Amid the controversy, emergency management officials on Wednesday invited state legislators and members of Congress to visit the facility on Saturday, setting up a 90-minute tour restricted to lawmakers.

The five Democratic state lawmakers who were denied entrance to inspect the new immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades last week filed a lawsuit in the Florida Supreme Court

Deep in the hazardous and ecologically fragile Everglades, hundreds of migrants are confined in cages in a makeshift tent detention facility Florida’s Republican governor calls “safe and secure” and Democratic lawmakers call “inhumane.