By KATE PAYNE and MIKE SCHNEIDER, Associated Press

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — A top Florida official says the controversial state-run immigration detention facility in the Everglades will likely be empty in a matter of days, even as Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration and the federal government fight a judge’s order to shutter the facility dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by late October. That’s according to an email exchange shared with The Associated Press.

In a message sent to South Florida Rabbi Mario Rojzman on Aug. 22 related to providing chaplaincy services at the facility, Florida Division of Emergency Management Executive Director Kevin Guthrie said “we are probably going to be down to 0 individuals within a few days.” Rojzman, and the executive assistant who sent the original email to Guthrie, both confirmed the veracity of the messages to the AP.

A spokesperson for Guthrie, whose agency has overseen the construction and operation of the site, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

FILE – President Donald Trump tours “Alligator Alcatraz,” a new migrant detention facility at Dade-Collier Training and Transition facility, on July 1, 2025, in Ochopee, Fla. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

News that the last detainee at “Alligator Alcatraz” could leave the facility within days came less than a week after a federal judge in Miami ordered the detention center to wind down operations, with the last detainee needing to be out within 60 days. The state of Florida appealed the decision, and the federal government asked U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams to put her order on hold pending the appeal, saying that the Everglades facility’s thousands of beds were badly needed since detention facilities in Florida were overcrowded.

The environmental groups and the Miccosukee Tribe, whose lawsuit led to the judge’s ruling, opposed the request. They disputed that the Everglades facility was needed, especially as Florida plans to open a second immigration detention facility in north Florida that DeSantis has dubbed “Deportation Depot.” During a tour of the South Florida facility last week, U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., said he was told that only a fraction of the detention center’s capacity was in use, between 300 to 350 detainees.

Williams had not ruled on the stay request as of Wednesday.

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The judge said in her order that 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 the state and federal defendants can’t bring anyone other than those who are already being detained at the facility onto the property.

Environmental groups and the 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 threatened environmentally sensitive wetlands that are home to protected plants and animals and would reverse billions of dollars spent over decades on environmental restoration.

The detention center was built rapidly two months ago at a lightly used, single-runway training airport in the middle of the rugged and remote Everglades. State officials have signed more than $245 million in contracts for building and operating the facility, which officially opened July 1.

Associated Press writer Mike Schneider in Orlando contributed to this report. Kate Payne is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

By JOSH FUNK and DIDI TANG

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — U.S. production of crucial components in electric vehicles, smartphones and fighter jets is set to expand rapidly in the coming years, as the Trump administration intensifies efforts to build up the critical mineral industry in the United States to work to break the chokehold that China has on the global supply chain.

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The federal government is pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into American companies, has made an agreement with one firm to set a minimum price for some U.S.-produced critical minerals, and has launched an investigation into foreign-made supplies.

“This is the Manhattan Project moment for rare earths,” said Joshua Ballard, CEO of USA Rare Earth, which plans next year to start making the rare-earth magnets that appear in many products.

The White House has made it a priority to revive the domestic critical minerals industry, which is proving urgent after Beijing leveraged its near-monopoly on the products to force the U.S. to the negotiating table during a trade war.

President Donald Trump said this week that China “intelligently went and they sort of took a monopoly of the world’s magnets,” but he expressed confidence in securing supplies because the U.S. has “much bigger and better cards.”

“We’re going to have a lot of magnets in a pretty short period of time. In fact, we’ll have so many, we won’t know what to do with them,” he said as he hosted South Korean President Lee Jae Myung.

Critical minerals have been tied to national security

Industry insiders, analysts and lawmakers have warned for years that America’s dependence on China for critical minerals — a list of 50 minerals that includes 17 sought-after rare-earth elements — is a national vulnerability.

The hard-to-pronounce elements are needed in smartphones, wind turbines and robots as well as missiles, submarines and fighter jets.

“Our national and economic security are now acutely threatened by our reliance upon hostile foreign powers’ mineral production,” an executive order from Trump declared in March.

It was not until Beijing rolled out export restrictions on several rare earths in April — leading to a temporary halt of Ford’s electric vehicle production — that “the problem that for over a decade seemed far away hit close to home,” said Gracelin Baskaran, director of the Critical Minerals Security Program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Trump said Monday that he could charge 200% tariffs on Chinese goods if Beijing does not export magnets to the U.S. but noted “that’s perhaps behind us.” Instead, he said he could withhold airplane parts to ground China’s American-made Boeing jets.

