Gov. Ron DeSantis announced plans for third deportation site—the ‘Panhandle Pokey.’
Nearly 20,000 immigration arrests were made in Florida in 2025, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced during a Jan. 5 press conference highlighting his state’s immigration enforcement standards.
Of that total number, 10,000 arrests were made as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s Operation Tidal Wave, and 7,674 were taken into custody by Florida’s highway patrol officers.
Those arrested included more than 6,300 people with criminal records, including violent and sexual offenses, as well as several hundred of the total 1,200 child predators arrested in the state that year.
It did not include any arrests made by federal agents or self-deportations, which authorities said reached about 1,000 people going through the state’s program alone.
DeSantis held the press conference at Deportation Depot outside Jacksonville, from where authorities said 93 deportation flights carried away 2,926 people in the few months the site was in operation last year.
Deportation Depot followed the establishment of the Alligator Alcatraz detention and deportation center deep in the Everglades.
DeSantis shared that both facilities now had a federal immigration judge on site to expedite the deportation process.
He also announced that his administration was awaiting DHS approval to open a third detention and deportation center in North Florida that would be called the “Panhandle Pokey.”
The governor also suggested that a fourth site could open this year in South Florida, but he did not go into details.
DeSantis emphasized that the creation of every facility was meant as a temporary solution to support federal agents who have run out of space to keep illegal immigrants off the streets.
While it was not clear how temporary they will be, DeSantis expressed his hope that the federal government could expand its bed space and eliminate the need for any state intervention.
Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Mark Glass said his department and its partners in the Florida Department of Children and Families were continuing to work with the Trump administration to find the estimated hundreds of thousands of children who were brought into the country unaccompanied.
Florida’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services Commissioner Wilton Simpson announced the Department of Transportation was going to build another major highway checkpoint and close up what he called “a major hole” along the state’s northern border.
By T.J. Muscaro
