Gov. DeSantis defends treatment of prisoners suspected of being illegal immigrants

Gov. Ron DeSantis says there’s nothing wrong with how inmates at two high-profile South Florida lockups are being treated as they await adjudication and deportation for illegal entry to the United States.

If anything, he said those being kept at the Krome North Service Processing Center (Krome) and the Everglades Detention Facility (Alligator Alcatraz) are getting too many amenities, especially given their history.

“You have a lot of criminal aliens. If you look at their rap sheets, you’ve got people that are sexual predators, you’ve got people that have committed, you know, really serious offenses. They shouldn’t have been in this country to begin with. And now they’re making claims, ‘Oh, they’re being abused.’ None of that is substantiated,” DeSantis said.

Amnesty International is the latest group to condemn the treatment of immigrants with disputed documentation, saying it falls “far below international human rights standards.”

DeSantis scoffed at the idea that inmates at Krome, a federal facility, were kept in a “black box.”

He also said Alligator Alcatraz coddled its occupants by supplying a mess hall, a library and other amenities.

“I’m like, do you really need to have all this stuff?’ Because honestly, I thought it was over the top,” DeSantis said.

“And they’re like, ‘Well, you know, we don’t want to be in a situation where we’re being accused of mistreating them.’ I was like, they are going to accuse you of that no matter what. You put them up in the Ritz-Carlton, they are going to accuse you of doing that.”

The latest comments continue an unorthodox defense of the state-federal partnership that served as a prototype for other immigration lockups around the country.

DeSantis previously marveled at an inmate complaining about the quality of a sandwich.

“One of the illegals said that his ham sandwich was cold,” DeSantis remarked. “And I’m thinking to myself, you know, you’re entitled to toasted hoagies?”

Florida’s Director of Emergency Management Kevin Guthrie defended the facility’s turkey sandwiches against claims that they were “gray” and “nasty,” leading to that meditation.

DeSantis has also allowed that at least some of those removed from the country via the state-administered facility could have been done so despite being in America legally, saying that “human institutions” are prone to occasional errors.

In a lawsuit, the American Civil Liberties Union alleged that at Alligator Alcatraz, “detained people were told that they are only allowed one meal a day (and given only minutes to eat), are not permitted daily showers, and are otherwise kept around the clock in a cage inside a tent.”

In response, Guthrie dismissed space concerns, saying inmates have much more room than do people in state-run hurricane shelters.