency will mean the return of what has been called ‘Trumpality,’ the Trump worldview or mindset in which objective truth has little to no value.”
Further,
“But in a broader sense, the imposition of Trumpality in the coming year will be pervasive and likely crippling to a United States whose whole success has been built on determining and responding to reality.”
Also,
“That delusional thinking will not only likely be evident this year, it will be imposed from above. It will likely affect everything from public health to weather forecasting. It will pervade the media whether mainstream, social or ideological as they both report what he asserts no matter how false and acquiesce to his version of events to avoid retaliation or retribution.”
Donald Trump’s war on reality and the media was aided and abetted by his billionaire supporters, who snapped up media properties in order to impose the Trump agenda from corporate boardrooms.
The First Amendment was not violated because Congress made no law abridging freedom of the press but the entire business infrastructure undergirding independent America media was undermined and subverted. Trump-obedient billionaires traded media properties among themselves like Pokéman cards.
The fiercely independent Washington Post of Donald and Katherine Graham became the cringing organ of Jeff Bezos, blocking the editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, cheering on Trump’s destruction of the White House East Wing, and banning alternative viewpoints from its opinion pages. The once-proud CBS television network of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite became the Trump cheerleading squad headed by Bari Weiss, a partisan, far-right columnist with no broadcast experience. The New York Times, the British Broadcasting Corporation, Wall Street Journal and over 20 media organizations were threatened by billion dollar lawsuits for reporting and broadcasting facts that Trump didn’t like. Social media platforms like Facebook ripped down their community standards to allow disinformation postings and Trump propaganda.
Many media controls had been imposed to protect the public against dangerous disinformation being spread during the COVID pandemic of 2020-2022. But that changed too, as The Paradise Progressive predicted.
“The opposition to vaccines and public health measures as evidenced by the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services, has the potential to wipe out a century of medical progress and scientific advancement in promoting public health and replace it with a brew of conspiracy theories, disbelief and even outright superstition.”
After a horrifically botched response to the COVID outbreak based on Trump’s delusional assertions that “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear,” and his insistence that it didn’t matter, national science and public health staged a comeback under President Joe Biden. But as predicted, the Trump regime did all it could to undermine and subvert that, cutting jobs, dismissing scientists and experts and altering findings at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration.
“The war on equality in all forms is almost certain to take place on many fronts this year.”
As predicted, the war on basic equality as well as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in all forms—already well underway in Florida—erupted with new ferocity during the year, with it being used as a club against higher educational institutions and corporations alike who faced extortionate fines and penalties for supporting equality in hiring, teaching and thinking. It was extended to the military by Secretary of War Peter Hegseth, who dismissed high-ranking female officers and eradicated monuments to black service people and heroes both at home and abroad.
“The most obvious possible Democratic presidential candidate to challenge Trump in 2028 (if there’s an election and if Trump runs again) is Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.”
And,
“The world can expect a massive Trumpist war against Newsom and the state of California starting this year and every year that Trump is president.”
Sure enough, Trump, who persisted in calling Newsom “Newscum,” embarked on a campaign of vilification and disparagement. But he didn’t predict—and The Paradise Progressive didn’t foresee—that Newsom would hit back with a campaign of his own that turned Trump’s social media postings against him with humor and pointedly funny parodies.
With his outspokenness and determination, Newsom emerged as the leader of the resistance among elected officials. He called out Trump’s autocratic moves for what they were and took concrete steps to counter them. And what were those autocratic moves? The Paradise Progressive predicted them too.
“Indeed, throughout the country expect attacks aimed at denying Democrats any possibility of ever winning any election again at any level, whether through ballot access denial or election interference in Democratic districts and cities, especially, in response to opposition to anti-migrant roundups and deportations and possible ‘sanctuary’ cities.”
The most blatant and egregious election interference was Trump’s attempt to get states to gerrymander district lines in mid-decade in order to deny Democrats seats in Congress in the 2026 elections.
The Paradise Progressive foresaw the effort but not the specific means—the idea of a mid-decade redistricting was so bizarre and unconstitutional it was beyond imagining at the outset of the year. The state of Texas immediately redrew its lines and other Trumpist states are doing the same. In Florida Gov. Ronald DeSantis (R) said he was open to the idea but concluded that Republicans wouldn’t gain that many seats. Still, as of this writing the notion hasn’t entirely been rejected.
Newsom understood the threat and launched a counterattack in California, pushing through a referendum on redistricting and proceeding to redistrict the state to counter Texas’ effort. Other Democratic states may follow.
However the Trumpist gerrymander turns out nationally, it was indicative of Trump’s determination to rig the 2026 election, stay in power no matter what, and deny Americans a genuine say in their government, as predicted at the outset of the year.
As the year began, The Paradise Progressive noted that a new triumvirate had emerged to dominate the world. In a subsequent post, it theorized about the possibility that Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping could conspire to divide the world between them and support each other’s expansionist goals and territorial ambitions. (Warning: A Trump-Putin-Xi conspiracy theory.)
But just as Rome’s triumvirate didn’t last, neither did today’s. The Paradise Progressive predicted that too.
“But also militating against the survival of this triumvirate is Trump’s inveterate lying and his lifetime record of welching on commitments and contracts. Just as a Mafia loan shark doesn’t take kindly to a deadbeat borrower, Putin and his mafia-like siloviki won’t take kindly to Trump reneging on whatever agreement they had that put him in office. The embers of this conflagration already seem to be sparking.”
What The Paradise Progressive did not foresee was the degree to which Trump used international trade tariffs as wildly and whimsically as he did, imposing and lifting them without notice or explanation. He tried to use them to punish Brazil for enforcing its laws against its own would-be dictator and Trump protégé, Jair Bolsonaro. He imposed them on Canada because the province of Ontario dared to run a television ad he didn’t like. He imposed them on China, then lifted them, then altered them, then reimposed them and then lifted them again after a phone call with President Xi Jinping. There’s no telling where they’ll stand tomorrow.
All these tariffs, which Trump regarded as a cost-free form of revenue, were in fact a form of consumer tax and drove up consumer prices, exactly as predicted.
“At least initially, this year, it’s likely to result in higher prices across the board and scarcity of goods as these men’s rivalries take the form of trade wars.”
Unforeseen was Trump’s war against Venezuela. At the beginning of the year it was Canada, Panama and Greenland that seemed to be in Trump’s crosshairs. But then American forces started destroying what were purported to be drug-smuggling boats off the coast of Venezuela, a campaign that steadily escalated.
As this is written American forces are gathering in the Caribbean in what appears to be preparation for an assault on Venezuela. But history provides a note of caution. Like Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Russia, or Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, or Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a unilateral, Trump-commanded American assault on Venezuela has within it the possibility of a regime-changing catastrophe—and that regime very well might be Donald Trump’s.
“As the year dawns the two biggest local political stories in Southwest Florida concern criminal investigations and court cases.”
“In Collier County, on Nov. 7, multiple federal agencies searched the properties of Francis Alfred “Alfie” Oakes III, the extremely conservative, outspoken and politically active farmer and grocer.”
Further,
“An easy prediction for 2025 is that it will be a major story in Southwest Florida when a public announcement is made in this case.”
Indeed it was a major story but the outcome was different than anticipated. Oakes was never charged with any crime and the heavy hand of the law fell instead on Steven Veneziano Jr., an Oakes Farms vice president. Veneziano and six other defendants pleaded guilty to defrauding the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program by falsifying crop records.
“In Lee County to the north, resolution of accusations against Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno for possible money laundering and misappropriation of funds will be another major political story for 2025.”
“Hey Carmine, pay attention,” Romano stated in an October TikTok video directed to Marceno. “So, word on the street from your own people, a lot of your own people, is that [Anthony] Lomangino, [a major donor to both Trump and Marceno] and Pam Bondi, the Attorney General of the United States, is gonna take all this, whatever’s happened, and put it on the shelf for you. Is that true? Answer me, answer the public. Is that true?”
Since The Florida Trident report, there have not been any publicly reported developments in the case. Marceno is reportedly thinking of running for Congress in Florida’s 19th Congressional District.
As with the Oakes affair, Marceno’s ultimate fate may be resolved in the year to come.
“The prospect for 2025 is for DeSantis to keep governing the state, with an eye to his post-gubernatorial opportunities. But a position in the Trump regime seems unlikely to be one of them.”
This too turned out to be prophetic. Despite some positions being floated, DeSantis received no offers (at least none publicly announced or acknowledged) from Donald Trump. Their animus seemed to recede when Trump came to open the Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp in July and joked that “We had a little off period for a couple of days, but it didn’t last long.” But there was never any evidence of a deeper thawing of relations or a place for DeSantis in the regime in the days that followed.
When it came to the people of Florida as a whole, The Paradise Progressive predicted:
“This population will also be less healthy than in the past as public health protections are dismantled and vaccinations dismissed. Public health will be in the hands of anti-vaxxers, both nationally (Robert Kennedy Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services) and statewide (Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo).”
As though destroying defenses against childhood diseases and epidemics was insufficient, in May the state of Florida decided to wage war against dental hygiene by banning the addition of decay-preventing fluoride in community water, a move that was preceded by the Board of Commissioners of Collier County in February 2024.
When it came to the state legislature,
“Once again DeSantis will be ruling over a subservient, super-majority legislature that will likely do his bidding on all things with the exception of paving over state parks.”