When asked about the leverage, Guo Jiakun, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, said Tuesday that Beijing “follows the principle of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and mutually beneficial cooperation” in dealing with the U.S.

“We hope the U.S. will work with us to jointly promote the steady, sound and sustainable development of bilateral ties,” Guo said.

The critical minerals industry welcomes support

The Pentagon is investing $400 million in rare-earth producer MP Materials. It gave the U.S. company a $150 million loan this month, has promised to ensure every magnet made at its massive new plant is bought and set a minimum price for its neodymium and praseodymium products for a decade.

“It looks like we’re going to finally do something to address that issue and make these projects a reality,” said Mark Smith, CEO of NioCorp, an American company working to raise $1.2 billion to produce niobium, titanium, scandium and rare earths in Nebraska.

Over four decades, Smith said he’s seen how the U.S. ceded the industry to China, which came to dominate the supply chain by brushing aside environmental concerns, investing in mines worldwide, developing advanced processing technology and setting low prices to squeeze out competition.

Previous efforts by U.S. companies to eke out a viable business proved futile when China flooded the market with low-priced products, chasing away potential investors.

NioCorp recently secured up to $10 million from the Pentagon, which helped pay for exploratory drilling this summer.

While it is unclear if the government would extend a minimum-price deal to other U.S. companies, Smith said the current support is “unbelievable” compared with the past. A price floor, he said, “just takes away the Chinese modus operandi that they’ve had for forever.”

About 220 miles away from where MP Materials is building a magnet plant in Fort Worth, Texas, Noveon Magnetics runs America’s only factory currently making rare-earth magnets. Located south of Austin, it is ramping up production to make 2,000 tons of magnets a year.

“I certainly hope and think it actually is not what may be the last of the efforts by the U.S. government,” Noveon Magnetics CEO Scott Dunn said of the Pentagon-MP Materials partnership.

Even with all the new production aiming to come online in the next few years, American companies are still nowhere near being able to satisfy North America’s demand for roughly 35,000 tons of magnets a year, analysts at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence estimate. And the demand could double in the next decade.

Ballard, whose USA Rare Earth plans to start making about 600 tons of magnets in Oklahoma next year, said the government can provide incentives to stop American buyers from falling back on cheap Chinese products once they are widely available again.

US government ramps up investments

This year’s big tax and spending cut bill includes $2 billion for the Pentagon to boost the U.S. stockpile of critical minerals and $5 billion more through 2029 to invest in those supply chains.

Between 2020 and 2024, the Pentagon said it had awarded more than $439 million to establish supply chains for domestic rare earths.

Domestic investments aside, Trump has tried to secure access to critical minerals outside of the U.S., including from Greenland and Ukraine. A peace deal the administration helped broker between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda might provide access to critical minerals, but it’s too early to tell if those efforts will succeed.

Some say a deal with Beijing still is needed

Derek Scissors, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said he’s concerned that Trump could consider it a success if China agrees to guarantee rare-earth supplies in trade talks.

“I don’t think there will be such a deal or, if there is, that it will last,” Scissors said. “But it is a threat to U.S. economic independence.”

David Abraham, a rare-metals expert who wrote the book “The Elements of Power,” said new U.S. mines are years away.

“Everyone agrees the U.S. still has to work out a deal with the Chinese because American companies need more rare earths and specialized magnets than can be produced domestically,” he said.

Tang reported from Washington.

“Sweeps, crackdowns, and mass hospitalizations may make homelessness less visible for a moment, but they don’t solve it. They just push suffering out of view—until it resurfaces again, often worse.”

Ambulances outside Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx. (Adi Talwar/City Limits)

I met a man I’ll call “Darrell” near Chelsea Park in Manhattan. He was sitting quietly on a bench, dressed neatly but clearly weathered by life on the street. I offered him a cup of lemonade, and soon he was telling me his story—how he went from stability to homelessness.

Darrell was diagnosed with schizophrenia in his teens. He struggled through college but found a treatment plan that worked. He held a steady job with health insurance that kept him medicated and stable—until 2020, when the pandemic cost him his job, his insurance, and eventually, his grip on reality. Without meds, the voices came back. He stopped looking for work and knew he needed government-subsidized healthcare before things spiraled further. But once he finally received benefits, the earliest psychiatric appointment he could get was eight weeks out.

