A view on May 09, 2024, of trailers located on Aregood Lane that are part of a state base camp in Islamorada to help with an increase in maritime migration from Cuba and Haiti.
pportal@miamiherald.com
Tallahassee
The southernmost outpost of Ron DeSantis’ battle against illegal immigration stands sentinel off the Overseas Highway, watching for a wave of migrants that hasn’t materialized.
For more than a year, pilots and boat captains have come and gone from a small grid of air-conditioned trailers in the Florida Keys, running missions on the water and in the sky in search of Cubans and Haitian migrants desperate enough to cross the Straits of Florida.
At a cost of about $20 million and counting, the makeshift base camp — erected on Plantation Key early last year after DeSantis declared a state of emergency over illegal immigration — has become one of the more expensive initiatives in the governor’s campaign to keep undocumented immigrants out of the state. DeSantis says it’s also among his most successful.
“I think the message is, the last thing you want to do is to get on some boat and think you are going to come through from any of these islands and come to the state of Florida,” DeSantis told reporters in March.
But a closer look at federal data and the state’s own records raise questions about whether the site — run by a politically connected disaster-management contractor — was established to address a problem that dissipated almost as soon as the generators began to run.
Figures kept by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Coast Guard show the rush of vessels that overwhelmed the Keys in early 2023 had reduced to a relative trickle just as DeSantis’ administration entered a no-bid agreement with the Deerfield Beach-based contractor Ashbritt to set up trailers, showers, bathrooms and a mess hall for Florida law enforcement officers and soldiers.
In January 2023, federal data shows there were 1,357 encounters with migrants who traveled by sea and succeeded in making landfall in Florida. Those numbers dropped by nearly 80% the following month, and have remained there. So far this year, an average of 126 migrant encounters have been reported each month in the Miami sector, the CBP designation for operations along most of Florida’s coastline.
DeSantis and state officials have attributed the drop to the state’s boats, planes and personnel deployed to the coast, saying they have helped federal immigration officials intercept migrants more efficiently. In March, the governor said the state’s efforts since January of last year had led to the interdiction of 670 vessels carrying over 13,500 migrants.
“We have an incredible amount of resources that are now on display to be able to prevent [illegal immigration],” DeSantis said in March. “The Coast Guard does by and large a good job but they are under-manned … We are filling those gaps.”
Marnie Villanueva, a spokeswoman for the Division of Emergency Management, which coordinates the state’s immigration-enforcement efforts in the Keys, added that the state’s efforts have allowed the Coast Guard to “patrol deeper waters and interdict a great number of illegal vessels, sooner.”
But officials with the Coast Guard and Department of Homeland Security dispute the notion that Florida’s outpost has made a material difference.
The governor’s office has been unable or unwilling to show how DeSantis arrived at figures that, it turns out, are bigger than the federal government’s own statistics tracking migrant encounters across a vast swath of ocean. Coast Guard officials said that between January 2023 and the end of last month, Coast Guard crews performed 9,911 repatriations at sea across the entire region — spanning from the Florida Straits all the way to the waters of Puerto Rico and the Mona Passage to Hispaniola, where Florida officials provide no assistance in federal operations.
“Currently, irregular migration flows through the Caribbean remain low,” a Coast Guard official told McClatchy and the Herald/Times last week.
The drop in migrant arrivals also coincided with the launch of a new federal parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans that penalized nationals from those countries crossing illegally into the United States, while offering them a new lawful pathway to entry. Land and sea crossings dropped across the U.S. southern border after the program went into force.
Few examples of impact
DeSantis has in recent years spent millions on initiatives to address what he calls an immigration emergency, including sending the Florida National Guard, state law enforcement officers and the Florida State Guard to the Texas border. Most prominently, the Florida Legislature created a $12 million program to allow DeSantis to fly undocumented immigrants out of Florida, only to change the law to allow the governor leeway outside of state lines after his administration said it had trouble finding migrants in the state and had to search for them in Texas.
In the Florida Keys, DeSantis has sent the State Guard, Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission law enforcement personnel on the water, Florida Department of Law Enforcement pilots to run reconnaissance missions in the air, and Florida Highway Patrol troopers with drones to surveil the area.
The DeSantis administration declined to answer repeated questions about staffing at the site, including how many people are currently at the camp and whether the campsite was at capacity each month.
The administration also did not provide details on the number of interceptions personnel have conducted since the camp was set up. By comparison, the governor’s office in 2021 was able to provide detailed numbers on encounters and criminal arrests made by state personnel while at the Texas border.