However,
“There’s less incentive to follow the DeSantis ‘line,’ whatever that may be in the coming year but that doesn’t mean they won’t follow a basically Make America Great Again (MAGA) ideology.”
That prediction plays out every day. But another prediction has already come true:
“Of course, Trump will take no responsibility for any of this. He will no doubt blame the weakened Democrats and ‘far left Marxist radicals’ for any problems he causes. If the past is prologue, Fox News and the MAGA faithful will buy it.”
Unexpected—and inspiring
The Paradise Progressive did not cover or make predictions in the off-year gubernatorial elections in Virginia, New Jersey or the mayoral race in New York City. However, those elections proved to be stunning repudiations of Trump rule and the MAGA program even though he frantically denied that he was on the ballot and blamed the debacle on the government shutdown and lack of Republican fervor.
Nor did the repudiations occur only in those major races. Across the country, in towns, cities and counties that held elections there was a marked shift away from Trumpism and the Republican Party in what amounted to a blue wave.
The Paradise Progressive also did not anticipate the resistance to tyranny, the grassroots organizing and popular outrage that led to national “Hands Off” and “No Kings” protests that attracted progressively larger and larger crowds.
Just how impressive this development was could be seen in Naples, Fla., an otherwise deeply Trumpist town, where each event brought out more and more people in what amounted to a massive turnout for the area—and throughout Southwest Florida in places not otherwise known for their activism, like Port Charlotte and Sanibel.
But while enormous crowds turned out in major cities, perhaps the most impressive demonstration occurred in rural Okeechobee, Fla., far from large gatherings or other “No Kings” protests. There, Linda Winner, a grandmother who had never demonstrated in any protest throughout her 76 years took a stand.
“I grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s watching all the protests, and so I said, if I’m ever going to do it, it better be now, I might not get another chance,” she told reporter Eileen Kelley of WGCU. So she stood alone on a street corner for three hours holding a “no kings” sign,
She explained her action to her son in North Carolina, who disagreed with her. “I called him to confirm that he knew that his mother loved America, to make sure that he understood that my protest today was not because I didn’t love America, but because I did,” she said.
Standing on her street corner she received a few fingers from passing motorists but also a lot of support and was treated to a free lunch at a nearby restaurant.
When the Linda Winners of the country take to the streets alone to fight dictatorship it shows that Americans still value democracy, freedom and are willing to resist—at all levels, in all places and at all ages. When they do that Americans might just all be winners.
What will this mean in the coming year?
That is something which it will take an entirely different essay to examine. But that the examination will be made at the beginning of 2026 is one prophecy almost certain to come true.
Linda Winner takes her lone stand for democracy in Okeechobee, Fla., on “No Kings” day, Oct 18, 2025. (Photo: WGCU/Eileen Kelley)
Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announces that Florida will be the first state in the nation to abolish all vaccine mandates. (Image: YouTube/News4JAX)
Sept. 8, 2025 by David Silverberg
Updated 10:30 am with Joseph Ladapo comments to CNN and David Jolly statement.
The decision announced on Wednesday, Sept. 3, by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo to end all vaccination mandates in Florida hands Democratic candidates an enormous opportunity in next year’s elections.
It’s a classic wedge issue, one liable to split the opposition party.
While memories of dangers and uncertainty from a deadly pandemic are still fresh, DeSantis and Ladapo deliberately introduced a new vulnerability that hits every single Florida home.
By banning all vaccination mandates they’re threatening every child going to school in the state—every single one. They’re alarming parents. They’re menacing seniors. They’re defying science. They’re outraging doctors. They’re hurting the economy. They’re also risking Florida’s tourism and hospitality industry, which is already reeling from President Donald Trump’s international bullying, insults and tariffs.
It’s a situation that’s damaging, unsustainable and needs to be corrected at the polls—but they’ve provided the means to do that.
The announcement
The announcement was delivered by Ladapo at Grace Christian School in Valrico, Florida near Brandon, before an enthusiastically supportive audience. Also speaking at the event were DeSantis, first lady Casey DeSantis, Lt. Gov. Jay Collins and Florida Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas.
Ladapo was impassioned, insistent and fervent in his six-minute address. He built his case against vaccine mandates on moral and ethical grounds.
He was emphatic that the decision applied to every mandate, every requirement that schoolchildren be vaccinated, and repeated the phrase “all of them” four times and “every last one of them” three times.
“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and, and, slavery, okay?” he said, emotionally. “Who am I as a government or anyone else? Or who am I as a man standing here now to tell you what you should put in your body?”
He continued: “I don’t have that right. Your body, your body is a gift from God. What you put into your body, what you put into your body is because of your relationship with your body and your God. I don’t have that right. Government does not have that right.”
While states had convinced people that they had the right to mandate vaccines, they do not, he said. “They do not have the right. Do not give it to them. Take it away from them. And we’re going to be starting that here in Florida.”
People should make their own decisions, he argued. “You don’t want to put whatever vaccines in your body, God bless you and I hope you make an informed decision. And that’s how it should be. That is, that is a moral ethical universe, not this nonsense where people who don’t know you are telling you what to put in your temple, the temple of your body. That is a gift from God. They don’t have that right.”
He thanked Florida lawmakers for supporting this position. He also noted that people regretted having taken the COVID-19 vaccine and wished they could undo it. Moreover, “…if we want to move toward a perfect world, a better world, you can’t do it by enslaving people in terrible philosophies and taking away people’s freedoms.”
Then he reiterated that all vaccine mandates in Florida “are going to be gone for sure” and said that DeSantis and the legislature would “get rid of the rest of it.”
“We need to end it,” he stated emphatically. “It’s the right thing to do and it’ll be wonderful for Florida to be the first state to do it.”
(A link to the full video is at the end of this article.)
In a CNN interview on Sunday morning, Sept. 7, Ladapo admitted that there had been no data review or research prior to his call for ending mandates.
“Absolutely not,” Ladapo told Jake Tapper, when asked if there had been any research done. “ … There’s this conflation of the science and, sort of, what is the right and wrong thing to do.”
He continued: “This is an issue, very clearly, of parents’ rights. So, do I need to analyze whether it’s appropriate for parents to be able to decide what’s appropriate to go into their child’s bodies? I don’t need to do an analysis on that,” Ladapo said.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis takes the stage after Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo to address the crowd at Grace Christian School.(Image: YouTube/News4JAX)
The political reaction
Republican politicians were split. Those who didn’t enthusiastically endorse the ban expressed their reservations with faint praise and a lack of enthusiasm, although none condemned it outright.
On the non-committal side, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), long an antagonist of DeSantis, told Marc Caputo of the news site Axios that “Florida already has a good system that allows families to opt out based on religious and personal beliefs, which balances our children’s health and parents’ rights.”
Another Republican, state Sen. Don Gaetz (R-1-Pensacola) was tepid: “If the surgeon general has valid and reliable evidence challenging the efficacy of certain vaccinations then of course I am open to his proposal,” Gaetz said in a statement to the Florida Phoenix. “As a layman, I also hope to hear from medical authorities.”
In contrast, Sen. Ashley Moody (R-Fla.), was enthusiastic, telling the conservative cable channel Newsmax: “They don’t call us the free state of Florida for nothing. One of the things I think stood out about our state during the last years, especially when we were dealing with [COVID-19], was that we pushed back and made sure that we were giving reasoned analysis throughout that time period and making sure that people knew we as state leaders understood our limits, that we respected individuals’ rights,” she said.
“I believe parents should be empowered to make vaccination decisions for their children,” he posted on X, immediately after the announcement. Of course, he effusively praised Trump: “President Trump has done a great job bringing the MAHA [Make America Healthy Again] conversation forward.”
He also made sure to praise Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. prior to his Senate testimony: “[Secretary Kennedy] is doing a great job. He is dismantling bureaucracy. He is eliminating corruption. He is Making America Healthy Again. We are undergoing a health revolution thanks to his leadership & I wish him all the best tomorrow in [the Senate Finance Committee].”
His primary opponent for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, Paul Renner, former Speaker of the Florida House, fell into the non-committal category: “As Speaker, I opposed mandatory COVID vaccines and supported strong parental rights legislation. Parents should not be forced to have their children take a vaccine that they think is unsafe. However, we should have safe and effective vaccines that save lives.”
In stark contrast to the Republicans, Democrats were immediate and outspoken in their condemnation of banning mandates.
“The DeSantis Administration’s decision to end vaccine requirements will result in the deaths of thousands of Floridians,” Democratic Party Chair Nichole (Nikki) Fried declared in a statement. “Today’s announcement is yet another morally bankrupt play that will make our communities less safe, all while Republicans are kicking 2 million Floridians off their healthcare.”
Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-24-Fla.) called for Ladapo’s firing: “Are we losing our minds? This is getting ridiculous and pathetic. Are we trying to kill millions of innocent children? Childhood vaccines save lives. Abolishing them is insanity.”
Sen. Lori Berman (D-26-Boynton Beach), the Democratic Senate leader, call the ban “ridiculous” and “dangerous, anti-science, and anti-child,” adding, “Nobody wants to go back to the days of iron lungs.”
Sen. Tina Polsky (D-30-Boca Raton) noted her 2023 opposition to confirming Ladapo and said “He remains determined to prioritize political dogma over smart health decisions.”
