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    Guided by angels, pursued by chemtrails: the weird world of Florida health chief’s influential wife

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    The wife of Florida surgeon general Dr Joseph Ladapo, a leading vaccine skeptic, believes that angels have spoken to her and that “dark forces” are targeting her family with chemtrails, and has claimed her husband won’t work with anyone she hasn’t vetted.In published works and interviews reviewed by the Guardian, Brianna Ladapo – who edited her husband’s USA Today op-ed from March 2020 against Covid-19 shutdowns and appears alongside him at conferences – claims to have regularly received visions that come true and believes her life has been saved “multiple times” by angels.Joseph Ladapo, a longtime vaccine skeptic who was handpicked by Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has faced accusations by public health advocates of peddling “scientific nonsense”. Ladapo has defended his stances on vaccines and Covid guidance, stating in 2023 in response to allegations he falsified a Covid report: “Between my scientific experience and training, and the fact that I am only comfortable saying the truth and speaking the truth, I felt completely fine with that announcement.”He recently ended vaccine mandates for children in Florida against preventable diseases, including measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio and hepatitis, comparing mandates to “slavery” and claimed the move would receive the blessing “of God”. Florida is the first state in the US to do so.The Guardian made several attempts to reach Brianna Ladapo and Joseph Ladapo by email. They did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Florida department of health and DeSantis also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.In a Substack post on 5 September, Brianna Ladapo defended her husband’s decision to end vaccine mandates and claimed there are “dubious origins, nonexistent safety profiles, and dirty money trails surrounding vaccines”.She wrote in the post: “You believe in vaccines because you’ve been told to by a corrupt medical establishment that has a vested interest in keeping you subservient and stupid.”In a July 2025 podcast, Brianna Ladapo stated: “I often think if I hadn’t had to learn to trust my own gut and learn how to think and stand on my own two feet at such a young age, when Covid had come through, apparently swept away everyone’s brains, I might have been swept away right along with it if I didn’t already know how to listen to that truth that I believe is inside every single one of us.”She added in the podcast that “even to the lead-up, I was having visions, I was having dreams”, about the pandemic, before it began in early 2020. “Immediately, ridiculous inconsistencies started to show themselves.”She also appeared in an interview with the prominent anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense in January 2025, in which she said: “If we all listen to our intuition, we listen to that voice, we would not fall for propaganda. Like, what’s happened with Covid. People did truly insane things to keep from catching a virus that over, well over 99% of people survived without intervention, right? That’s textbook insanity.”Joseph Ladapo has appeared with his wife on stage at conferences on health and parenting.In Dr Ladapo’s 2022 memoir, Transcend Fear, he wrote that his wife has “a history of extraordinary experiences that were hard to explain with natural laws”. In March 2020, he wrote an op-ed for USA Today against shutdowns in response to Covid-19, the first of several he wrote about the virus, and noted that it was edited by his wife.Joseph Ladapo wrote in Transcend Fear that when he was recruited for the job of Florida surgeon general by DeSantis, his wife claimed it was the message she was waiting for.In Brianna Ladapo’s 2023 memoir, she claimed “as long as I can remember, I have received communications from beings beyond this realm. Even as a young child, angels regularly spoke to me.”She added that “since I was born, I have also received constant communications in the form of visions” and that “eventually, every single one of them came to pass”.In the book, Brianna Ladapo claims she went on a “pilgrimage” trip to Egypt in graduate school during which she saw the rest of a “recurring vision” from a past life.In a video podcast on Rumble earlier this year, she reiterated these claims about her “gifts”.“I was born a very sensitive child, the kind of kid who would see angels and talk to beings that no one else could necessarily perceive,” she said, claiming her family “perceived what was happening to me as satanic and demonic and evil”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I saw a lot of angels, but my angels would talk to me and they saved my life multiple times,” she claimed.Brianna Ladapo also claimed their children together “have all been having experiences like this since they were born” and have “innate divine intelligence”.She claimed one of her children as a baby had “a gift” that was temporarily shared with her.“I started to hear conversations that sounded like they were right next to me. There were no people anywhere near us. And they were clearly from different eras, sometimes different countries, different languages and dialects,” Ladapo said.She said initially in their relationship, her husband was skeptical, but came to believe in her “gifts”.“After a number of years, he came to deeply trust my gift and now he won’t work with anybody I haven’t vetted,” she said. The couple did not respond to requests for comment about Brianna Ladapo’s vetting.Later in the podcast, Ladapo claimed she floated an inch above the ground during a session with a former Navy Seal and self-proclaimed traditional healing guru, whom she said her husband had also seen and had similar experiences with. The healer declined to comment, citing client confidentiality.Ladapo is also a proponent of the chemtrails conspiracy theory about planes mass-dumping chemicals. She claims in the podcast interview that she and her children got sick because of chemtrails, and she used a patch that has been characterized as pseudoscience by medical experts.“As we try to chase down where this is coming from, who is funding the companies who are flying the planes, who are piloting these planes, where are they taking off? We don’t even know where they are, because none of this is on the books.” Ladapo said about chemtrails.She added in the podcast interview about a photo of a Florida sky outside of her home: “This is how the chemtrails have been looking outside our window for the past few weeks. They are, I hate to say it, but that looks like a pentagram and they’ve been plastering it in the sky right outside our house for the last few weeks.”She characterized the perceived chemtrailers as “dark forces” out to get her and her husband.“They’ve been trying to stop us for years,” she claimed. “We are operating at a level of light that puts us essentially out of the grasp of those with a very low vibration, very evil intention.” More