Darrell’s story isn’t unique. In my 15 years working with people experiencing homelessness in New York and New Jersey, I’ve met hundreds like him. Contrary to popular belief, most aren’t refusing help—they’re caught in systems that are underfunded, understaffed, and overwhelmed. We often call people “service resistant,” but in reality, it’s the services themselves that resist people.

That’s why the recent show of force in Washington, D.C., in response to President Donald Trump’s order that “the homeless have to move out IMMEDIATELY,” is so troubling. Not to be outdone, Mayor Eric Adams has floated his own plan to involuntarily hospitalize people with untreated mental illness or drug use in New York City.

Both Trump and Adams are trying to frame coercion as compassion. But removing people from sight—whether to a hospital ward, a jail cell, or a distant encampment—without addressing the root causes only deepens the crisis and ignores research showing that forced treatment rarely works.

In practice, forced hospitalization often means hours—sometimes days—waiting in an ER hallway because no psychiatric beds are available. New York alone has lost nearly 1,000 psychiatric beds in recent years. Even when a bed is found, discharge usually comes before real stabilization, with no follow-up plan and nowhere to go. The result? More trauma, more mistrust, and more costly cycles of hospitalization, incarceration, and street homelessness.

Even if such measures provide temporary stability, the bigger question is: what next? Most cities don’t have nearly enough supportive housing—affordable apartments with built-in services to help people stay well. Waitlists stretch for months, even years. Without housing, people return to the street, and the cycle repeats.

We’ve seen this movie before. Sweeps, crackdowns, and mass hospitalizations may make homelessness less visible for a moment, but they don’t solve it. They just push suffering out of view—until it resurfaces again, often worse.

There is a better way, and we already know what it looks like. People need timely access to care, not police escorts. They need mobile mental health teams that meet them where they are. They need respite care after hospitalizations, and case managers who stick with them beyond a single crisis. And most of all, they need housing—because treatment without stability rarely lasts.

The impulse behind these high-profile crackdowns may be to respond to suffering. But homelessness and mental illness aren’t solved through control. They’re addressed through care, compassion, and infrastructure. The opposite of homelessness isn’t hospitalization—it’s housing. It’s healthcare. It’s dignity.

And it’s a system that helps people before they fall—so they don’t end up on a park bench, waiting for care that may never come. Or worse: locked in an ambulance, only to be discharged back to the same street, three days later, more broken than before.

Josiah Haken is the CEO of City Relief, a non-profit dedicated to connecting the unhoused community to hope and resources.

The post Opinion: Forced Hospitalization Isn’t the Answer—Housing, Healthcare, and Compassion Are appeared first on City Limits.

By DORANY PINEDA, Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Earlier this year, several environmental groups sent a petition to the federal government with a seemingly simple message: Ensure that water from the imperiled Colorado River is not wasted and only being delivered for “reasonable” and “beneficial” uses.

The organizations urged the Bureau of Reclamation to use its authority to curb water waste in the Lower Basin states: California, Arizona and Nevada. They argued it was necessary to help address the river’s water shortages.

The concept of reasonable and beneficial use is not new, but it’s being discussed at a crucial moment. Chronic overuse, drought and rising temperatures linked to climate change have shrunk water flows. States reliant on the river are approaching a 2026 deadline to decide on new rules for sharing its supplies, and they have until mid-November to reach a preliminary agreement or risk federal intervention.

The petitioning groups argue reducing water waste could help ensure the river has a sustainable future. But others worry cuts could bring hardship to farmers and consumers.

The river supports 40 million people across seven U.S. states, two states in Mexico and Native American tribes.

“We don’t have a management future for the Colorado River right now and it’s getting pretty scary,” said Mark Gold, adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and former director of water scarcity solutions with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a petition group. “We should be dealing with this as a water scarcity emergency, and one of the things that you really want to do in an emergency is, let’s deal with water waste first.”

The bureau has not responded to the petition. In a statement to The Associated Press, the agency said it continues to operate with the agreements and rules in place and has other strategies to “reduce the risk of reaching critical elevations” at the river’s reservoirs, Lakes Powell and Mead.

FILE – People walk by a formerly sunken boat standing upright along the shoreline of Lake Mead at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Jan. 27, 2023, near Boulder City, Nev. (AP Photo/John Locher, File)

Defining ‘beneficial’ and ‘reasonable’ is not easy

A bureau code says “deliveries of Colorado River water to each Contractor will not exceed those reasonably required for beneficial use.”

But Cara Horowitz, director of UCLA’s Frank G. Wells Environmental Law Clinic, wasn’t sure what that meant or how it’s applied. So she and her students sought to find out with government records.