Sen. Shevrin Jones (D-34-Miami Gardens) called the move “reckless” and accused the DeSantis administration of “actively undermining public health.”
David Jolly, the Democratic candidate for governor, called for Ladapo’s firing.
“Our surgeon general should be fired—today,” Jolly said in a 1-minute, 21-second video posted on X. “The good news is that Florida’s next governor gets to do that and I will do that on my very first day in office.” He called on the governor and legislature to stop the plan to lift the mandates and on his Republican opponents to condemn it as well and support vaccines.
He warned that parents are thinking of keeping their children home from school for fear of infection.
He also warned that “we have a raw ignorance infecting our politics today. It is time to embrace science and health and yes, vaccines.”
Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Jolly. (Image: Campaign)
Analysis: Wielding the wedge
The big bet that DeSantis and Ladapo have made is that more Floridians will favor lifting mandates than maintaining them.
In this they listened to the extreme anti-vaxxers in Florida and in the Trump regime, most notably Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Both DeSantis and Ladapo have long been anti-vaxxers, as evidenced during the COVID pandemic. They opposed public health measures at the time and moved to abolish other health mandates. (It merits noting that DeSantis privately received the vaccine and disappeared from the public for two weeks in 2022 when he was rumored to have caught COVID.)
Given Kennedy’s all-out assault on vaccines and the scientific institutions that evaluate and administer them, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, DeSantis and Ladapo no doubt believed they were currying favor with Trump himself.
Moreover, they were carrying forward the COVID-era anti-vaccine movement. Certainly that anti-scientific sentiment was in evidence from their immediate audience at the Grace Christian School, which cheered and applauded. In their bubble they no doubt expect overwhelming support and agreement and they may think that this base can swing the 2026 election in their preferred direction.
But just as the medical data doesn’t support the assault on vaccines, so the polling data doesn’t support the opposition to them.
In a bit of remarkable timing, the KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation) and the Washington Post newspaper conducted a survey of Floridians’ attitudes toward vaccines in July and August.
The survey found that 82 percent of the Floridians in the sample (of 2,716 people nationwide) favored requiring vaccines for measles and polio (while allowing some health and religious exemptions), with only 17 percent of respondents opposing them.
This tracked with the national results, which found that 81 percent of all respondents favored school vaccine mandates and only 18 percent opposed them. (One percent of the respondents skipped the question.)
Results of a KFF-Washington Post poll on attitudes toward vaccine mandates. (Chart: KFF, Washington Post)
These results indicate that Floridians as a whole are unlikely to favor the DeSantis/Ladapo vaccine mandate ban as its full consequences sink in.
In fact, it appears that DeSantis and Ladapo have handed the Democrats a precious wedge issue, one so emotionally fraught and divisive that it could split Republican voters to break for sensible, science-based Democratic candidates who care about their survival and that of their children. After all, this is a matter of life and death—and Florida has been through it before.
Democratic messaging should emphasize the threat that DeSantis and Ladapo have posed to Floridians’ kids, themselves and the state and it should be pounded home again and again and again, in every speech, statement and advertisement.
It’s as though DeSantis and Ladapo have put an iron wedge in an otherwise seemingly solid log and handed Democrats a sledgehammer to hit it.
It should be pounded hard, loud and continuously until that log splits.
Then Democrats should light a fire with the kindling—and make sure it burns hot.
On Thursday, Aug. 21, Judge Kathleen Williams of the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida ruled that the state of Florida’s concentration, detention and deportation camp, Alligator Alcatraz, had to cease operations and be dismantled within 60 days, which falls on Oct. 21.
The State of Florida appealed the ruling within an hour of the decision’s announcement. That appeal is now pending and could go up to the Supreme Court.
However that appeal plays out, it is not too soon to begin thinking about what should happen to the site of what had previously been the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport.
This essay recommends that the site be converted into the “William J. Mitsch Memorial Wetlaculture Experiment and Everglades Restoration Project.”
The article will review the court ruling and explain the proposal.
The ruling and reaction
In her ruling, Williams found that the State of Florida, in its haste to set up Alligator Alcatraz, had violated federal laws requiring an assessment of the camp’s environmental impact.
The most relevant law was the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), “which requires that major federal actions significantly affecting the human environment undergo environmental review processes.”
While state and federal officials (Defendants) acknowledged possible “deficiencies” in their haste to establish the camp, they argued that any injunction should be vacated while the case made its way through the judicial process (i.e., the camp should be allowed to continue functioning throughout legal deliberations).
Williams was having none of it. Indeed, so blatant was the state’s indifference to due process and the rule of law that Williams’ scorn comes through even in the dry language of a court ruling.
“Here, there weren’t ‘deficiencies’ in the agency’s process,” she wrote. “There was no process.” [Emphasis ours.]
She continued: “The Defendants consulted with no stakeholders or experts and did no evaluation of the environmental risks and alternatives from which the Court may glean the likelihood that the agency would choose the same course if it had done a NEPA-compliant evaluation.”
(The full, 82-page text of William’s ruling can be read here and is also available for viewing and download at the end of this article.)
The ruling also dealt with issues of venue, finding that the Southern District of Florida was the proper court to consider the case; the degree of permanent environmental harm the camp was causing; and responsibility for the camp’s establishment and operations (the State of Florida rather than the federal government).
Because of its violations of law and environmental impact, Williams issued an injunction that prohibited the defendants from installing any new lighting “or doing any paving, filling, excavating, or fencing; or doing any other site expansion, including placing or erecting any additional buildings, tents, dormitories, or other residential or administrative facilities,” although modification of existing buildings is permitted for the sake of safety or environmental mitigation.
New detainees cannot be brought to the camp.
The order applies to everyone involved in camp operations, whether state or federal.
According to the order, “No later than sixty (60) days,” which falls on October 21, state and federal officials have to remove the fencing, lighting and “all generators, gas, sewage, and other waste and waste receptacles that were installed to support this project”—essentially, returning the site to its prior state and giving Miccosukee Tribe members complete access to the area.
Lastly, the plaintiffs were required to post a token, $100 bond.
Not only was an appeal of the order immediately filed in the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, Ga., but it was predictably denounced by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).
“This is a judge that was not going to give us a fair shake,” DeSantis said the day after the ruling during remarks in Panama City. “This was preordained, very much an activist judge that is trying to do policy from the bench.”
He continued: “This is not going to deter us. We’re going to continue working on the deportations, advancing that mission,” referring to President Donald Trump’s roundups and deportations.
The state is proceeding with plans for a “Deportation Depot” camp west of Jacksonville, Fla.
“We’re not going to be deterred; we’re totally in the right on this,” DeSantis said. “But I would also note, because of the success of Alligator Alcatraz, there’s demand for more.”
While appealing the ruling, Florida officials may simply ignore the judge’s order. There is precedent for this.
In that case, Williams was the judge whose order was defied by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier. In April she issued an injunction against enforcing a Florida law making it a misdemeanor for undocumented migrants to enter the state. Uthmeier sent a letter to police chiefs and sheriffs saying that the injunction was legally wrong and he could not force them to obey it. In June, Williams found Uthmeier in contempt but his only punishment was to produce biweekly reports on enforcement actions.
“Litigants cannot change the plain meaning of words as it suits them, especially when conveying a court’s clear and unambiguous order,” Williams wrote at the time. “Fidelity to the rule of law can have no other meaning.”
It remains to be seen if those words will have any impact on the dismantlement of Alligator Alcatraz.
A modest proposal: Restoration and renewal
Bill Mitsch in his natural habitat, 2021. (Photo: Bill Mitsch)
William Jerome Mitsch was one of the world’s foremost scientific experts on wetlands like the Everglades and did much of his work at Florida Gulf Coast University. In 2022 he retired after a 47-year career and passed away in February of this year at the age of 77.
In 2018, Mitsch proposed a solution to the problem of pollution affecting the Everglades.
He called it “wetlaculture.”
The concept was that pollution could be defeated by creating new wetlands and this could be done by planting sawgrass, which is native and thrives in this area. The sawgrass would filter out contaminants while letting water flow. These new wetlands could be created on previously cultivated land. He believed that the grass would create soil so fertile that nitrate fertilizers would be unnecessary.
He calculated that new wetlands could be created over a 10-year time period. At the end of that time, the soil would be flipped and used for farming for 10 years. Then, it could be flipped again to lie fallow for another 10 years and so on, indefinitely.
A small-scale Wetlaculture experiment is already under way in Freedom Park in Naples, Fla. There, 28 bins hold sawgrass and researchers experiment with different levels of water and nutrients in the different bins as the sawgrass grows. Scientists measure nutrients in the soil and see if nitrates and phosphorous are being removed. When the soil is deemed to be clean and fertile enough they’ll plant crops and see how well they grow.
A sign marks the spot of the current Wetlaculture experiment in Freedom Park in Naples, Fla. (Photo: Author)
Now the time has come to attempt a Wetlaculture experiment on a grander scale—perhaps the scale of the 39-acre site of Alligator Alcatraz.
Commentary: A better future
If Alligator Alcatraz is in fact closed and dismantled the “William J. Mitsch Memorial Wetlaculture Experiment and Everglades Restoration Project,” would be a most fitting replacement.
The concrete, asphalt and especially the runway could be scraped and removed and in its place be planted with sawgrass with an eye to flipping it after 10 years, or whenever scientists deem it appropriate. The plantings would likely restore water flow, cleanse pollution and prepare the soil for crops in their turn.
