Around 100 leaders of various faith traditions, activists and residents gathered on the steps of the U.S. District Courthouse in downtown Gainesville on Friday to rally against a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center set for construction at Camp Blanding Joint Training Center in Starke.
The North Central Florida chapter of Indivisible (NCFI), a nationwide political action committee, hosted Friday’s demonstration against the facility.
Rally leaders distributed copies of a letter quoting verses from the New Testament, Hebrew Bible, Quran and Bhagavad Gita stating, “every life is valuable, that strangers are welcomed and that justice is measured by how we treat the most vulnerable among us.” The letter has been signed by more than 70 faith leaders, 73 organizations and 500 individuals and will be sent to elected officials opposing the center’s construction.
Protestors carried signs reading phrases such as “No Auschwitz in Florida” and “Dignity, Not Detention,” while chanting that “internment camps” shouldn’t be allowed, “not here, not now, not ever.”
Construction was slated to begin at Camp Blanding this week, but the Florida National Guard, which is housed at the military base, told Mainstreet it hadn’t started yet.
“As Americans, we have committed a great number of sins in the past,” said Westminster Presbyterian Church Rev. Becca Putnam at the rally. “We are creating a great number of sins currently. We cannot change the past, but we can learn from it. And the truth is that one great American sin is the internment of immigrants and people different from ourselves.”
On June 25, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the possibility of a new federally-funded ICE detention center at Camp Blanding Joint Training Center. The facility will hold around 2,000 individuals illegally residing in the U.S. who are deemed a threat to national security or integrity of immigration law.
The U.S. Senate passed a bill this month granting $45 billion in spending for building new detention centers, nearly 62% more than the federal prison system’s budget, according to the American Immigration Council.
ICE currently operates over 200 detention centers in the U.S., including Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in the Big Cypress National Preserve, which can hold around 5,000 detainees.
The 2025 National Detention Standards state detainees must be provided with medical, dental and mental health care, showers three times a week, three nutritionally adequate meals per day and access to religious materials.
CBS News recently reported that some Alligator Alcatraz detainees hadn’t received their necessary medications and were denied access to Bibles. State officials have reported the facility will only be evacuated for hurricanes above category 2.
With the average cost of arresting, detaining and removing an illegal resident being over $17,000, the government recently launched a self-deportation program where illegal residents can self-deport and receive a $1,000 stipend after they return to their home country.
At Friday’s rally, speakers likened the detention center to Japanese internment and concentration camps during WWII.
Jaime Zelaya, a microbiologist by trade and pastor by calling, said that even though he’s been a Gainesville resident for 20 years after immigrating from El Salvador, attaining American citizenship was easy because his wife was already a citizen. He said most migrants are not in the same position, whether circumstantially or financially.
Instead of detaining the immigrants who are sometimes here through Temporary Protected Status, Zelaya said providing a path towards citizenship would give them hope and a future instead of detaining them.
“But [the government isn’t] really interested in that,” he said. “We understand that, but they don’t say it because they don’t have the same point of view about life.”
Trinity Metropolitan Community Church Rev. Catherine Dearlove said that her immigration experience coming to the U.S. from England was horrendous, lengthy, expensive and humiliating.
She called the issue of detaining migrants a human and moral issue instead of Republican or Democratic, and said that when people ignore those who are suffering and in prison, they reject what Jesus taught to welcome the stranger, and a society like America’s that’s rooted in justice.
“Using [Camp Blanding] to detain migrants, many of whom are fleeing violence and poverty, is a betrayal of my faith, of the citizenship that I signed up for two years ago in this country,” Dearlove said. “We can’t allow this land to become another site of dehumanization and pain.”
Adela Beckerman represented the Jewish Council of North Central Florida. She said communities needed to remember America is a nation made up of immigrants, not to close its doors to certain people groups as with Jews during WWII and called for Alachua County to reject tolerating the centers by employing its detainees.
“It is ironic that in Alachua County, where so many work really hard to avoid having prisoners serve as slave laborers for the community, that we’re setting up a detention center that will, in effect, do that,” she said. “This is something that we cannot tolerate in our community.”
Rally leaders encouraged people to attend their next demonstration at the entrance of Camp Blanding (5629 FL-16 W, Starke) at 3 p.m. on Saturday, July 19.
