MIAMI — After a year filled with lawsuits, torture allegations and criticism over the use of taxpayer money, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced on Thursday the closure of the Everglades detention center known as Alligator Alcatraz.

“Alligator Alcatraz fulfilled the role it was designed to serve,” DeSantis said at a news conference Thursday at the facility that has already been emptied of federal detainees.

In his remarks, DeSantis ticked off serious criminal offenses, including rape and murder, for about a dozen of the more than 20,000 immigration offenders held there and then deported by the federal government. “There’s no question this mission has made the state of Florida safer.”

The temporary detention camp — created on a remote airport Florida seized from Miami-Dade County last summer under the governor’s emergency powers — quickly was dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by DeSantis, a play on the dangers that detainees might face if they strayed into the swampy waters surrounding the property.

Critics slammed the operation as a pricey publicity stunt and an inhumane way to house people facing deportation. Environmental groups sued, saying Florida violated environmental regulations in rushing construction of a camp surrounded by the federal Big Cypress Preserve.

DeSantis’ announcement of the closure comes after almost two months of the state and federal governments not being forthcoming about whether detainees still remained at the Everglades facility and when it planned to close the tent camp, even after signaling that discussions about its closure had begun as early as March.

In his remarks, DeSantis did not lay out a timetable for when Florida would turn the airfield back to Miami-Dade. He told reporters he expected the facility to be formally closed within two weeks. Early Thursday, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said she wanted the county-owned property — including about 17,000 acres of wetlands — turned over to the National Park Service to help Everglades restoration.

DeSantis was joined by Tom Homan, President Donald Trump’s border czar. He used his time to defend Trump’s crackdown on both illegal immigration and on people holding legal visas that were revoked by the president’s administration.

“The most secure border in the history of this nation was achieved under President Trump,” Homan said.

From the start, the DeSantis administration faced criticism from environmental conservation groups, who argued in federal court that increased activity in the area because of the facility’s operations caused irreparable harm to the surrounding Everglades wetlands. The groups filed a lawsuit against the state and federal governments, accusing them of failing to comply with federal environmental regulations when building the facility, which ran on numerous diesel generators and required daily sewage disposal.

The state has rejected accusations of environmental harm and said the airport was already developed, with activity occurring before the tent detention camp was erected.

Closure of Alligator Alcatraz has been in the works

The population of immigrants housed at the facility had been dwindling over the past months. Family members and advocates had noticed a steady transfer of immigrants to other detention centers. At the beginning of April, the population was around 1,400, but when U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost, an Orlando Democrat, toured the facility in an announced visit in May, the population had been reduced to 655 immigrants.

Alligator Alcatraz, a brainchild of Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, was hastily erected in a matter of days last summer, transforming about 6,000 acres of the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport into a tent city to hold immigrants the Trump administration had called the “worst of the worst.”

DeSantis had touted it as an example of state cooperation with Trump’s mass deportation mandate and crackdown on illegal immigration.

When the site opened last summer, DeSantis led a tour for Trump and former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who walked through the chain-linked fences and rows of brown bunk beds in the first-of-its-kind state-run detention facility. Trump described the facility as “so well done.”

Noem highlighted that the facility’s then-estimated annual operating cost of $450 million would be reimbursed by the federal agency. The agency assured Florida it would receive the total cost from a fund designated to reimburse states for immigration detention expenses. However, as the DeSantis administration entered into nearly a billion dollars in contracts with vendors through no-bid agreements, the federal government changed its stance and said it would not cover the site’s construction costs. That left Florida taxpayers responsible for expenses drawn from an almost-depleted emergency fund.

The foreboding name and ensuing memes led to social media chatter and merchandise, making the site a tourist attraction for some in the Everglades. It also inspired other states to create their own versions — Speedway Slammer in Indiana, Cornhusker Clink in Nebraska and the Louisiana Lockup in Louisiana.

Over the last year, both the state and federal governments have given divergent statements about what’s been happening at Alligator Alcatraz.

Most recently, federal immigration officials said this month that detainees had been moved because of safety concerns related to hurricane season. But Kevin Guthrie, who leads the state’s Division of Emergency Management and oversees hurricane preparedness, said he was unaware of the reason and countered federal officials, saying the site was well prepared to handle tropical storms or a Category 1 hurricane.

For the immigrants who had been held there, and for their families and lawyers, the news of the site’s closure comes as a welcome relief. They had denounced the conditions at the detention center, describing them as unsanitary, and said that detainees were beaten or pepper-sprayed when they complained.

Arianne Betancourt, a community advocate whose father was detained at Alligator Alcatraz, said she was happy that people were no longer going to be held there but that there were now concerns about how their pending immigration cases would move forward because detainees were being relocated outside Florida.

“A lot of these guys were sent to Louisiana, California, Texas, Mississippi, and they have upcoming court dates within the next couple of weeks. So now that’s going to create a whole big issue for them,” said Betancourt. “It just complicates everyone’s situation.”

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(Miami Herald staff writer Syra Ortiz Blanes contributed to this story.)

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