Instead of destroying the natural environment, the “William J. Mitsch Memorial Wetlaculture Experiment and Everglades Restoration Project” would restore it. Instead of the constant floodlights, the area would be restored to the darkness that made it part of Big Cypress’ International Dark Sky Park. Instead of noise and traffic, there would be quiet and calm. Instead of harming wildlife, animals could thrive. Instead of fencing out the public and the Miccosukee Indian Tribe, all would have access.
As for the expense, it would be far less than the $450 million expected to cost Florida taxpayers to run Alligator Alcatraz this year alone. It would also cost Florida and the nation far, far less to maintain in every subsequent year. Moreover, because it would be a scientific experiment, it would be eligible for academic and research funding.
Most of all, it would replace a concentration camp that is likely to be a blot and a stain on Florida’s history and on the history of the United States. Rather than a disgrace, Florida and the Everglades would have a site that improves the future, addresses environmental challenges and would be in harmony with the land, water, plants, animals, people and climate. Instead of punishment, the Mitsch Memorial Experiment would be a place of possibilities.
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” Yogi Berra, the Yankee baseball catcher famous for his malapropisms, supposedly said. Along the old Tamiami Trail, right on the Collier County-Dade County line, Florida and the American people have come to a fork in the road. One path leads to a concentration camp of deliberate human suffering, oppression and brutality. The other path leads to a restoration of nature’s balance, a hopeful future and great potential benefits.
The time has come to take the fork in the road. A “William J. Mitsch Memorial Wetlaculture Experiment and Everglades Restoration Project” is clearly the better path to follow.
The Everglades. (Photo: National Park Service/Robert Krayer)
A hurricane hits Alligator Alcatraz. (Art: AI for TPP/ChatGPT)
Aug. 4, 2025 by David Silverberg
A draft hurricane evacuation plan for the Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp in the Everglades released by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is so heavily redacted that the public and relevant officials cannot determine its effectiveness or use it for planning purposes.
(The full document is available for viewing and download at the end of this posting.)
“We can’t go by just blacked-out information in a 30-page document and just trust the DeSantis administration,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-25-Fla.) told CBS News Miami in an interview. “This is what is unacceptable. We absolutely need to have a clear, written, confirmed plan in hand from the Division of Emergency Management and ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], who are responsible for these detainees at the end of the day.”
“The 33-page draft plan appears to detail alternate facilities that could be used in an evacuation, procedures for detainee transportation and other measures that would be enacted in the event of a powerful storm or other emergency,” stated state Rep. Anna Eskamani (D-42-Orlando) in a Facebook posting. “But specific details are a secret. Officials blacked out almost all of the pages, citing exemptions in the state’s public records law that allow information about ‘tactical operations’ during emergencies to be shielded from disclosure.”
DeSantis released the draft “South Florida Detention Facility Continuity of Operations Plan” on Wednesday, July 30 in response to a report in The Miami Herald newspaper the same day that Alligator Alcatraz lacked an evacuation plan in the event of a major weather event.
“Legacy media made a mistake by concocting a false narrative that can so easily be disproven…” he posted on X. “Failed drive-by attempt…”
He released the draft to Florida’s Voice Radio, a conservative media platform, which headlined its X posting, “WRONG AGAIN! The Miami Herald reports FAKE NEWS that @GovRonDeSantis, @KevinGuthrieFL and @FLSERT have no “formal hurricane plan” for Alligator Alcatraz. Here it is.”
The Voice then posted two pages of the plan, the cover and a summary sheet. The full 33-page plan was then released to media outlets with extensive redactions. (The plan refers to Alligator Alcatraz as the South Florida Detention Facility (SFDF), its bureaucratic designation.)
The evacuation plan was not posted to any official state website that this author could determine. Since it is still a draft—essentially, the concept of plan—The Miami Herald was technically correct that Alligator Alcatraz does not have an evacuation plan.
Commentary: The hidden dangers of hiding
Because details of the plan remain secret, emergency managers, law enforcement, medical personnel and local officials cannot take it into account when they make their own hurricane plans should an evacuation be necessary, nor can they coordinate their efforts with those of authorities, either state or federal, at Alligator Alcatraz.
This is particularly acute for officials and law enforcement officers in Collier and Miami-Dade counties, where Alligator Alcatraz sits astride their mutual borders.
There is a historic precedent for a plan’s secrecy causing extreme harm during an emergency.
In 1906 the emergency plans for the city of San Francisco resided in the mind of one man: Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan, who never shared them with anyone. Sullivan was incapacitated in the first shock of the earthquake that occurred in the early hours of April 18. Living on the top story of one of the city’s firehouses, he fell through the floor into the basement when the building broke apart, getting severely scalded by a broken radiator when he hit the bottom.
Sullivan never recovered from his injuries, dying three days later. As a result, first responders and officials had no guidance or direction in their response, which contributed to the city’s extensive damage when it was ravaged by fire.
As the 2012 book Masters of Disaster: The Political and Leadership Lessons of America’s Greatest Disasters by this author states: “…A critical lesson from the San Francisco earthquake and fire is that a plan is only as good as the people who know it. Disaster plans have to be known in advance by key decisionmakers and shared among those people who will implement them. They cannot rely entirely on a single individual and ultimately, they cannot be kept secret.”
Alligator Alcatraz has been so hastily thrown together and poorly conceived that nothing about it—not its detention, inmate processing, housing, food, shelter, or evacuation plan—can be judged at face value as acceptable.
Further, its secrecy in all aspects, whether the refusal to allow unannounced inspections, the difficulties of attorneys to meet their clients (currently the subject of a lawsuit), the blindsiding of local officials, and now the covertness of its evacuation plan make everything about it suspect. As an unfinalized draft, there is no telling which officials have input into the final product. Even then, if this is the final plan, its secrecy to all but a few officials renders it ineffective.
If Alligator Alcatraz is in all respects legal and proper, as DeSantis contends, it should be open to inspection, visits, detainee access, due process, public scrutiny, press examination and all the other legal standards of incarceration that govern correctional facilities in the United States.
And an evacuation plan that’s secret to all but a few is no plan at all.
Click on the button below to read and download the full “South Florida Detention Facility Continuity of Operations Plan” with redactions.
The first detainees arrive by van at Alligator Alcatraz, July 2025. (Image: WINK News)
The first detainees arrive by bus at Dachau Concentration Camp, March 1933. (Photo: Bavarian State Archives)
July 21, 2025 by David Silverberg
“Alligator Alcatraz” is now an established fact in Southwest Florida.
The detention and deportation camp was hastily thrown up in eight days before any opposition could effectively coalesce and blessed by a visit from President Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on its opening day, July 1st.
Detainees are being held. Opposition is building.
(Alligator Alcatraz has also attracted other names: Alligator Auschwitz, Gator Gulag, and Gator GITMO, for example. It could also be called the Collier County Concentration Camp. However, this article will use its official designation.)
According to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, speaking at the camp’s opening, the idea for the facility came from her general counsel, James Percival, a Floridian, who called DeSantis and Attorney General James Uthmeier.
As she recounted it, Percival said: “Hey, what do you think about partnering with us on a detention facility that we could put in place that would allow us to bring individuals there?”
James Percival. (Photo: DHS)
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier at the site. (Image: AG Office)
DeSantis and Uthmeier agreed and Alligator Alcatraz was immediately launched.
In its establishment and operations, Alligator Alcatraz bears eerie similarities to the first Nazi concentration camp established in Bavaria, Germany near the town of Dachau (pronounced daa-kau, or ˈdɑːxaʊ/, /-kaʊ/ with a guttural chau in the middle).
The history of Dachau Concentration Camp (its official name) also provides a look into the course of events that Alligator Alcatraz could take.
But Alligator Alcatraz is only 20 days old as of this writing. It may still be stopped or closed.
This essay will look at the lessons of the past, the present dynamics surrounding it and possible futures.
Echoes of the past
Make no mistake: Alligator Alcatraz is a concentration camp. It concentrates people into a single location for detention and processing.
The term “concentration camp” came to be synonymous with murder and extermination after the German camps were liberated by allied forces during World War II. But it didn’t originate with the Nazis and it didn’t initially mean automatic death for those held.
In fact, the term “concentration camp” is British. In 1900, when British forces were locked in a guerrilla war with South African Boers, the British commander, Gen. Herbert Kitchener, conceived of “camps of concentration” for the Boer population. Mostly women and children were herded into these camps to keep them separate and unable to support the guerrillas in the field.
A British concentration camp during the Boer War. (Photo: UK National Archives)
While not intended as death camps per se, death was nonetheless the result, with detainees being subject to starvation, disease and abuse. A series of reports and agitation by British activists brought the abuses to light over time. Despite much opposition from politicians who dismissed the reports as what would be called “fake news” today, the population and government in Britain turned against the camps and their abuses and they were ultimately disestablished.
When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933 they decided to follow the British model and sought new places to hold opponents, dissidents and dissenters. They settled on the town of Dachau in Bavaria for the first of their camps of concentration.
There are striking similarities between the founding, development and expansion of Alligator Alcatraz and Dachau.
Abandoned facilities:
In the words of Uthmeier, Alligator Alcatraz is on the “virtually abandoned” site of a proposed Jetport whose sole runway was designated the Dade County Training and Transition Airport (even though two-thirds of it is in Collier County).