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      Florida plan to drop school vaccine mandates won’t take effect for 90 days

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      Florida’s plan to drop school vaccine mandates likely won’t take effect for 90 days and would include only chickenpox and a few other illnesses unless lawmakers decide to extend it to other diseases, like polio and measles, the health department said on Sunday.The department responded to a request for details, four days after Florida’s surgeon general, Dr Joseph Ladapo, said the state would become the first to make vaccinations voluntary and let families decide whether to inoculate their children.It’s a retreat from decades of public policy and research that has shown vaccines to be safe and the most effective way to stop the spread of communicable diseases, especially among children. Despite that evidence, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health secretary, has expressed deep skepticism about vaccines.Florida’s plan would lift mandates on school vaccines for hepatitis B, chickenpox, Hib influenza and pneumococcal diseases, such as meningitis, the health department said.“The department initiated the rule change on September 3 2025, and anticipates the rule change will not be effective for approximately 90 days,” the state told the Associated Press in an email. The public school year in Florida started in August.All other vaccinations required under Florida law to attend school “remain in place, unless updated through legislation” including vaccines for measles, polio, diphtheria, pertussis, mumps and tetanus, the department said.Lawmakers don’t meet again until January 2026, although committee meetings begin in October.Ladapo, appearing Sunday on CNN, repeated his message of free choice for childhood vaccines.“If you want them, God bless, you can have as many as you want,” he said. “And if you don’t want them, parents should have the ability and the power to decide what goes into their children’s bodies. It’s that simple.”Earlier this week, Ladapo garnered criticism after he compared vaccine mandates to “slavery”. Speaking at a press conference alongside Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis who has also expressed deep vaccine skepticism, Ladapo said of the vaccine requirements: “Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.”His comments drew outrage from lawmakers and health experts alike, with Democratic Florida state representative Anna Eskamani saying: “Ending vaccine mandates is reckless and dangerous. It will drive down immunization rates and open the door to outbreaks of preventable diseases, putting children, seniors and vulnerable Floridians at risk.”Meanwhile, John Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, said: “Florida’s undertakers will now need to plan for the future by increasing their stocks of small coffins,” adding that all the preventable vaccines would increase in schools.Ladapo had previously altered data in a 2022 study by the state’s health department to exaggerate the risks of cardiac death for young men. The study had initially disclaimed any significant risk associated with the vaccines for young men. However, Ladapo replaced the language to claim that men between 18 and 39 years old are at high risk of heart illness from two Covid vaccines that use mRNA technology.Ladapo had also falsely claimed in 2023 that booster shots were not tested on humans and had “red flags.” The same year, the US Food and Drug Administration, as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called Ladapo’s vaccine stances as harmful to the public.“It is the job of public health officials around the country to protect the lives of the populations they serve, particularly the vulnerable,” the federal letter said, adding: “Fueling vaccine hesitancy undermines this effort.”Florida currently has a religious exemption for vaccine requirements. Vaccines have saved at least 154 million lives globally over the past 50 years, the World Health Organization reported in 2024. The majority of those were infants and children.Dr Rana Alissa, chair of the Florida chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said making vaccines voluntary puts students and school staff at risk.This is the worst year for measles in the US in more than three decades, with more than 1,400 cases confirmed nationwide, most of them in Texas, and three deaths.Whooping cough has killed at least two babies in Louisiana and a five-year-old in Washington state since winter, as it too spreads rapidly. There have been more than 19,000 cases as of 23 August, nearly 2,000 more than this time last year, according to preliminary CDC data.Maya Yang contributed reporting More

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      ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ immigration jail can stay open, appeals court says

