Editor's note: This story was originally published by The Florida Trib.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration planned to spend more than a billion dollars on the makeshift immigration detention facility in the Florida Everglades known as “Alligator Alcatraz”, according to records released under a judge’s order and obtained by The Florida Trib.

In an application signed Aug. 7, 2025, the Florida Division of Emergency Management – the state agency that spearheaded the construction and operation of the site – formally requested a $1.49 billion grant from the federal government, underscoring the staggering scale of spending of taxpayer dollars on federal immigration enforcement – largely out of public view and with little oversight by state lawmakers.

The documents show the state was spending more than $1 million per day to run the facility, with the “daily burn” rate topping $3 million a day during its earliest weeks.

The figures were revealed in a trove of thousands of pages of internal emails, budget spreadsheets and vendor contracts that Second Judicial Circuit Judge Angela Dempsey ordered FDEM to produce in a lawsuit brought by the advocacy group Friends of the Everglades.

For months, FDEM had refused to hand over the documents in compliance with the state’s public records law, once considered a national model for open government but now routinely undermined by state agencies under the DeSantis administration.

The documents are being disclosed at a critical time, as state lawmakers are considering reauthorizing the multibillion-dollar emergency fund that allowed the governor’s office to spend profusely and rapidly to build and run the makeshift detention center made of tents and trailers – and as state officials and the federal government give conflicting accounts about whether Florida will ever be reimbursed for the costs.

A Florida Senate panel in the state’s Republican-dominated Legislature is slated to consider a proposal reauthorizing the Emergency Preparedness & Response Fund on Monday.

A ‘daily burn’ rate of $1.2 million a day

Last month, a key state official stood before a packed room in the Florida Capitol and for the first time answered substantive questions from state lawmakers about FDEM’s spending on the Everglades detention center, and another pop-up facility built at the Baker Correctional Institution, about 40 miles west of downtown Jacksonville.

FDEM Executive Director Kevin Guthrie acknowledged that the agency had spent $573 million on immigration enforcement since the creation of the emergency fund housed in the governor’s office in 2022, which empowered the executive to spend prodigiously without needing express approval by the Legislature.

But Guthrie didn’t tell lawmakers everything.

The newly released records detail just how much more the state intended to spend on the facilities, after quickly inking multimillion-dollar deals with vendors that included companies whose owners are major Republican donors to political committees for DeSantis, President Donald Trump and other GOP candidates.

At one point, the state estimated the Everglades facility’s “daily burn” rate – how much cash it cost on a daily basis to support 500 detainees – was more than $1.2 million a day.

State records show more than $92 million has been paid to just one vendor called Doodie Calls, a portable restroom company tasked with setting up temporary bathrooms and hauling away the estimated 45,000 gallons of wastewater the facility produces each day.

Individual expenses across dozens of spreadsheets include $39,000 spent on pillows for the staff “village” at the facility, a section of the compound where hundreds of staffers live in on-site trailers. The state doled out $169,900 for “boonie hats,” a kind of military-style cotton hat with a wide brim and a chin strap.

The documents also detail the scale of the personnel required to build and manage the temporary lock-up, from janitors to laundry workers to cooks, translators to legal case managers to IT staff. At one point, the “current staff” total was logged at 396 people, below what the state estimated it needed to support 500 detainees.

And it all comes with a cost – the facility’s warden is listed as earning $1,000 a day in regular pay, totaling $365,000 a year, with another $273,000 expected in annual overtime pay.

Corrections officers at the facility were projected to earn a base salary of more than $120,000 a year, almost three times the base pay of correctional officers in the state’s prisons, which have been plagued by chronic understaffing.

Who will ultimately pay for it all remains an open – and critical – question.

‘The State took the risk’

Almost as soon as DeSantis administration officials announced their plans for the sprawling tent camp in the Everglades – blindsiding other state and local leaders – they assured the public that the federal government would pick up the tab.

In October, DeSantis heralded an announcement by Department of Homeland Security officials that Florida had been awarded a $608 million reimbursement.

“We were right; media was wrong…” DeSantis posted on social media on Oct. 2, 2025, referencing previous news reports that questioned whether federal funds for the facility would come through.

Five months later, no federal reimbursement has materialized – and attorneys for the state are acknowledging in court filings that the money may never come.

“The State constructed and operated the facility, and the federal government had no say in whether or how the State proceeded. The State took the risk (and still does) that federal funding will not materialize,” reads a Feb. 24, 2026 filing on behalf of Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, credited as the architect behind the idea for the South Florida detention facility.

The question of funding is at issue in a federal lawsuit brought by Friends of the Everglades and other environmental groups, who allege that government officials violated federal law when they failed to conduct an environmental review before building the facility.

A federal district judge agreed, ordering the facility to wind down its operations, before an appeals court panel halted the order.

Attorneys for the federal government have argued that the facility is state-managed — and because it hasn’t received any federal funding, the federal environmental law should not apply.

In court documents, Trump administration attorneys have worked for months to cast doubt on the reimbursement, describing plans to provide federal funding as “unrealized” and “legally insufficient.”

The recently released records paint a different picture – the documents show that not only was the $608 million grant “awarded,” federal funds were “available” and state officials had requested payment.

According to documents, the Federal Emergency Management Agency awarded Florida the $608 million grant, effective Sept. 30, 2025. What followed was many more weeks of back-and-forth negotiations between attorneys for FEMA and their state counterparts – with questions persisting about whether certain spending would trigger an environmental review required under federal law.

One spreadsheet detailed the “allowability” of certain state expenses – whether FEMA would reimburse for them – with labels noting “Need more info” and “Will possibly trigger environmental review.”

Then on Nov. 26, 2025, FDEM got some good news – FEMA had approved an amendment to their application and federal funds were “now available” for the state to submit a request for reimbursement.

“The grant has been amended in the FEMA GO system, and $89,670,048.85 is now available for submission of payment request(s),” reads the FEMA confirmation email.

On Dec. 8, 2025, Florida submitted a more than $30 million payment request – only to have FEMA deny it two days later, citing a need to conduct an EHP or Environmental and Historic Preservation review.

“The EHP hold should not have been lifted as the EHP review was not yet finalized. FEMA will put the funds back on hold until the EHP review is finalized,” reads the denial email from FEMA.

All the while, pressure had been building on the state agency – which has been sued in the past for allegedly failing to pay contractors.

“Any opportunity to get funds to us by mid-December will go a very long way with our Stakeholders,” FDEM’s then-chief of staff wrote to FEMA officials on Nov. 20, 2025, “so we will work expeditiously to complete any outstanding items.”

Kate Payne is The Tributary’s state government reporter. She’s spent her career in nonprofit newsrooms in Florida and Iowa and her reporting has run the gamut, from interviewing presidential candidates on the campaign trail to middle schoolers in the lunch line. Kate has won awards for her political reporting, sound editing and feature writing and was named 2024 journalist of the year by the Florida chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Kate’s previous newsrooms include the Associated Press and WLRN Public Media in Miami. Her stories and photographs have been published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, NPR and PBS, and her reporting on the death penalty has been cited in a filing in the U.S. Supreme Court. She can be reached at kate.payne@floridatrib.org. The Tributary is a nonprofit newsroom producing high-impact government accountability and investigative journalism in the public interest. Based in Jacksonville, our mission is to shine a light on systemic problems and solutions, hold those in power accountable, and focus on under covered topics through collaboration with other news organizations and the community.