Dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” the massive tent detention complex built deep in the Florida Everglades can hold 3,000 and could be the template for other facilities in other states.

One week after the first detainees began arriving at the Florida-run detention center for migrants in the Everglades, Katie Blankenship, a Miami immigration attorney, showed up at the gates of Alligator Alcatraz with a list of five names and a demand: Let me in to see them.

Fernando Artese had plans to voluntarily leave the country before he was arrested last month for driving with a suspended license, his daughter said.

The state of Florida has opened a migrant detention center in the Everglades. Its official name is Alligator Alcatraz, a reference to the former maximum security federal penitentiary in San Francisco Bay.

Deep in the hazardous and ecologically fragile Everglades, hundreds of migrants are confined in cages in a makeshift tent detention facility Florida’s Republican governor calls “safe and secure” and Democratic lawmakers call “inhumane.

Protesters lined the streets on Saturday as lawmakers from both sides of the aisle arrived at the immigration detention facility.

U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has announced that five Republican-led states are in active discussions with the federal government to replicate Florida's recently opened migrant detention facility,