Dachau Concentration Camp was established on the site of an abandoned munitions factory.
Intended for undesirables:
Uthmeier, when announcing the idea of Alligator Alcatraz in a June 19 X posting stated that the camp was intended for “criminal aliens.” On June 30 Noem stated: “Alligator Alcatraz, and other facilities like it, will give us the capability to lock up some of the worst scumbags who entered our country under the previous administration.” In his remarks after touring the facility on July 1, President Donald Trump said it would hold “some of the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet.”
On March 21, 1933, the Nazi newspaper Voelkischer Beobachterannounced the opening of the Dachau Concentration Camp, stating: “All Communists and – as far as it is necessary – functionaries of the Reichsbanner [a pro-democracy paramilitary group] and the Social Democrats who endanger the security of the state will be incarcerated here. This is being done because it is impossible in the long run to accommodate these functionaries in the prisons and it constitutes a heavy burden on the state apparatus. It has been proven impossible to leave these people in liberty as they continue to incite and to cause disorder. These measures have to be used in the interest of the state security and without regard for petty considerations.” This later expanded to include Jews, Romany and prisoners, both civilian and military, from every country conquered by the Nazis.
Increasing the initial estimated number of internees:
In his initial X posting, Uthmeier estimated that Alligator Alcatraz “could house as many as a thousand criminal aliens.” That estimate was rapidly increased to 3,000 and then 5,000.
In 1933 the Voelkischer Beobachter announced that the Dachau Concentration Camp would have “a capacity of 5,000 people.” Over time, however, the numbers increased as the Nazis shipped in more people and the camp expanded. Ultimately, one estimate is that 200,000 people were sent to Dachau during its 12 years of operation.
Inspections and subject to law:
On Thursday, July 3, after the first group of detainees arrived at Alligator Alcatraz, five state Democratic lawmakers tried to visit the facility but were turned away, ostensibly on safety grounds. They filed a lawsuit to force entry, arguing that the denial violated state law.
Two days after its opening, state Sens. Shevrin Jones (D-35-Miami Gardens), Carlos Guillermo Smith (D-17-Orlando), Reps. Anna Eskamani (D-42-Orlando), Michele Rayner (D-62-St. Petersburg), and Angie Nixon (D-13-Jacksonville), attempt to gain access to Alligator Alcatraz but are turned away by state authorities. (Photo: Office of Rep. Anna Eskamani)
On Saturday, July 13, state officials allowed a carefully controlled visit by federal and state lawmakers of both parties. Press was excluded, visitors were not allowed to talk to prisoners and phones and cameras were prohibited. As might be expected, reactions were widely at variance, with Democrats like Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-25-Fla.) calling it “really disturbing, vile conditions” and state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia (R-11-Spring Hill) saying that Democratic rhetoric “did not match the reality.” (Ingoglia was subsequently named state Chief Financial Officer by DeSantis.)
At the start of its operations, Dachau Concentration Camp too was subject to Bavarian law and outside inspection.
Initially, Dachau was not advertised as a murder camp and when reports of prisoner deaths began emerging a month after its opening, Bavarian officials investigated.
Josef Hartinger, an investigator from the Bavarian Ministry of Justice, accompanied by medical examiner Moritz Flamm, visited the camp. Hartinger discovered that three Jewish prisoners had been shot, allegedly for attempting to escape but with wounds indicating executions.
In the following months and subsequent visits—and more deaths, including the suicide of a guard—Hartinger built a case against the camp commandant and his staff. He recommended a prosecution and the murders stopped, at least temporarily.
However, when the case was sent for prosecution and trial, higher authorities declined to pursue it. Hartinger was transferred to a provincial position and survived the war, dying in 1984. Flamm, however, was fired and after two attempts on his life, died under suspicious circumstances in a mental institution in 1934.
These were not the only outside inspections of Dachau Concentration Camp. Members of the International Committee of the Red Cross were granted access in 1935 and 1938. They documented the harsh conditions but with a Nazi-sympathetic vice president, the Committee issued a statement after the second inspection that the camp “is a model of its kind in terms of the way it is built and managed.”
Analysis: Possible futures
Opponents of Alligator Alcatraz protest at the site on June 22. (Photo: Andrea Melendez/WGCU)
If Alligator Alcatraz follows the same course as Dachau Concentration Camp, in the days ahead it will expand to hold many more detainees, who will arrive in growing numbers, likely well in excess of the 5,000 projected now. Access to the facility for lawmakers, lawyers and outsiders of all sorts will be progressively limited. Conditions will steadily deteriorate for prisoners and abuses will multiply. There will certainly be deaths, whether from neglect, sickness or mistreatment, deliberate or otherwise. No doubt authorities will try to cover these up.
Further, it will serve as a model for similar concentration camps that other states are already considering establishing.
Most of all, Alligator Alcatraz will increasingly become a permanent facility, instead of the “temporary detention facility” Uthmeier initially promoted.
Opponents of Alligator Alcatraz mobilized against the camp immediately after its announcement. On June 22 they protested outside the entrance along Route 41 on environmental grounds, led in part by Betty Osceola, a longstanding environmental activist and member of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, whose sacred lands are close to the camp.
Also lending his voice against the camp is Clyde Butcher, a renowned local photographer specializing in images of the Everglades.
On June 27 the organizations Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit against a variety of federal and state individuals and agencies for violating land use and environmental laws. This has now been joined by the Miccosukee Tribe. Although the lawsuit failed to prevent the opening of the camp, it is nonetheless ongoing in US District Court.
Opposition to the camp is building. No doubt one reason state officials and contractors rushed it to completion in eight days was to outrace expected opposition.
Every day new opponents appear as the magnitude, impact and intent of the facility becomes apparent.
Faith leaders are now joining the chorus of opposition.
Op-eds and similar denunciations are mounting and the rest of the world is awakening to what Alligator Alcatraz really means.
The goal of the opposition at the moment is to either shut down and/or roll back the facility. As Wasserman Schultz put it following her visit: “There are really disturbing, vile conditions and this place needs to be shut the hell down.”
What are the prospects for closure or rollback?
The environmental lawsuit
Lawsuits take time and the DeSantis administration will no doubt follow the Trump model of delaying any proceeding on any basis for as long as possible. State Attorney General Uthmeier is in charge of the state’s defense and as the face of Alligator Alcatraz he will no doubt vigorously defend it.
Moreover, given that he has already been held in contempt for defying a judge’s order, there’s no assurance that any court ruling would be obeyed or have any effect. Also, given the backing of Trump and DeSantis, a conservative, majority DeSantis-appointed Florida Supreme Court, and a US Supreme Court majority that seems to actively favor a Trump dictatorship, the prospects for judicial relief are dim.
That said, the lawsuit has merit on the facts and law. But it will take time to adjudicate. Meanwhile, detainees will be subject to camp conditions and will be deported, no doubt with questionable due process.
Forces of nature
On the day it opened a seasonal rainstorm flooded the Alligator Alcatraz reception area, as though a precursor of things to come.
Water covers the floor of the tent where officials spoke for the opening of Alligator Alcatraz. (Photos: TikTok via AnnaforFlorida)Water on the floor of the detention area of Alligator Alcatraz.
Alligator Alcatraz opened in the midst of Southwest Florida’s wet season when daily afternoon thunderstorms drench the region. More ominously, it is hurricane season, which runs until Nov. 30.
Supposedly, Alligator Alcatraz is built to withstand a Category 2 hurricane (winds of 96 to 110 miles per hour). At the very least that seems questionable. Moreover, the area is subject to much more powerful hurricanes.
There is a precedent for a severe hurricane wreaking havoc on temporary camps in Florida. On Labor Day 1935 a powerful hurricane, later estimated to be a Category 5, struck three Works Progress Administration camps in the Florida keys housing World War I veterans. Some 259 veterans were killed, part of the 400 to 500 people who lost their lives overall. (An excellent account of this is in the book Storm of the Century by Willie Dye, available at the Collier County Public Library.)
There is the very real possibility that Mother Nature herself could wipe Alligator Alcatraz off the face of the earth. It needs to be noted, though, just how awful this possibility is: it could kill the people at the facility, whether guards or prisoners. There is the horrifying prospect of prisoners handcuffed to their beds being helplessly ripped into the air and flung against debris or into the waters surrounding the camp.
Given personnel and budget cuts to the National Weather Service, the National Hurricane Center and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, there is also no guarantee that Alligator Alcatraz administrators would get accurate warnings with time to prepare—or that they would even make adequate preparations if they were warned.
Cost, crime and corruption
Alligator Alcatraz is expected to cost $450 million to run in its first year, which will be reimbursed at least in part by the federal government.
It is increasingly apparent that the initial phase of Alligator Alcatraz was built using sweetheart deals and favored contractors.
As detailed by The Florida Trident investigative news organization, a primary contractor for Alligator Alcatraz is IRG Global Emergency Management, a company only formed in February. It is an offshoot of Access Restoration Services US, Inc., which has been a major campaign donor to DeSantis and won $108 million in state contracts, mostly awarded by the governor’s office.
Could the cost of Alligator Alcatraz or potential crimes associated with its building lead to its shutdown?
This is highly unlikely in Florida where the chief law enforcement officer and prosecutor is Attorney General James Uthmeier and the Chief Financial Officer is Blaise Ingoglia.