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      An appellate panel on Thursday put on hold an order to wind down operations at the “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration center in the Florida Everglades, allowing its construction and operation to continue.Last month a federal judge in Miami had ordered the closure of the Trump administration’s notorious immigration jail within 60 days, and ruled that no more detainees were to be brought to the facility while it was being wound down.That shock ruling by district court judge Kathleen Williams built on a temporary restraining order she had issued two weeks previously, halting further construction work at the remote tented camp, which has attracted waves of criticism for harsh conditions, abuse of detainees and denial of due process as they await deportation, as well as environmental damage.The state of Florida, which funded and built the hastily-erected camp and runs it on behalf of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency, then appealed.On Thursday afternoon, a three-judge panel in Atlanta decided by a 2-1 vote to stay Williams’ order pending the outcome of Florida’s appeal, saying the ruling was in the public interest.Ron DeSantis’s administration in late June had raced to build the facility on an isolated airstrip surrounded by wetlands to aid Donald Trump’s efforts to deport people deemed to be in the US unlawfully.The Florida Republican governor said the location in the swampy and remote Everglades was meant as a deterrent against escape, much like the infamous, now disused, island prison in San Francisco Bay that Republicans named it after.The US president visited the facility and praised its harsh environment for detainees, some of whom have accused the authorities of inadequate medical care and other poor conditions.The 11th US circuit court of appeals ruled in a split opinion that the Trump administration was likely to prevail in a legal battle with environmental groups that say the facility is endangering the fragile Everglades and its wildlife.Two judges sided with the Trump administration, and one judge dissented.
      The majority ruled that the project, funded by Florida, which is seeking reimbursement fees from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the parent agency of Ice, did not trigger the kind of environmental review needed for federally funded construction projects.Although both DeSantis and the DHS secretary, Kristi Noem, have said the federal government will pay for expanding the detention facility, there is no evidence that federal funds have been used for construction, the court ruled.The detention center cost about $250m to build and covers more than 18 acres. The facility is 37 miles west of Miami in a vast subtropical wetland that is home to alligators, crocodiles and pythons – imagery that the White House leveraged to show its determination to remove migrants – and also home to many rare birds, plants and creatures such as manatees.The Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Florida crosswalk wars take DeSantis’s ‘war on woke’ to street level

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      A battalion of transportation workers armed with cans of black paint has been deployed to open a new front in Ron DeSantis’s “war on woke”, while young students trying to make their schools safer have joined the LGBTQ+ community as targets of Florida’s Republican governor.The saga began with the state moving in the dead of night to paint over a rainbow-colored crosswalk outside Orlando’s former Pulse nightclub, where 49 people were killed in a 2016 shooting. The city’s mayor, Buddy Dyer, called the erasure of the memorial to the mostly LGBTQ+ victims “a cruel political act”.Since then, DeSantis’s crosswalk wars have spread across Florida. The governor has ordered the removal of about 400 “non-standard” pieces of street art, even though they all received state approval as a condition of installation. A growing number of municipalities has pledged to fight him.The state’s declared intent, acquiescent to a national directive by the Trump administration last month, is to “keep our transportation facilities free and clear of political ideologies”, Florida’s transport secretary, Jared Perdue, wrote in a post to X.Perdue has also said painted roadways are a safety hazard, despite research showing improved driver behavior and a “significantly improved safety performance” at sites that have art installations.The purge, which has targeted more than just rainbow crosswalks and other street symbols of LGBTQ+ pride street decorations, has reverberated in cities from Tallahassee to Key West.Several municipalities, under threat of losing state funding, have complied. Those include Port St Lucie, which removed hearts painted on a roadway as a memorial to a teenager who died of a heart condition, and Daytona Beach, which painted over checkered flag crosswalks at the city’s famous international speedway.More than a dozen schools in Tampa were also snared, and will lose vibrant asphalt artwork designed by students installed as part of the city’s award-winning Crosswalks to Classrooms program. Florida’s department of transportation (FDOT) recognized it as a gold standard of road safety only four years ago.“The innovative and collaborative efforts to combine public art and engineering treatments to improve school safety was truly inspiring,” a department official said at the time.In Orlando, bicycle lanes painted in May at an elementary school, designed by fourth-graders who won a FDOT art contest, must also go.DeSantis, at a press conference in Tampa, was unrepentant. He suggested students use his street art directive outlawing “social, political or ideological messages” as a civics lesson.“What I would tell kids is we have a representative system of government. People elect their representatives. They’re able to enact the legislation with the governor’s signature and then when that happens, obviously people will conform their conduct accordingly,” he said.Other cities are digging in their heels, setting up a likely legal fight with the DeSantis administration. A special meeting of the Fort Lauderdale commission on Wednesday voted to file an administrative appeal against a removal order on four pieces of pride-themed street art in the city, including a large rainbow flag.“Tonight, we must stand our ground. We cannot allow ourselves to be bullied into submission and to allow others to dictate what we should do in our own communities,” Dean Trantalis, the mayor of Fort Lauderdale, said. Trantalis has previously called the governor’s crosswalk directive an act of “irrational vengeance” on the LGBTQ+ community.Commissioners also voted to hire the same firm of outside attorneys contracted by officials in Key West and Miami Beach, two other cities known for inclusivity, to help in the legal fight. Delray Beach commissioners voted earlier this month to defy the state and retain its giant pride streetscape. An administrative hearing is scheduled for Tuesday.View image in fullscreenAnna Eskamani, a Democratic state representative for Orlando, noted DeSantis’s long history of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation – including the “don’t say gay” bill and efforts to ban or restrict gender-affirming healthcare – and saw deeper menace in the crosswalk orders.“It’s not just, ‘I despise queer people,’ which is clearly a part of the MO here, it’s bigger than that,” she said.“It’s trying to control what local governments can and can’t do and an effort to essentially target, harass, bully and potentially even eliminate them. Overwhelmingly, cities that have these crosswalks do not support DeSantis and didn’t vote for him. These are the same municipalities that are now getting Doge, the same municipalities where DeSantis is trying to take away property taxes, which means no revenue and the consolidation and elimination of local governments.“It’s worth connecting the dots. It’s not as simplistic as another culture war on LGBTQ+ people.”Charlie Crist, the former Republican Florida governor who switched parties to become a Democratic congressman, and challenged DeSantis for governor in 2022, said it was an “absurd and embarrassing” effort to silence residents.“It’s hard to understand. We have a right to free speech in this country, and these murals in our cities and our communities reflect the values of those communities and cities,” he said.“The notion that the state government would want to suppress that right of free speech is bizarre.”Crist said he also saw the move as an extension of DeSantis’s targeting of minority groups: “It’s hard to draw a different conclusion, frankly, and I don’t understand it. I believe in the golden rule to do unto others as you would have done unto you, and I don’t think DeSantis knows what that is. It’s disappointing.”Nadine Smith, executive director of Equality Florida, predicted the push to remove pride street art would backfire.“DeSantis may paint over rainbows and art, but people are answering with defiance, chalking sidewalks, raising flags, covering cars with stickers, and businesses painting their parking lots with rainbows. These acts declare we are not intimidated and we will not be erased,” she said in a statement.“This isn’t about safety. It’s a cowardly abuse of power and the latest in his campaign to ban books, whitewash history, and attack LGBTQ people. Cities must push back to protect the values that make them welcoming places to live, work, and visit.” More