At least one local official, the Keys’ top law enforcement officer, Monroe County Sheriff Rick Ramsay, says he is “thrilled” to have the state resources working in the area.
Ramsay, a critic of the state and federal government when migrant landings were becoming a daily occurrence in late 2022 and early 2023, believes the efforts have deterred migrants from arriving at Florida’s shores. When that happens, his deputies are sometimes required to stay with newly arrived migrants until federal officials can take them into custody.
Ramsay said in an interview that the state’s resources have “taken the burden off the sheriff’s office so we can focus on investigating and preventing crime.”
The state, however, provided only three examples of its personnel engaging with migrant vessels. Two of those were in the Keys, involving a 60-foot yacht carrying about 30 Haitians and a Cuban chug transporting 16 people who were eventually repatriated. The third was up in Central Florida, 200 miles north of the Keys, involving undocumented immigrants, firearms, night vision gear and drugs.
DeSantis has acknowledged the surge of migrants the state was expecting hasn’t come, though he claims it’s because of the state’s efforts.
“We have not seen a large uptick in vessels coming from Haiti which we are on guard against,” DeSantis said in April, when gangs attacked Haiti’s core institutions and desperate Haitians fled the country. “We have a lot of flotillas out there deterring that from happening and I think it has been successful so far.”
Most of the time, Florida’s pilots and boat captains are assisting federal authorities — something that Florida has been doing for decades. At least one agency involved in the immigration operation, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, says it does not track the number of times officers arrive on a scene to assist other agencies.
An immigration emergency
DeSantis’ 2023 emergency declaration — still in place today — allowed his administration to quickly and without bids sign a contract to open the site with Ashbritt, a politically connected disaster-management company known for scoring big government jobs following natural disasters, including after Hurricane Irma in 2017.
Documents show the company told the state it could erect a fully operational base for 100 people within 72 hours, and a site was quickly made available in vacant lots in Islamorada owned by a Florida corporation that, in turn, lists the company’s co-founder as its main officer.
Once the deal was reached, the DeSantis administration paid Ashbritt $2.1 million, and a site capable of accommodating 100 state personnel into white, air-conditioned trailers was set up in Plantation Key. Each month, the state has chosen to keep the deal going, though purchase orders show the cost each month has dropped as staffing has decreased.
Shutting the site down is also an option, though the state has so far kept the arrangement going.
“We can scale down as soon as tomorrow,” Ashbritt officials have said in their correspondence with the state. “Please let us know.”
Ashbritt referred questions to the DeSantis administration.
A company with close allies
While Ashbritt is largely known for debris removal following natural disasters, the company has been dipping its toes in the immigration sector.
In 2022, AshBritt was hired to build a makeshift wall along the Arizona-Mexico border with shipping containers and industrial grade fencing. The goal was to stem “the influx of migrants illegally crossing the border.” Ashbritt was later hired to take down the same wall it was hired to build.
This contract came after Ashbritt co-founder Randal Perkins had to pay a $125,000 fine to the Federal Election Commission to settle charges that AshBritt made an illegal $500,000 contribution to a pro-Trump super PAC in 2018. AshBritt claimed the payment had been charged internally to a personal account the company maintains for Perkins, records show. The commission ruled the company’s violation was not knowing or willful.
Ashbritt also has close ties with the DeSantis administration and the governor.
U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat, served as the former general counsel for Ashbritt before DeSantis picked him to serve as the state’s director for the Division of Emergency Management in 2018. Holly Raschein, a former Republican lawmaker who DeSantis appointed to the Monroe County Board of Commissioners in September 2021, is the government relations director for the company. Sara Perkins, who served in DeSantis’ transition team, is the company’s vice president of business affairs.
Executives at Ashbritt also helped fuel DeSantis’ fundraising efforts last year when his presidential campaign was running low on cash and after the campaign announced it was letting go of more than a third of its staff.
Federal campaign filings show that in late September, five executives at the company each gave $3,300 — the maximum amount allowed during a primary — to both the DeSantis’ presidential campaign and an associated political action committee, for a combined $33,000 in donation.
At the time of those donations, Ashbritt was months into its agreement with the state to house state personnel responding to immigration in the Keys.
Months later, the hum of the generator-powered trailers continues and there is nothing to suggest the state intends to shut it down any time soon.
“Florida will continue to dedicate personnel and resources to protect the state from illegal immigration and maintain law and order for the safety of residents,” Villanueva, the Division of Emergency Management spokeswoman, said in a statement.
Miami Herald reporter David Goodhue contributed to this report.