They and DeSantis are clearly focused on implementing Trump’s anti-foreigner agenda, not enforcing state contracting laws—and especially not when it comes to their pet project. Nor can any relief or resistance be expected from the state legislature, which is out of session and when in session sought to implement Trump’s program more forcefully than the governor. Nor is there likely to be relief from the US Justice Department under Attorney General Pam Bondi, a Floridian who appears to see her primary role as Trump’s personal attorney.
Analysis: Politics and principle
President Donald Trump speaks at the opening of Alligator Alcatraz. (Image: YouTube)
Despite the obstacles to shutting down or curbing Alligator Alcatraz by the powers that be, one principle seems to stand out:
Alligator Alcatraz will be closed when it becomes more of a political liability than a political asset.
To appreciate this, one must weigh the facility’s role in the Trump anti-migrant agenda and its political usefulness to Trump, DeSantis, Uthmeier and the rest of the regime.
Trump’s anti-migrant crusade is based on his perception, both genuinely held and vigorously propagated, that undocumented migration constitutes an invasion by immigrants who are “poisoning the blood” of America.
As he put it in his remarks at the Alligator Alcatraz unveiling:
“In the four years before I took office, Joe Biden allowed 21 million people, that’s a minimum—I think it was much higher than that—illegal aliens to invade our country. He invaded our country just like a military would invade. It’s tougher because they don’t wear uniforms. You don’t know who they are, more than the populations of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, and Philadelphia combined. That’s what came into our country. From prisons, from mental institutions, from street gangs, drug dealers. It’s disgusting. This enormous country-destroying invasion has swamped communities nationwide with massive crime, crippling costs, and burdens far beyond what any nation could withstand. No nation could withstand what we did.”
(The figures cited by Trump are erroneous. Credible estimates of undocumented migrants in the United States have never exceeded 12 million. [To the degree that Trump was quoting any kind of source for his figures, he might have transposed the numbers 1 and 2.])
Trump’s rhetoric is strongly reminiscent of Adolf Hitler’s attitude toward outsiders and Jews, as expressed in a Jan. 30, 1939 speech:
“For hundreds of years Germany was good enough to receive these elements, although they possessed nothing except infectious political and physical diseases. What they possess today, they have by a very large extent gained at the cost of the less astute German nation by the most reprehensible manipulations.”
So Trump, DeSantis, Uthmeier and Noem see themselves as part of a great crusade against an alien invasion and Alligator Alcatraz is a key asset in combatting it, a means of instilling fear, punishing detainees—all of whom they characterize as “the worst of the worst” —and inducing self-deportation. It is similar to the Nazis’ early efforts to make Germany “Judenfrei,” Jew-free, before they decided on a “Final Solution” to kill them.
On a partisan basis, Trump appears to be seeking to re-engineer American demographics to eliminate Hispanics both as a population and as an element of Democratic Party strength—and Alligator Alcatraz serves that purpose as well.
However, Alligator Alcatraz also serves more parochial, personal political ends for the participants—and provides them the opportunity for a bit of showmanship.
From its first unveiling, Alligator Alcatraz was characterized as political theater.
“What we saw in our inspection today was a political stunt, dangerous and wasteful,” said Rep. Darren Soto (D-9-Fla.) after touring the facility on July 13. “One can’t help but understand and conclude that this is a total cruel political stunt meant to have a spectacle of political theater and it’s wasting taxpayer dollars and putting our ICE agents, our troops and ICE detainees in jeopardy.”
For DeSantis, Alligator Alcatraz is an asset because it’s a way to show the depth of his commitment to Trump’s anti-foreigner agenda and bring himself back into the president’s good graces, which he lost when he ran for president himself in 2023. It is also in keeping with the anti-foreigner agenda that he has been promoting for the past two years of his governorship. As his rhetoric attests, DeSantis is determined to keep Florida in the front ranks of anti-foreigner, anti-migrant sentiment and activism.
Alligator Alcatraz certainly seemed to have played this role on July 1 when Trump visited for the opening.
“Well, I’d like to just thank everybody for the incredible job they’ve done,” Trump said in leading off his remarks. “I love the state. As you know, Ron and I have had a really great relationship for a long time. We had a little off period for a couple of days, but it didn’t last long. It didn’t last long and we have a lot of respect for each other.”
For at least those few minutes the Trump-DeSantis rift seemed healed. Whether the relationship remains so will be seen in the days ahead but Alligator Alcatraz played its role as a political asset for Ron DeSantis on that day.
Trump also showered praise on Uthmeier when he did his shout-outs to local politicians: “I want to thank Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier. Where is James? Where is he?” Trump found Uthmeier in the crowd. “You do a very good job. I hear good things. I hear good things about you from Ron, too. No, you really do. He’s even a good-looking guy. That guy’s got a future, huh? Good job, James. I hear you did really, really fantastic. Worked hard. You’re like in the construction business for a few days, right? Huh? Congratulations, uh, for all the hard work and to make this facility possible. It’s amazing.”
So Alligator Alcatraz served as an asset for Uthmeier. It brought him to Trump’s attention and gave him a leading role in the anti-migrant movement. If the anti-migrant base remains cohesive and dominant in Florida, it will be an achievement for Uthmeier that will burnish his future prospects whether political or private. It also enhances his role in Trump’s anti-migrant movement and demonstrates his belief in it, whether his belief is genuine or is just for show.
These are powerful reasons for these people to support, sustain and expand Alligator Alcatraz. Those reasons overshadow all the citizen protests, the environmental damage, the religious condemnation, the public disapproval, the historic precedents and any ethical considerations.
Certainly these people are not moved by the suffering of those being held in the facility whom they, along with Trump, seem to regard as subhuman (or untermenschen, in German parlance). Nor do reports of detentions lacking criminal charges and inclusion of legally documented immigrants appear to make any impression on them.
As with Dachau, reports are already seeping out of abysmal conditions at Alligator Alcatraz. There are accounts of excessive heat, overcrowding, overflowing backed-up toilets, short supplies of drinking water, bug-infested inadequate or substandard food, personal uncleanliness, leaking tents, flooded floors and persistent, pervasive swarms of mosquitoes. Even guards are already quitting or being fired and speaking anonymously to the media about the conditions.
A lawsuit filed on July 16 by detainees, their lawyers, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Americans for Immigrant Justice charges that detainees have been denied access to their lawyers.
“The government has banned in-person legal visitation, any confidential phone or video communication, and confidential exchange of written documents,” according to an ACLU statement. “These restrictions violate the First and Fifth Amendment rights of people being detained, as well as the First Amendment rights of legal service organizations and law firms with clients held at the facility.”
While ostensibly for foreign, criminal migrants, US citizens appear to be imprisoned as well. A 15-year old without a criminal record was held there for three days before being released. Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-10-Fla.) said that during his tour of the facility one detainee called out: “I’m an American citizen!”
Far from responding to the allegations and complaints, DeSantis, Uthmeier and camp supporters are boasting about the camp and publicly displaying their supposed toughness and ruthlessness, in imitation of Trump’s approach. Meanwhile, vendors are gleefully exploiting the camp, selling Alligator Alcatraz merchandise.
Clearly, these people will not be moved by any appeal to humanity, principle, religion, morality or law. So it is only when they perceive that Alligator Alcatraz is harming their political ambitions more than helping them that they will take any action to either alleviate conditions or close the facility altogether.
What form political harm to them takes remains to be seen. One way might be if Alligator Alcatraz becomes a liability in the midterm elections, presuming that these are free, fair and held as scheduled. But for any kind of effective counterpressure to be applied, opponents must coalesce, unite, focus and act effectively.
Another form of pressure might be economic harm to the state of Florida—and specifically Southwest Florida—if tourists boycott its attractions and other countries impose sanctions based on violations of human rights.
Never again?
An American soldier feeds inmates following Dachau’s liberation. (Photo: US National Guard)
American troops liberated Dachau on April 29, 1945. What they found horrified and shocked them—and the world. Dachau had gone from a detention camp to a mass extermination camp. Corpses were everywhere. Typhus was rampant. Survivors were starving. One American soldier said that at that moment he knew why he was fighting.
When confronted by the Americans, residents of the city of Dachau responded “Was könnten wir tun (What could we do?)?”
It was a response that didn’t sit well with Army Col. William Quinn, who wrote the official US Army report on the camp’s liberation. However, Quinn noted: “If one is to attempt the tremendous task and accept the terrific responsibility of judging a whole town, assessing it en masse as to the collective guilt or innocence of all of its inhabitants for this most hideous of crimes, one would do well to remember the fearsome shadow that hangs over everyone in a state in which crime has been incorporated and called the government.”
It’s an observation that rings hideously true today. Anyone accepting, countenancing or promoting these kinds facilities becomes complicit in their crimes—and that fact shows why individual acts of protest and opposition are so important.
From the revelations of Dachau and the other Nazi concentration camps the world resolved that the kind of criminality and brutality practiced there should never be repeated. Until now it was a basic tenet of Americanism that there should never be concentration camps on American soil, nor were any ever before proposed.
Since the liberation of the Nazi camps and the defeat of Fascism, the civilized world’s watchwords have been: “Never Again.”
Now, with Alligator Alcatraz, Trump, Noem, DeSantis and Uthmeier are saying: “Again.”