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      ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ to be vacated in compliance with court order to shut it

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      Florida’s immigration jail known as “Alligator Alcatraz” will probably be empty of detainees within days, a state official has said, indicating compliance with a judge’s order last week that the facility must close.The Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s administration appealed the order by federal court judge Kathleen Williams that the tented detention camp in the Florida Everglades, which attracted criticism for its harsh conditions, must be dismantled within 60 days.But in an email reported Wednesday by the Associated Press, Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida department of emergency management, which operates the jail on behalf of the federal government, appeared to confirm it would be shuttered.“We are probably going to be down to 0 individuals within a few days,” Guthrie wrote to Mario Rojzman, a Miami Beach rabbi who has been helping to arrange chaplaincy services.Representatives for Rojzman confirmed the authenticity of the memo to the news agency. Guthrie’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The Miami Herald had previously reported that hundreds of detainees were moved from “Alligator Alcatraz” to other immigration facilities in the state in advance of Williams’s ruling.On Monday, protesters who have maintained an almost permanent presence at the gates of the jail reported seeing convoys of buses driving out.Maxwell Frost, a Florida Democratic congressman, said that he was told during a tour last week that only about 300 to 350 detainees remained.“Alligator Alcatraz” was touted by Donald Trump as a holding camp for up to 3,000 undocumented immigrants as they awaited deportation. The jail, he said, was reserved for “the most vicious people on the planet”.Since it opened in early July after being hastily constructed in late June at a remote disused airstrip about 50 miles (80km) west of Miami, it drew waves of criticism. Several lawsuits sought its closure, and there have been claims that hundreds of those detained had no criminal records or active proceedings against them.Williams’s ruling was a significant victory for a coalition of environmental groups and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians, who claimed the camp had caused permanent and irreparable damage to the ecologically fragile wetland and its wildlife.Another lawsuit, filed by groups including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), claimed detainees were abused by jail staff, and that their human and constitutional rights were denied because they were refused access to attorneys and due process.The plaintiffs said the Everglades facility was not needed, especially because Florida plans to open a second immigration detention facility in the north of the state that DeSantis has dubbed “deportation depot”.Williams had not ruled by Wednesday on a request by attorneys for the state to stay her order of closure. In her original 82-page ruling, she said she expected the population of the facility to decline within 60 days by transferring detainees to other facilities, and once that happened, fencing, lighting and generators should be removed.She wrote that the state and federal defendants could not bring anyone other than those who are already being detained at the facility onto the property.The environmental groups and Miccosukee tribe had argued in their lawsuit that further construction and operations should be stopped until federal and state officials complied with federal environmental laws. Their lawsuit claimed the facility reversed billions of dollars spent over decades on environmental restoration.State officials have signed more than $245m in contracts for building and operating the facility at a lightly used, single-runway training airport in the middle of the rugged and remote Everglades. The center officially opened on 1 July.In their lawsuits, civil rights attorneys described “severe problems” at the facility which were “previously unheard-of in the immigration system”. Detainees were being held for weeks without any charges, had disappeared from the online detainee locator maintained by the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice), and nobody at the facility was making initial custody or bond determinations, they said.Detainees also described worms turning up in the food, toilets that did not flush, flooding floors with fecal waste, mosquitoes and other insects everywhere and malfunctioning air conditioning that alternated the temperature between near freezing and extreme heat. More

