WSLR News reporter Ramon Lopez was at Camp Blanding.
By Ramon Lopez
Original Air Date: July 23, 2025
Host: Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to open a second big detention camp in Florida to concentrate immigrant deportees. WSLR News reporter Ramon Lopez was at the site southwest of Jacksonville this weekend, to witness a protest.
Soundbite of protesters chanting
An estimated 700 to 1,000 protesters lined up along the highway near the gate of Camp Blanding. Photos: Ramon Lopez
Ramon Lopez: It was a sweltering Saturday afternoon for the 700 to 1,000 demonstrators, who baked under scorching summer sunlight at Camp Blanding.
They lined the highway across from the front gate of the Florida National Guard training base in a peaceful protest, pushing back on plans to open a second detention center near Starke in Clay County for undocumented detainees for Immigration & Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
Last month, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced plans to stand up a facility at Camp Blanding, near Jacksonville in northeast Florida. This, in addition to the initial detention center in the Everglades dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.”
Last week, however, DeSantis disclosed that he would delay startup of the Camp Blanding detention site. The plan is to fill up Alligator Alcatraz to capacity, with 3,000 to 4,000 detainees, before moving ahead with Camp Blanding.
But it’s full steam ahead for turning the state military base into a detention facility, as a request for proposal for bids from potential private vendors to run the detention site has been issued.
Ron DeSantis: As a request for proposal for bids from potential private vendors to run the detention site has been issued, we sent out the request, the RFP, for Blanding. I think that there are a number of people that submitted bids. I’m willing to do Blanding. Once Alligator Alcatraz is filled, Blanding can be turned on very quickly. I know they’ll award the bids once we make that decision. This may happen in a matter of a week or two, right? I mean, it’s possible. 
RL: Democratic lawmakers are critical of the Alligator Alcatraz setup. And days after President Trump and Governor DeSantis toured the facility in the Everglades, attorneys, advocates and detainees’ relatives spoke out about the poor conditions there. But DeSantis said Alligator Alcatraz is up to standards, as will be the second ICE setup at Camp Blanding.
RDS: This is not the Ritz-Carlton, OK? [laughter] We’re not doing this just to let people have food and shelter, although they do get that. But that’s not … all the minimum standards are upheld. But the reality is, it’s there to be a quick processing center so that they can … we have a runway right there. They can just be flown back to their home country.
RL: While detainees live in tents at Alligator Alcatraz, Blanding has army style barracks and buildings that will be repurposed for those in custody, about 2,000 ICE detainees.
And like Alligator Alcatraz, Blanding has an airfield, which the state plans to use to remove detained undocumented immigrants to their countries of origin.
Ironically, Camp Blanding has provided for prisoners in the past.
Of the 378,000 German military personnel captured during World War II, about 10,000 lived and worked in prison camps in Florida. Most of them were assigned to two large camps, one in the Panhandle near Carrabelle, the second at Camp Blanding.
They cleaned military bases, picked and packed citrus, cut sugar cane, dug up potatoes and chopped down trees in Florida’s vast pine forests. This, until released at war’s end.
But a deeper dive in history shows that 4,000 German civilians were arrested in Latin America after the shock Pearl Harbor attack, then sent north, to be interned in camps across the United States. About 200 of them ended up at Camp Blanding.
The civilian deportation program was never kept secret, but it remained largely overlooked for decades, overshadowed by the mass internment in the U.S. of people of Japanese descent.
Now, history will reflect that Donald Trump kept his campaign promise to crack down on illegal immigration, by ramping up arrests, detainments and deportations.
The recently-enacted “Big Beautiful Bill” will dramatically change the U.S. immigration system. It sets aside $45 billion to expand the network of immigrant detention facilities for adult migrants and families. ICE will increase its current detention capacity from about 41,000 people to 100,000, as ICE has been ordered to make 3,000 arrests per day of undocumented people in the country. The immigrant dragnet will be supercharged by the $12 billion earmarked to hire 18,000 new ICE and Border Patrol personnel, to spread through Florida and other states.
Despite DeSantis’s decision to put his pet prison project ‘on ice’ for now, the protesters said the rally at Camp Blanding would go on as previously planned, to pour anti-freeze on the second ICE house that’s planned.
Saturday’s protest at Camp Blanding was organized by the Jacksonville Immigrant Rights Alliance, or JIRA.
Similar demonstrations have taken place in recent months, where protesters called various actions by Trump and DeSantis inhumane. But state officials insist that the planned new facility is necessary for public safety, and that detainees’ rights will be protected.
Stretching along the highway, with some passing drivers honking their support, the protesters waved their homemade signs criticizing the future detention site and the immigration-related policies and tactics of the Trump Administration.
The signs read: “No Deportations…No Camps”; .”We Need FEMA…not Death Camps”; ”No Human is Illegal”; ”I Prefer Crushed ICE”; ”Melt ICE”; .and reflecting the 102 degrees Fahrenheit registered that day: “ICE Melts in the Heat!”
Speakers included JIRA organizer Jonathan Gonzalo Kleinick.
Gonzalo Kleinick: We’re drawing a line of the sand and saying, ‘we are not going to allow concentration camps built in our state or anywhere in this country’. That this is wrong and the moves that they’re trying to make with Alligator Algatraz, we cannot let that continue. Which seems to be the plan that DeSantis wants for Camp Blanding right here in Clay County.
RL: You are aware that he’s delayed the plans? Is that a victory for you?
GK: Not yet. It’s not a victory until it’s absolutely canceled and all concentration camps of it, akin to it, are completely dismantled. I think the fact that he’s considering slowing down means that he’s feeling some of the pressure, and that he doesn’t have enough gas in the tank to continue with his plans. Which means that this is the time, especially now, to act and continue the pressure until we cross that finish line. I just grew up with a lot of different people in my life, from a lot of different places, who look like a lot of different sort of ways, from Mexican to Filipino immigrants.
RL: He was not alone in attacking both Governor DeSantis’s backing of President Trump and the chief executive’s mass deportation agenda.
Protest speaker 1: We protest having any further, I call them incarceration, concentration camps in our region. What’s going on down south is bad enough. We don’t want it up here. We don’t believe this is the way to treat immigrants who are not criminals, for the most part, but our workers, and part of our economy, and our life.
Protest speaker 2: Keep up this fight, because this is the good fight! This is the fight that we need to be taking part in. And we will not be silent until there’s no camp at Camp Banding. We are out here to make sure that our state is not used as a guinea pig for fascism and authoritarianism any longer.
Protest speaker 3: This is like going back to Nazi Germany or the Japanese during World War II. There’s no reason why these people should be in jail, when they get pulled away from their families and their jobs. Why are they going to jobs to pick up people? I thought they were going after the drug dealers. Drug dealers are not going to report to Home Depot for work.
RL: With a third detention center planned by DeSantis in an undisclosed place in the Florida Panhandle, and with deepening dismay over the nation’s evolving immigration policy, more rallies and protests can be expected to sweep the Sunshine State and the rest of the country… keeping heat on the nation’s politicians.
Reporting from Camp Blanding for WSLR News, Ramon Lopez.
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