It’s up to the people of the world, and especially the citizens of Florida, to resoundingly reply: “Never!”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis envisions a state run immigration force, complete with its own police force and detention camps, that operates largely outside federal rules. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement)
By David Silverberg
Mega-farmer Francis Alfred “Alfie” Oakes III addresses the camera as massive watermelons come rolling down a conveyor belt at one of his farms in Collier County. Behind him are workers, all of them Hispanic, rapidly picking up the melons and putting them in large bins.
“We’re loading as quickly as we can,” Oakes explains in a video he uploaded to Facebook on April 28. “We couldn’t do that without the help of this amazing team here.”
He continues his praise of immigrant workers, whom he says are superior to the American labor force that used to work his family’s farms.
Farmer and MAGA supporter Alfie Oakes extols the virtues of immigrant labor (Facebook/Alfie Oakes)
“They really do so much more of an amazing job than what we call the ‘domestic’ workers that we used to get 30 years ago when I started in this business,” Oakes says. “That’s why we can grow a 500 or 600-acre field and load 40 or 50 semi loads a day because these guys really know how to get it done. They’re true masters of their trade.”
It might be surprising to hear such pro-immigrant talk from Oakes, who is well-known as an ultra-conservative, pro-Donald Trump activist and local Republican kingpin. Trump, after all, has relentlessly attacked immigrants over the past decade, claiming they come from prisons and insane asylums, and has made deporting them en masse a cornerstone of his second term in the White House.
In the video, Oakes, who owns the Seed to Table supermarket in Naples, seems to be telegraphing a plea to Trump and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to leave his business alone in those deportation efforts. He says all the migrants who work for him are documented, but that hasn’t always been the case – in 2014, more than 100 of his employees were arrested for possessing false immigration papers.
Clearly Trump heard the pleas of farmers like Oakes who rely on immigrant labor, as earlier this month he did an abrupt about-face on his mass deportation plans.
“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” he wrote June 12 on social media.
After so many years of relentless demonization, Trump was suddenly acknowledging that immigrants – including undocumented workers – have economic value in America. Shortly thereafter he announced the deportation effort would be aimed primarily at America’s cities, the “Democrat Power Center,” as he called it.
Migrants work at one of Oakes’ farms. (Facebook/Alfie Oakes)
Trump’s admission only echoed what many economists and immigration experts have been saying all along: Migrant labor, rather than hindering the economy, is actually vital to it.
But there’s been no such concession by Gov. Ron DeSantis, and no sign his mission to make Florida the national leader in rounding up immigrants has lost any steam. “We’re leading,” DeSantis said during a May 12 press conference in Tampa. “I think others really need to do more.”
Florida already has the country’s largest number of local agreements to assist federal deportation, according to ICE, and the governor has even bigger plans. At that same presser DeSantis unveiled his “Immigration Enforcement Operations Plan” detailing his administration’s vision of a new state-run immigration enforcement system to “circumvent federal agency bureaucracy” and essentially operate on its own rules.
The 37-page plan paints a vision of immigrant holding camps where thousands of arrested immigrants would be detained in jails as well as tents and other makeshift facilities (“soft-side detention”) that it specifically notes may be built and run by for-profit prison companies. And it’s all part of the state’s effort to assist “President Trump’s fight against the ‘deep state’ within federal agencies,” according to the plan.
And DeSantis, who didn’t respond to an interview request, has a pot of taxpayer money at his disposal for the effort. In February, he signed a bill into law allocating $298 million in state funds toward the effort, with the money going toward the hiring of 50 law enforcement officers and detention facilities, among other things.
Uthmeier, center, walks the “Alligator Alcatraz” site with state troopers in his X video. (X/Attorney General James Uthmeier)
A very dramatic early implementation of the plan is so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” — a detention camp of large tents and trailers in a little-used airport facility located in the environmentally protected Everglades of eastern Collier County expected to hold 3,000 immigrants. The prison is estimated to cost some $450 million annually to run, with funding expected from the Federal Emergency Management Administration.
“There’s not much waiting for [immigrant detainees] but alligators and pythons,” said Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier in a June 19 X post. “There’s nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.”
The controversial project is moving at lightning speed. Its opening is expected today, with a visit to the site from Trump to mark the occasion, but a lawsuit filed against DeSantis by environmental groups on Friday aims to block its opening. “This scheme is not only cruel, it threatens the Everglades ecosystem that state and federal taxpayers have spent billions to protect,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, which filed the lawsuit along with the Center for Biological Diversity.
At the same time, the Trump Administration has systematically removed legal status for well over a million formerly documented immigrants – from countries including Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua – that will provide human fodder for camps like “Alligator Alcatraz.”
Humanitarian and environmental concerns aside, multiple economic and immigration experts interviewed by the Florida Trident warn that mass sweeps, detentions, and deportations would do to the state’s economy precisely what Oakes fears it would do to his own massive farm operation.
Bring it to ruin.
The need for immigrants
Michael Collins has spent his life in the hospitality industry, doing everything from making beds to running hotels for Hyatt and Wyndham. He’s also interim director of resort and hospitality management at Florida Gulf Coast University’s Lutgert College of Business – and he told the Trident that a major sweep of immigrants in the state would be financially catastrophic.
“Bottom line, our business could not work at full capacity without foreign workers,” he said. “Next time you’re in a restaurant you might have a two hour wait to be seated, if not for them.”
The Department of Homeland Security, under Kristi Noem, promoted “Alligator Alcatraz” with this AI-generated image. (X/DHSgov)
Temporary workers in the hospitality industry are covered under H2B visas for non-agricultural workers, giving them permission to work up to three years in the United States. When it comes to Collier County as an example, Collins has a precise count: 661 H2B workers were admitted to the county for the first half of the federal fiscal year, which began in October. Of those, 85 percent were in the food preparation and serving business, while others worked in hotels, personal healthcare, and spas.
“That’s in one county,” Collins pointed out. “Double it up in Lee, Sarasota, and go to the east coast.”
Florida’s iconic citrus industry provides another example of the state’s reliance on immigrant workers, according to Florida Immigrant Coalition spokesman Thomas Kennedy.
“Florida in the 1990s produced 240 million boxes of oranges each year,” said Kennedy, whose coalition represents 83 groups that advocate for immigrants. “This year it’s 12 million. There are issues of land use, a lot of growers leaving the industry, citrus greening disease, hurricanes, the occasional drought, the willingness to make some money by selling land to developers—that’s all happening. But it’s silly to pretend that there isn’t a labor issue. [The growers] talk about the impact of tariffs but they also talk about it being increasingly difficult to find workers that are economically viable for them.”
He noted Florida’s slowing population growth, with more young people moving out of the state and birth rates in decline. “Legal or not legal, any population boost will be from immigration,” Kennedy said.
The response by state lawmakers to the need for more of these workers has been a flurry of proposals to drop restrictions on child labor and expand the hours that school-enrolled students can work part-time jobs. Even though these measures failed in the legislative session, Kennedy said they reflect the strains of an economy in need of workers.
The DeSantis Administration has “no feasible alternative if they went through with their mass deportation effort,” Kennedy said. “The thing they will never do is admit that they need more immigrants in the state.”
Roka (FGCU/Center for Agribusiness)
When it comes to the broader agricultural sector, Social Security data shows the stereotypical perception that most of the workforce is undocumented is erroneous, according to Fritz Roka, director of FGCU’s Center for Agribusiness. Most migrant agricultural workers are authorized to come into the United States under the H2A visa program, which produced what Roka calls “a radical shift” in the number of documented workers versus undocumented workers after its launch in 1986 under President Ronald Reagan.
Oakes, the Collier County farmer, made the same point in his video.
“All the workers here are H2A workers that come over here on a work visa from Mexico over here for maybe five months,” he said.
Oakes is especially sensitive to this after 105 of his workers were arrested in a 2014 raid by Florida Division of Insurance Fraud. The workers were charged with multiple crimes, including fraudulent documentation, use of personal identification, identity theft and workers’ compensation fraud.
While most of those charged were released on their own recognizance and given probation, he has said that ever since he’s been compliant with H2A and E-Verify, the federal database that tracks worker legal status.
But in the Trump sweeps, holders of legitimate visas and green cards are not immune from arrest, said Fort Myers immigration attorney Indera DeMine. People are being detained when they report for what were once routine meetings with authorities, or at traffic stops, or for lapsed drivers’ licenses, she said, and then transferred from facility to facility so that family and counsel can’t contact them.
“What will we be left with?”
Evidence of an aggressive targeting of workers in Florida is mounting. In Brevard County, ICE agents have raided construction and landscaping crews, according to Fox 35. In the Florida Keys, a roofing company owner (and Trump supporter) wept on camera during an NBC6-Miami interview after ICE took six of his workers, five of whom he said had valid work permits.
Attorney DeMine (DeMine Immigration Law Firm)
Like the Keys roofing company case, DeMine said she’s seen instances where documented immigrants are being targeted.
“What we’re seeing is an out-of-control targeting of immigrants, not just the undocumented,” DeMine related. “We’re certainly seeing an uptick in removals and detentions. … If [her clients] didn’t have a criminal history they would be released on their own recognizance, or given probation. Now there’s less discretion.”