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      Federal judge orders closure of Trump’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ immigration jail

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      A federal judge in Miami late on Thursday ordered the closure of the Trump administration’s notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration jail within 60 days, and ruled that no more detainees were to be brought to the facility while it was being wound down.The shock ruling by district court judge Kathleen Williams builds on a temporary restraining order she issued two weeks ago halting further construction work at the remote tented camp, which has attracted waves of criticism for harsh conditions, abuse of detainees and denial of due process as they await deportation.In her 82-page order, published in the US district court’s southern district of Florida on Friday, Williams determined the facility was causing severe and irreparable damage to the fragile Florida Everglades.She also noted that a plan to develop the site on which the jail was built into a massive tourist airport was rejected in the 1960s because of the harm it would have caused the the land and delicate ecosystem.“Since that time, every Florida governor, every Florida senator, and countless local and national political figures, including presidents, have publicly pledged their unequivocal support for the restoration, conservation, and protection of the Everglades,” she wrote.“This order does nothing more than uphold the basic requirements of legislation designed to fulfill those promises.”No further construction at the site can take place, she ruled, and there must be no further increase in the number of detainees currently held there, estimated to be about 700. After the 60-day period, all construction materials, fencing, generators and fixtures that made the site a detention camp must be removed.The ruling is a significant victory for a coalition of environmental groups and a native American tribe that sued the state of Florida and the federal government. Williams agreed that the hasty, eight-day construction of the jail at a disused airfield in late June damaged the sensitive wetlands of a national preserve and further imperiled federally protected species.“This is a landmark victory for the Everglades and countless Americans who believe this imperiled wilderness should be protected, not exploited,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, one of the groups that filed the lawsuit.“It sends a clear message that environmental laws must be respected by leaders at the highest levels of our government, and there are consequences for ignoring them.”The alliance plans to hold a press conference on Friday morning to discuss the ruling in detail.Conversely, the ruling is a blow to the detention and deportation agenda of the Trump administration. The president touted the camp, which recently held as many as 1,400 detainees, as a jail for “some of the most vicious people on the planet”, although hundreds of those held there have no criminal record or active criminal proceedings against them.There was no immediate reaction to Williams’s ruling from the Florida department of emergency management, which operates the jail on behalf of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice), or from the Department of Homeland Security.But lawyers for the state told Williams in court last week that they would appeal any adversarial ruling, the Miami Herald reported.In addition, hundreds of detainees were moved from “Alligator Alcatraz” to other immigration facilities at the weekend in anticipation that Williams would order its closure, the outlet said.Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, announced earlier this month that the state will soon open a second immigration jail at a disused prison near Gainesville to increase capacity. More

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      Ron DeSantis enters the chat: governor eyes chance to redraw Florida maps

