Dear Friends,

In case you haven’t heard, Florida had a big payday recently — and it’s not exactly good news.

Last week, right before Republicans shut down the federal government because they’d rather take away people’s lifesaving healthcare than make the ultra-rich pay taxes like the rest of us, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) slipped over $608 million to the state of Florida as a reimbursement for opening and operating the concentration camp in the Everglades.

Now remember — we know that the estimated cost of operating the Everglades camp is $450 million.

That is the amount of Floridian taxpayer money that Governor DeSantis fronted to pay for it — our money meant to rebuild homes, fix roads, and keep us safe after storms, instead used to cage children, tourists, and DACA recipients in a makeshift camp designed to normalize human rights abuses.

And now DeSantis and friends just got over $600 million in FEMA funds, more than the actual operating costs, in a type of grant that lets them spend the money on other “similar projects.”

We’re already seeing “similar projects” — detention camps with alliterative names that don’t deserve repeating — popping up across the state near Jacksonville and in the panhandle. So it’s not hard to imagine DeSantis will use this extra cash (money meant to house people displaced by natural disasters) to fund even more PR stunts that disappear our neighbors and profit off human suffering.

Right On The Money

There may be a win here. Turns out Federal Judge Kathleen Williams was right when she declared, “If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, then it’s a duck.”

That’s the conclusion she reached when she ordered the shutdown of the Everglades concentration camp after sorting through a mess of finger-pointing between the State of Florida and the federal government over who was responsible for building and running the prison.

Both sides tried to dodge accountability in a lawsuit filed by Friends of the Everglades and the Miccosukee Tribe, who rightly argued the camp was built illegally — rushed through without following federal requirements of studying how it would harm the fragile Everglades ecosystem.

After Judge Williams ruled that the federal government was responsible for running the camp and ordered it shut down, a divided three-judge panel from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta overturned her decision.

But now, with the U.S. government cutting Florida a check for more than $600 million to cover the camp’s costs, it’s hard to argue Judge Williams wasn’t right on the money.

The Real Disaster

At the same time, a new publication from the Florida Policy Institute points out that, even with historic federal funding, Florida is still short $14.8 billion just to meet basic disaster recovery needs — costs that arise directly from disaster damages to homes, public infrastructure, and local businesses.

This is a number that represents the minimum investment to bring households, neighborhoods, and businesses back to baseline functioning, and is a number that’s expected to rise once more data comes in.

So we’re nowhere near having enough to do the bare minimum to rebuild and keep people safe after storms, and DeSantis and his friends are spending over half a billion dollars on branding stunts that lock innocent people in cages and tear children from their families.

This is OUR Money

Once again — it’s about our money. How it’s being spent, who’s getting it, and who’s getting screwed.

Something you can do right now in this government shutdown is call your senators and members of Congress. Hold them accountable. Demand they fund us — the working people who just want to enjoy the lives we’ve worked so hard to build — not the billionaires and corporate CEOs that are stealing everything away from us.

Our friends at SEIU made it easy:
👉 Fill out this form to send a message in seconds
📞 Or call the hotline at 877-851-2521 (just enter your ZIP code to get connected).

Onwards and upwards,

Your Friends at Florida For All