While documented workers aren’t being targeted en masse, the Trump Administration has moved the goalposts in its deportation effort by stripping documented status from more than one million immigrants who previously had legal status. The U.S. Supreme Court in May allowed the administration to move more than half a million immigrants here on humanitarian parole from Haiti, Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua – many of them living in Florida – into the undocumented ranks, making them fair game to be swept up. Just this past Friday, the Trump Administration announced it was stripping temporary protective status for some 500,000 Haitian immigrants, setting them up for round-ups, detention, and deportation back to their home country rife with hunger, crime, and chaos.
The Trump Administration just paved the way to round up a half million Haitians for deportation. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement)
Combined with the federal effort, DeMine said she finds the prospect of the governor’s immigration enforcement plan – with its vision of mass roundups and camps run by a largely unregulated state force – nothing short of horrifying both in terms of constitutional rights and the state economy.
“It threatens to strip people of their dignity, due process, and protections afforded under the U.S. Constitution,” she said. “It disregards international human rights standards and puts Florida at risk of becoming a state known for hostility and intolerance.
“What will we be left with? … Healthcare, agriculture, landscaping, hospitality and so many other businesses are so reliant on the immigrant workforce and no one in our government seems to be thinking of that.”
About the author: David Silverberg is a veteran reporter who covered Congress, defense, and homeland security during a 30-year journalism career in Washington D.C. As a freelance writer, his work has been published by Mother Jones, Gulfshore Business, and the Naples Press.
Could this be Florida’s future? Deportees from the United States are processed at El Salvador’s CECOT (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo) prison in March 2025. (Photo: Office of the President of El Salvador)
May 20, 2025 by David Silverberg
Florida’s “Immigration Enforcement Operations Plan” unveiled by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on May 12 envisions actions that “circumvent” federal regulations and restrictions, including standards and procedures ensuring humane treatment of detainees—and its first use may be against Venezuelans who lost their temporary protected status yesterday, May 19.
The 37-page Plan lays out creation of a state immigration enforcement and detention system separate from the federal one in “support of President Trump’s fight against the ‘deep state’ within federal agencies.”
The “Preliminary Potential Actions” section suggests the most radical actions the state could take. The majority of the Plan is concerned with authorities and areas of responsibility by various state and federal agencies.
Venezuelans who lost their legal status in the United States could be the first aliens to be subject to the Florida plan.
Yesterday the US Supreme Court ruled that President Donald Trump had the authority to revoke the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) of Venezuelans in the United States. TPS allowed Venezuelans fleeing the dictatorial regime of President Nicolas Maduro to legally live and work in the United States for a specified period of time. They are now subject to detention and deportation.
If Florida decides to implement its Plan, this population could be the first target, subject to mass roundups and deportations by a state whose officers feel themselves unbound by standards of law, humane treatment or due process.
Key state proposals
Under existing law the federal government and its officers have sole authority for all matters of immigration, naturalization and border security. This is administered through the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its enforcement and removal arm, the directorate of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Under the Florida Plan’s recommendations, local police trained under the 287(g) program would become “fully empowered immigration officers,” which the Plan states “would enable the State to bypass the operational bottleneck caused by the limited availability of ICE personnel.”
The 287(g) program trains local police to cooperate and support federal immigration personnel and efforts, but does not supplant them. Under this proposal, state officials, police and local law enforcement officers would be enabled to act with the same powers as federal immigration officers, detaining and ultimately possibly deporting detainees.
To oversee the anti-immigrant effort, the Plan would “Create a command structure led by the state that empowers coordinating officers to act without prior federal authorization.”
In other words, Florida would act independently of the federal government, establishing its own immigration command. It would act independently, taking on a role that was and has been confirmed as federal under the Constitution.
Why would it do this? As the Plan states: “Due to the limitations of the current Federal Executive Order, there has been a lack of leadership coming from the federal government that could be supplemented if the state of Florida were to assume operational control and enabling timely decision-making.”
The Plan proposes waiving “federal detention facility requirements” in order to “expand housing capacity for arrested individuals.”
“One of the stumbling blocks that we perceive exists in the detention section of the overall removal cycle. At present, the Federal government does not possess adequate bedspace capacity for its ambitious, and long overdue, enforcement strategy. While this can be mitigated by better, quicker through-put in physical repatriation—an important factor—it still poses a choke-point to be addressed.”
It continues: “At its current state, ICE is overwhelmed with the number of detainees that have been arrested prior to the state assisting with the process. With the state’s assistance, this number will grow by multitudes, which will likely become unsustainable if ICE were to remain operating at its current state. Many of the individuals arrested by state and local law enforcement will be forced to be released due to the lack of space in ICE detention facilities.”
Under current law and procedure the federal government has standards for housing inmates and detainees to ensure humane, sanitary, and proper treatment and housing. The Plan proposes waiving those requirements to allow holding of inmates under non-standard conditions, presumably substandard ones.
The federal standards are contained in the National Detention Standards (NDS). These are the standards used by ICE. It is against these standards that local jails are judged when it comes to housing federal detainees.
However, the Plan considers NDS too restrictive for what it has in mind.
“The standards are so limiting that many county jails cannot meet the standard even though they are otherwise accredited by the American Correctional Association,” complains the Plan. It finds it “anomalous” that local jails holding American citizens are considered unfit to hold detained aliens.
“This self-limiting proposition works against achieving the President’s goals,” argues the Plan, which also complains that it drives up costs and makes “transportation and logistics more complex and cumbersome.”
To correct this, the Plan suggests that the Department of Homeland Security suspend the standards for the duration of the presidential state of emergency. (Trump declared an emergency on the US southern border on Jan. 20, 2025, the first day he took office.)
As an afterthought, the Plan adds that despite the suspension detainees will still be treated humanely and facilities will try to maintain humane standards.
All of this would be done to rapidly increase capacity. “Waiving select requirements would significantly increase the State’s capacity to detain individuals,” it states. If the standards are suspended, the state would be allowed to hold more people more rapidly under substandard conditions and “pave the way to set up soft-side detention as needed and desirable”—i.e., house them in tents.
If the state cannot build out this holding capacity on its own, it envisions turning to private companies to provide additional space. As the Plan puts it the state could “Utilize existing logistics vendors to establish additional detention space. If the State chooses to forgo the federal detention sites as well as the federal detention standards, logistics vendors are prepared to rapidly deploy detention facilities statewide.”
All of this is intended to hold massive numbers of people swept up in deportation raids, both state and federal.
The only obstacle to implementing the effort envisioned by the Plan is the fact that it may not be reimbursed for the expense by the federal government.
“The federal government has shown itself to be very hesitant to commit to any form of reimbursement to past or future immigration operations,” it complains. “There may come a time when, without federal assistance, a long-term immigration support mission may become fiscally untenable.”
Analysis and commentary: Bad ideas
Make no mistake: This is a plan for a mass roundup of people, using dubious justification, to be housed in questionable circumstances prior to deportation, which may be done by the state of Florida on its own authority. It would “circumvent” or supplant federal authorities, rules and regulations.
With these recommendations the State of Florida is proposing a completely separate state anti-migrant system and command structure without federal oversight, input or approval. Its operations would be conducted by local law enforcement officers who would have the powers of federal immigration officials but without the training, legitimate authority or legal background. Detainees would be housed in facilities and tents unregulated by federal standards of humane treatment including those of nourishment, healthcare and shelter, all of which it views as “bottlenecks” and “chokepoints.”
This would all be done at Florida taxpayers’ expense without any assurance of federal reimbursement or funding. Aside from its legal and humanitarian aspects, it would add an enormous expense to the state budget.
It would also be a gold rush for private for-profit detention companies, which could pursue lucrative, barely monitored contracts no doubt issued with little to no competitive bidding. The potential for graft, corruption and profiteering is enormous.
All this would be done in great haste, “circumventing” all proper procedures for due process, adjudication, regulated law enforcement or oversight.
Why the urgency? Partially because of a flawed, deeply questionable national “emergency,” partially in opposition to a delusional “deep state,” and purely out of what appears to be hatred, prejudice and rage against an alien population, whether legally resident or not. Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem have cited the presence of a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, to justify their targeting of Venezuelans.
But Tren de Aragua is tiny group whose presence is being exaggerated to stereotype an entire population. In a press conference on Monday, May 19, Adelys Ferro, executive director of the Venezuelan American Caucus, a non-profit advocacy organization, stated that Tren de Aragua members constituted “just 0.04 percent of our community.”
The Supreme Court decision allowing the Trump regime to revoke TPS for Venezuelans immediately establishes a vulnerable population to be preyed upon by the mechanism envisioned by the Plan.
This is especially relevant to Florida given its large Venezuelan population.
“As a lawyer and as the vice mayor of this city, I will continue to advocate and fight so that our community has access to the resources and information necessary to continue to fight and continue to prepare for what may come from all of this,” said Doral Vice Mayor Maureen Porras (R). Doral, Fla., is home to a Venezuelan population estimated at around 34,000, the largest in the United States.
As of this writing, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-26-Fla.), whose district includes Doral, had not issued any statements regarding the loss of TPS on any of his social media accounts, although he has been extremely active in the past in denouncing the Maduro regime.
Right now the most radical elements of the Plan are recommendations only. They can still be stopped by the legislature when it passes its budget for the next fiscal year. People can protest against them, with a reasonable chance of defeating them.
They are evil ideas proposed at an evil time for evil reasons. They’re a form of darkness that should never see the light of day in the Sunshine State.
The Paradise Progressive 