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      With Gavin Newsom and Greg Abbott, the respective heavyweight governors of California and Texas, trading blows over plans to gerrymander the 2026 midterms, it was always kind of inevitable that Florida’s Ron DeSantis would enter the chat.The Republican sees his state, the nation’s third-largest by several metrics, not least its 28 congressional seats, as pivotal in the redistricting wars for control of the House.So few were surprised this week when DeSantis gave his full-throated endorsement to two projects to try to save the Republican majority: Donald Trump’s call for an unprecedented mid-decade census that could blow things up nationally; and state Republicans’ efforts to redraw existing district maps in their favor, similar to Abbott’s scheming in Texas.“We have 28 now, we might have 29, 30, 31, maybe. Who knows?” DeSantis said at a press conference in Melbourne on Monday, expressing his belief that a new national population tally that excludes undocumented immigrants could expand Florida’s congressional delegation.Currently, 20 of those 28 seats are held by Republicans. Even without a census, DeSantis and allies including the Florida house speaker, Daniel Perez, have concluded that tinkering with existing boundaries and dumping blocs of Democratic voters into heavily Republican districts could net them several more.Perez, bolstered by a Florida supreme court ruling in July that approved DeSantis’s wholesale stripping of Black voters’ influence in the north of the state, is convening a “select committee on congressional redistricting” to do the same in the south.The long-serving congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Trump bete noire Jared Moskowitz are two of the prominent south Florida Democrats in DeSantis’s crosshairs.“We are going to have to do a mid-decade redistricting,” DeSantis said. “Obviously you would have to redraw the lines. Even if they don’t do a new census, even if they don’t revise the current census, I do think that it is appropriate to be doing it.”To Florida Democrats who have promised to fight the emerging threat to the eight House seats they do still hold, DeSantis’s maneuvering is a stereotypical power-play by a governor who has frequently been able to bend the state legislature to his will.“This isn’t about drawing lines on a map, this is about who gets hurt and who gets silenced in this thing we call democracy, or in this democratic process,” said Shevrin Jones, a Democratic state senator whose district covers parts of downtown Miami and Miami Beach.“Floridians were extremely clear years ago when we voted on fair districts that the redistricting process should be fair and transparent, that it should be reflective of the people and not the political ambitions of those who are in power. Yet that’s what we’re seeing right now.”To many critics, the Florida supreme court’s ruling, authored by the chief justice, Carlos Muñiz, a DeSantis appointee, was a sleight of hand: it stated that the districts drawn – by Republicans – that ensured fair Black representation violated a 2010 voter-approved constitutional amendment banning partisan and racial gerrymandering during redistricting.Yet the effect of the ruling was to essentially nullify the amendment by validating DeSantis’s manipulation of the northern districts to the Republicans’ advantage, and to give him a green light to do the same anywhere else.Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic party, said the governor had seized on the ruling to blatantly attempt to rig the 2026 midterms.“After gutting representation for Black Floridians and stacking the court to uphold it, he wants to further gerrymander and suppress the vote of millions of Floridians,” she said in a statement.“If Ron DeSantis spent half as much time solving real problems as he does scheming to steal elections, maybe we wouldn’t be in the middle of a housing, insurance and education crisis.”Republicans hold a supermajority in both chambers of the Florida legislature, so any walkout by Democrats, similar to that seen in Texas where lawmakers fled the state to deny quorum, would be ineffective.Instead, Jones said, his party, at state level at least, will continue to call out what they see as underhand efforts by the DeSantis administration to join the national Republican drive to save its House majority in support of Trump’s agenda.“I understand where Gavin Newsom and a great deal of Democratic governors are coming from when they say fight fire with fire. That’s fair, we can’t continue as Democrats to show up to a gunfight with slingshots,” he said.“I also understand that the Republicans are in power, and I understand they have no scruples about what they’re doing, I get that. The question is when or how can we find the alliances that exist to push back on the bullshit that the Republicans are doing, because it’s an absolute threat to not just democracy, but an absolute threat to our national security and our future.”Jones said that DeSantis, a lame-duck governor about to enter his final year in office before being termed out, had leapt upon the opportunity to inject himself back into the national picture.Still wounded by the humiliating collapse of his pursuit of the Republican presidential nomination a year and a half ago, DeSantis has seen himself eclipsed in the 2028 race by emerging hopefuls including Vice-President JD Vance and secretary of state Marco Rubio, the former Florida senator.“This isn’t just about Florida, it’s about national political positioning. The only way Ron DeSantis can prove that his voice is still loud is doing or saying asinine things like this to continue to kiss ass to Trump,” Jones said.“I think the governor is trying to restart a failing campaign that lost gas quickly, and I think he’s trying to fill it back up. But that car doesn’t work any more, and I don’t know any mechanic that wants to work to fix it.” More

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      My travels in Trump’s Florida: Maga superstars, gen Z Republicans – and the shame of ‘Alligator Alcatraz’