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“As best as we could tell, it’s never defined the phrase and it does not use the phrase in any meaningful way as it’s making water delivery decisions,” said Horowitz, who is representing the groups. They believe the bureau needs a reformed process to determine whether states are avoiding wasteful and unreasonable use. In the petition, the groups urged the bureau to address those issues and perform periodic reviews of water use.

Experts say that defining reasonable and beneficial use could be challenging, but some argue it’s worth a try. Others worry that allowing an authority to determine what’s wasteful could have negative impacts.

“It’s potentially a whole can of worms that we need to approach very carefully,” said Sarah Porter, the Kyl Center for Water Policy director at Arizona State University. “Who gets to be the entity that decides what’s an appropriate amount of use for any particular water user or community?”

The groups see it differently. For example, they think farmers should be incentivized to change “wasteful” irrigation practices and consider growing crops better suited for certain climates. An example they gave of “unreasonable” use is year-round flood irrigation of thirsty crops in deserts. In cities and industries, wasteful use includes watering ornamental turf or using water-intensive cooling systems.

In a 2003 case, the bureau invoked the provision when it ordered water reductions to California’s Imperial Irrigation District, the largest river water user, after determining it couldn’t beneficially use it all. The district sued and the dispute eventually settled.

FILE – Farmer Larry Cox walks in a field of Bermudagrass with his dog, Brodie, at his farm Aug. 15, 2022, in Imperial Valley near Brawley, Calif. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull, File)

Concerns from farmers and cities

California’s Imperial Valley relies 100% on Colorado River water. The desert’s temperate, mild winters are ideal for growing two-thirds of winter vegetables consumed nationally.

Andrew Leimgruber, a fourth-generation farmer here, has tried to reduce his use with water-savings programs. He grows crops like carrots, onions and mostly alfalfa, which he often flood-irrigates because it fills the plant’s deep root system. For up to 60 days in the summer, he doesn’t water it at all.

Water cuts because of “unreasonable” use could mean people won’t be able to eat a Caesar salad in New York City in January, Leimgruber said. He worries about short-term food shortages and putting farmers out of business.

Bill Hasencamp, manager of Colorado River Resources for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, said the agency supports an annual process to ensure water is being beneficially used, even as that definition changes, but he doesn’t think it’s meant to solve the river’s existential crisis. He worries invoking this tool could result in litigation. “Once things go to court, there’s always a wild card that’s sort of out of anyone’s control.”

FILE – The Hoover Dam appears on the Colorado River, Aug. 22, 2024, near Boulder City, Nev. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)

A California provision as a model

Some experts point to California’s constitution as a potential model, which contains a provision on reasonable and beneficial use. How that is interpreted is fluid and decided by state water regulators, or the courts.

“The way it’s written is actually very adaptable to the times, so it’s actually about what is wasted and reasonable use in a given time,” said Felicia Marcus, fellow at Stanford University’s Water in the West program and former chair of the California State Water Resources Control Board. “So things that would have seemed to be reasonable 50 years ago, no longer are.”

The state water board has invoked its beneficial and reasonable use provision in times of drought, for example, to help support using less water in cities. It’s deemed washing sidewalks or washing cars in driveways as unreasonable. In another case, the water agency argued and won that it was unreasonable for a senior water rights holder to take so much water that fish couldn’t swim to cold water refuges.

Water regulators have also threatened to apply their unreasonable use authority to get the holders of water rights to better manage their use. “It’s a tool that gets used as both a threat and a backstop,” said Marcus.

FILE – Augustin Rodriguez gets hoses ready on the back of his water truck as he delivers at a home across the street from a large sign that reads “conserve water,” in Spanish, May 9, 2023, in Tijuana, Mexico. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull, File)

Addressing shortages requires multiple approaches

Leimgruber, the Imperial Valley farmer, said limiting population growth and expansion in arid areas could help. John Boelts, a farmer and Arizona Farm Bureau president, suggested more desalination projects. And Noah Garrison, a water researcher at UCLA, found in a recent study he co-authored that states could do more to recycle wastewater.

Still, as decades-long droughts plague parts of the basin and with critical deadlines approaching, some experts say it’s time for the bureau to be more assertive.

“There’s responsibility here to be the water master on the river or it gets thrown to the Supreme Court, which will take years to work its way through,” said Marcus. The “beneficial use petition is one way to say, ‘Here’s a tool you have, step up and consider it.’”

The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment.