JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – A little-known consulting firm with ties to a prominent Jacksonville business leader landed a $78 million contract earlier this month to provide a raft of critical services at a pop-up immigration detention center in Big Cypress National Preserve, which Florida officials have aggressively marketed as “Alligator Alcatraz,” according to a report from The Tributary, a Jacksonville nonprofit newsroom.
Staffers with Jacksonville-based Critical Response Strategies LLC have a visible presence at the facility, which has sparked intense criticism from immigration-rights activists, attorneys and Democratic lawmakers, in part because of the scramble to open the tented detention center within days and the privately managed conditions there. The site quickly flooded and detainees complained of no showers or flushing toilets.
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Information about CRS, including who runs it, was available in the spring but has more recently been stripped from its website, which houses stock photos and describes no obvious relationship to Jacksonville.
State officials tapped CRS earlier this month to handle a wide range of responsibilities, including staffing, training and security, according to a copy of the contract. Emails also indicate that the company has some involvement in what lawyers have characterized as a convoluted process for reaching and visiting their clients.
It’s not clear how CRS landed the tens of millions in work at so-called Alligator Alcatraz, or whether it has previously handled the task of managing a site holding thousands of detainees. The firm markets itself as a clearinghouse of potential government needs, including emergency response, behavioral health services and engineering. Its site indicates CRS has previously worked with emergency-management officials in Florida and Kansas on COVID-19 work. CRS also says it has helped the state Department of Transportation on hurricane recovery efforts, including an $8 million contract to replace emergency signs after Hurricane Michael.
A state vendor database indicates the $78 million contract was awarded July 9 under an emergency order from Gov. Ron DeSantis, which is often an indication it was signed without a competitive bidding process.
Officials with the Florida Division of Emergency Management did not respond to questions about the process used to give CRS the work.
Jacksonville origins of CRS
CRS, however, has a prominent friend – or at least once did. The firm was at one time publicly affiliated with Caplin Ventures, a private investment firm headed by Jacksonville businessman Ricky Caplin.
Caplin, a member of the Civic Council, an influential group of Jacksonville CEOs, is known as the founder of the healthcare IT firm HCI Group, the majority of which he sold to Tech Mahindra in 2017 for an upfront payment of nearly $90 million. Caplin has since remained a significant player in Jacksonville’s business and political worlds.
Caplin joined forces with Tim Tebow on an ownership group working to bring men’s and women’s professional soccer teams to Jacksonville. They are also partners on an impact fund designed to give investors the chance to “contribute to faith-led investments in technology startups.”
Financial records don’t show Caplin to be one of the governor’s biggest financial backers – he and his wife contributed about $26,000 to DeSantis’s presidential campaign and its affiliated political committee in 2023 – but he is represented in Tallahassee by lobbyists Brian Ballard and Adrian Lukis, DeSantis’s former chief of staff, of Ballard Partners, one of Florida’s most powerful lobbying firms.
Most of the ties between CRS and Caplin have been scrubbed from the websites of Caplin Ventures, Critical Response Strategies and others, like LinkedIn. But CRS still lists Matt Fenner, Caplin Ventures’ CFO, as the company’s registered agent on its state business filings, and an archived version of the CRS website said it “spun out” of another firm, Pulse Clinical Alliance, which lists Caplin as its chairman. CRS and Caplin’s family office – as well as several other business ventures under the Caplin umbrella – also share the same Southpoint business address.
As of April, Caplin Ventures listed Adkins – the CRS chief executive – as an “operating partner.” That has since been deleted.
Caplin did not respond to an emailed list of questions or a text message, which a read receipt indicated he viewed. Adkins also did not respond to an email or text message.
State officials also appear to have clawed back information about CRS: A copy of the $78 million Alligator Alcatraz contract was included in a state vendor database Tuesday. On Wednesday, it was no longer available.
Legal mystery
Legal services are not part of CRS’s portfolio of responsibilities under the “Alligator Alcatraz” contract, but the company has on at least one occasion been looped in on a visitation request sent through a channel immigration attorneys have been instructed to use.
Some attorneys have been instructed to reach out to legal@privacy6.com – an email apparently affiliated with the detention center but whose domain has no clear origin. A document reviewed by The Tributary showed that on at least one occasion, someone with control of the privacy6 address forwarded a visitation request to Will Adkins, the CEO of CRS.
When immigration lawyer Magdalena Cuprys reached out to ICE for information about her client’s case and was instructed to email legal@privacy6.com, she assumed the email was for a government agency. She worries about how a private company would manage and protect confidential information, but also has no other way to contact her client or advocate for him.
“It’s concerning. Our clients a lot of the time are victims [of crimes] and generally their information is private for that reason,” Cuprys said. “When it’s a private contract, God knows who they’re sharing it with.”
Legal@privacy6.com responded Wednesday to an email from The Tributary saying that it handles legal correspondence and coordination for the detention center.
“As we continue to develop and expand direct legal access resources at the facility, please be assured that we are working diligently to ensure timely, secure, and reliable attorney-client communication,” said the email signed by the South Detention Facility Coordination Team.
Later Wednesday, when asked directly by a journalist with The Tributary if privacy6 was affiliated with CRS, the South Detention Facility Coordination team responded in an email that, “all media and press-related inquiries regarding the Southern Detention Facility should be directed to the Miami ICE Field Office.”
ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Detention workers ‘unqualified‘
DeSantis declared that illegal border crossings merited a state of emergency in September 2021, citing a lack of border enforcement by the Biden administration. This suspended many requirements for state contracts and permits and paved the way for an increase of no bid contracts. Even after border crossings decreased under the Biden administration and Trump took office, the governor has repeatedly extended the emergency order.
A lack of competitive process for private contracts has contributed to the poor conditions at Alligator Alcatraz, according to Thomas Kennedy, a frequent DeSantis critic and spokesperson with the Florida Immigrant Coalition.
“He [DeSantis] used it not just to commandeer this site from Miami-Dade County, who owned the land and managed it … but he also is using it to basically swat away permitting requirements,” Kennedy said. “So the facility really is not up to par.”
State Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, who visited the detention center over the weekend and recalled seeing CRS branding attached to staffers’ name tags, said the firm was simply “not qualified” to manage the detention center.
“No one knows what’s going on, nobody can answer basic questions,” she said.
Anna-Catherine Brigida is an investigative reporter at The Tributary who focuses on immigration.
Nate Monroe is the executive editor of The Tributary.