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      The mezzanine floor of the Tampa Convention Center buzzes chaotically with rightwing chatter: conspiracy theories, grievance politics and Christian nationalism. Look in any direction and someone in front of you, washed in sharp studio lights, is drawing a crowd and creating content.Ahead of me, Russell Brand sits on a white sofa, broadcasting live on the conservative video-streaming service Rumble – his guest is the “alt-right” influencer Jack Posobiec. To the left, along an alleyway lined with small broadcast booths, is the longtime Donald Trump adviser and self-proclaimed “dirty trickster” Roger Stone, who is holding court on a podcast. To the rear, on a large metal scaffold, is Steve Bannon’s War Room channel, busy cutting between live footage of a small protest outside the event and adverts for various Trump-aligned products.View image in fullscreenThe panorama serves as a realisation of one of Bannon’s notorious PR idioms: flooding the zone with shit. This is the Turning Point Student Action summit, an annual gathering targeted at gen Z conservatives, which draws thousands from across the US. It was a driving force in Trump’s success among younger male voters at the last election.In the arena next to the mezzanine, a conveyor belt of Maga superstars walk out to deliver keynote speeches, accompanied by spitting-flame cannon, pounding dubstep, spinning lasers and strobe lights. Brand delivers a bizarre diatribe – part standup comedy, part evangelical sermon – about his newfound conversion to Christianity in a word salad of alliteration and non sequiturs. Unsurprisingly, he makes no mention of the multiple rape and sexual assault charges he faces in the UK (to which he has pleaded not guilty).He is immediately followed by Tom Homan, Trump’s loudmouth border tsar, who is met with cries of “USA, USA!” as he refers to himself in the third person: “Tom Homan is running one of the biggest deportation operations this country has ever seen!” It is hard to keep up with this melange of fearmongering, severity and self-congratulation. It’s the epitome of Trump’s America.My colleague Tom Silverstone and I came here as the first stop on a journey across southern Florida. Once the quintessential swing state, it is now solidly Republican – and home to some of the president’s vast sources of personal wealth, including his beach club, Mar-a-Lago. It is also one of the hubs of his mass‑deportation programme.It seems no coincidence that the fast pace at Turning Point mirrors the first six months of Trump’s second term, which has lurched from scandal to extreme policy to blatant self-dealing at extraordinary speed – from the administration’s acceptance of a $400m luxury jet from the state of Qatar to his family’s creation of a private members’ club in Washington DC, charging $500,000 (£380,000) in annual fees.The apex of these brazen efforts to monetise the presidency is Trump’s venture into the world of cryptocurrency. He lauched his $TRUMP memecoin three days before he was sworn into office. These digital currencies have little to no financial use and are prone to rapid market fluctuations. Analysts estimate that the president’s family has netted about $315m since the venture launched into this volatile and speculative market and hundreds of thousands of investors have lost out. The whole episode lends itself to the argument that Trump’s return to power marks the advent of a second gilded age, last seen in the US after the civil war, when the unprecedented dominance of industry and technology led to rampant corruption and pronounced inequality.In May, some of the largest $TRUMP coin investors were invited to a dinner with the president at his Virginia golf course, then on a VIP tour of the White House, which some observers described as a blatant pay-to-play. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has said that Trump abides by all conflict of interest laws “that are applicable to the president”.No one at Turning Point seems particularly concerned about any of these apparent grifts, though. Anthony Watson, a contributor, stands in the merchandise area of the convention, where limited-edition gold Trump golf shoes are $500. He flicks away my questions about the Qatari jet with little thought.“What’s wrong about accepting it?” he says, after I point out it might fall under the general definition of a bribe. “Well, what did they get in exchange? Until you know, it’s speculation.”I track down Stone to ask how he thinks the founding fathers, who authored the foreign emoluments clause of the US constitution to block corruption and limit foreign influence, might view Trump’s move into memecoin. “I don’t think they could envisage cryptocurrency, period, or the technological age that we’re in,” he says, dodging the question.Beyond sheer audacity, these money-making schemes also strike at a clear contradiction within the Maga movement and its America First agenda. While most remain anonymous, some of the largest investors in Trump’s memecoin have been revealed as foreign nationals, one with ties to the Chinese Communist party. How does that tally with America First?View image in fullscreenI address this question to Bannon, who greets me with a smile and professes his love of the Guardian, despite labelling us “fucking commies from England”.He is willing to acknowledge a degree of unease, particularly when I mention the Chinese Communist party. But he still finds a way of reconciling it, arguing that the VIP event at the White House underscored a drive for “entrepreneurial capitalism”. “I’ve just got so much on my plate right now, I just don’t even focus on the memecoins,” he says, adding that “the crypto thing is not at that big a level”.It seems to mark a turn for Bannon who, in 2019, described cryptocurrencies as having a “big future … in this global populist revolt” and – according to reporting by ABC News – partly took control of an anti-Joe-Biden memecoin in 2021, along with the Republican strategist Boris Epshteyn. He seems uneasy when I ask about this venture, named $FJB (officially Freedom Jobs Business, unofficially shorthand for Fuck Joe Biden), given allegations of missing funds, reported failures to donate promised money to charity and a potential examination by the US justice department (DoJ) in 2023.“I think I put $500,000 into it,” Bannon recalls. Did he lose it all? “Yes. I think I lost all of it,” he says. He calls reports of a DoJ probe “fake news”.We leave Turning Point shortly after Bannon’s keynote address, which includes a flurry of praise for the immigration crackdown and receives a large round of applause. “Mass deportations now. Amnesty never,” he says. We drive about four hours south of Tampa to the centre of the Everglades, where a single‑lane highway is surrounded by cypress trees and mangroves.The administration’s immigration enforcement efforts are, in some ways, as brash and open as the Trump family’s presidential profit-making. Half a mile out, a large, newly installed bright-blue road sign announces we are approaching “Alligator Alcatraz”, a hastily constructed tent-like detention centre, surrounded by mosquito-infested swampland, about 50 miles outside Miami.View image in fullscreenIn a calculated display of draconian showmanship, Trump toured the facility in July, seeming to revel in its harsh conditions. It has become a symbol of this era of removals. Of the 57,000 people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, more than 70% have no criminal record.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis morning, a small congregation of protesters stand by the roadside looking on in dismay. “This place is shameful,” reads one sign.View image in fullscreenI explain where we have come from in Tampa and ask how they think the centre they are protesting against is connected to my conversations about Trump’s self-enrichment at the convention.“It’s all part of the same thing,” says one older female protester. “For Trump, it’s about power and money. He’s doing everything he can to make money while he’s president. But he knows he has to be in power to maintain that, and this is all about power,” she says, gesturing towards the detention centre. “Power and fear.”View image in fullscreenA few minutes later, a white SUV emerges from a roadway leading to the centre. The car pulls over to a grassy embankment and a family emerges. They had tried to gain access to a relative named Martin Sanchez. They were blocked from entering.Sanchez, they tell me, has lived in the US without paperwork for the past 25 years, since coming from Mexico. He has two young children and no criminal record; he pays his taxes and works as a landscaper in the city of Palm Beach. He was arrested there four days earlier while on his way to work, mowing lawns.“He calls me a lot,” says his cousin Janet Garcia. “He hasn’t showered. They treat him like a prisoner. He got caught for working and that’s it.”She stares back towards the detention centre in the piercing sunlight. “Without immigrants, this country is gonna go down,” she says. “We have a felon in the White House, but the people they’ve got in here don’t even have a [traffic] ticket.”There is something stark about the location of Martin’s arrest. Palm Beach county, on Florida’s eastern coast, is the location of some of the most pronounced and expanding income disparities in the state. Average house prices here exceed the median income by six times. Known as the “Wall Street of the south”, its corporation-tax-friendly climate has drawn many of the world’s biggest finance groups and it is home to at least 67 billionaires. The highest profile of these is, of course, Trump, whose Mar-a-Lago club is situated on a tree-lined street by the sea. A year ago, it raised its annual membership fees to $1m.We drive to a food pantry a short distance from Trump’s club, where a line of about 20 people are waiting for the doors to open. A laminated sign on the wall warns that immigration officials will need a valid warrant to enter the premises and that the pantry, run by a local non-profit group, continues to serve people regardless of their legal status.The county has a significant population of people from Haiti, many of whom are under threat of deportation after Trump moved to end their temporary immigration protections, despite the security crisis in the country. “Some of them are afraid to come,” says a volunteer minister. “It’s hard, you can imagine. You have no food, but, because of your immigration status, you stay home.”The programme’s director, Ruth Mageria, shows me the large stockpiles of food in the fridges and tells me the pantry has seen a 71% increase in use over the past five years. Things are expected to get worse, as a spending bill passed by the Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by Trump will cut basic food-assistance benefits for an estimated 22.3 million families across the country, while securing a host of tax cuts for the wealthy. The pantry has started preparing to ration its reserves.With a thunderstorm rolling in over the Atlantic and dark clouds forming like a tidal wave on the horizon, we seek out Mar-a-Lago. We stand on a bridge, on the newly renamed President Donald J Trump Boulevard, and look out over billionaires row. I’m reminded that this community was founded during the US’s first gilded age.It is an inauspicious end to this 400-mile journey across the state. The roads have emptied, but a small crew of landscapers, already drenched, are trimming the tall palms outside the club. Oliver Laughland is the Guardian’s US southern bureau chief More

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      ‘Hundreds’ of people have been removed from ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ detention camp, says Florida governor

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      Florida has begun deporting people from the notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” detention camp, the state’s governor said, and deportations are expected to increase in the coming weeks.At a press conference at the controversial facility, Ron DeSantis said “hundreds of illegals have been removed” from the facility. He later clarified that most of those were flown from Alligator Alcatraz to other detention facilities in the US. DeSantis, who has built a political career on his anti-immigration views, said 100 people had been deported from the US.“I’m pleased to report that those flights out of Alligator Alcatraz by [the Department of Homeland Security] have begun. The cadence is increasing,” DeSantis said. “We’ve already had a number of flights. … Hundreds of illegals have been removed from here,” De Santis said.He added: “We look forward to this cadence increasing.”Officials said two or three flights have so far departed, but didn’t say where those flights were headed.Last week, a number of non-profit organizations demanded the closure of the facility, which is based in the rural Everglades region, about 40 miles (64km) from Miami.The facility’s conditions are reportedly appalling, advocates said, with detained immigrants sleeping in overcrowded pods, along with sewage backups “resulting in cages flooded with feces”, and, in addition, “denial of medical care”. Advocates said the 39-acre camp, which was built in a matter of days, now holds more than 1,000 men in “flood-prone” tents.Donald Trump said the jail would be reserved for immigrants who were “deranged psychopaths” and “some of the most vicious people on the planet” who were awaiting deportation, but in mid-July it emerged that the jail contains hundreds of detainees with no criminal records or charges. Democrats have sued DeSantis, demanding access to the facility.Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida division of emergency management, said the facility had grown, in less than a month, to have a current capacity of 2,000 people. That will increase to 4,000, he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGuthrie defended conditions inside the facility, claiming that “whether it’s Florida standard or national standard [of conditions and services in detention facilities], we meet or exceed the higher standard”.Since the jail opened in early July, the Trump administration and local officials have specifically touted the brutality of the facility, including its remote location in a wetland surrounded by alligators, crocodiles, pythons and swarms of mosquitoes. Officials have also seemed to revel in the crude name the facility has been given, echoing the long-shut and notoriously harsh Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay. More