She runs companies that reaped hundreds of millions worth of health care contracts to care for inmates at “Alligator Alcatraz,” the grotesque state-run immigration detention center.
The Everglades monstrosity was built at grossly inflated costs under Gov. Ron DeSantis’s phony “emergency” and was ordered closed by a federal judge (the ruling is on appeal by the state).
She was the target of a recent protest in Miami for allegedly profiting from cruelty at “Alcatraz.”
She served for two years on the board of the Hope Florida Foundation, target of a state grand jury probe for using proceeds of a Medicaid overbilling settlement to help sink two ballot initiatives (as far as we know, she’s not personally implicated).
Needless to say, you’ll find none of that on Tina Vidal-Duart’s LinkedIn profile. What you will find is that she’s the co-owner of CDR Health, a board member of the Miami-Dade Homeless Trust and the FIU Foundation and chair of the Florida Grand Opera.
Senators confirmed her Wednesday as an appointee of Gov. Ron DeSantis to the board of trustees at Florida Atlantic University.
The 4-3 vote was in the Senate Ethics & Elections Committee. Four Republicans approved Vidal-Duart, and three Democrats voted no — two from Palm Beach County.
A resounding endorsement? Heck, no. But it was enough.
It signals another divided vote, but ultimate approval, for her by the Republican-dominated Senate in the upcoming session.
Her story is a small but telling example of how extremism has been normalized in Florida under DeSantis, who’s mercifully entering his last year as governor.
Sweetheart deals at a state-run gulag where immigrants are cruelly separated from families? In Tallahassee, it’s no big deal.
A member of Hope Florida’s board during the time that it might have engaged in criminality? Yawn.
In a previous Senate hearing a week earlier, Vidal-Duart came across as evasive on a Zoom call when asked about possible illegal money laundering at Hope Florida and said she should not talk about it because of the investigation.
Her second performance was much better. She showed up in person, stood eye-to-eye before senators and aggressively and articulately defended herself — and it worked.
Along the way, she made the DeSantis family-created Hope Florida Foundation look a lot worse, testifying under oath that she pushed to improve its bylaws and add a conflict-of-interest policy, independent legal counsel and monthly meetings to provide more oversight.
As she told it, the board ignored her.
“I did not get a response,” she said of the need for more meetings.
“I am not a rubber-stamp board member,” she said, reading from a prepared statement, “and I often challenge leadership … I do not accept positions on boards because they look good on a resume or a LinkedIn profile.”
She was asked, as an FAU trustee, about the university’s decision to suspend three professors for their social media commentary after the death of conservative leader Charlie Kirk (two of the three professors have been reinstated).
“People have a right to free speech and a right to enact that free speech, as long as it doesn’t violate the law,” she replied.
Democratic Sen. Tina Polsky of Boca Raton asked the best questions; she could have asked many more.
Explaining why she voted against Vidal-Duart, Polsky said that by personally profiting from an illegal immigration emergency, Vidal-Duart is “entangled and has conflicts of interest.”
“There’s just too much,” Polsky said. “There’s too many red flags.”
Amina Spahić, political director of the liberal advocacy coalition Florida for All, was the only witness who urged senators to block Vidal-Duart’s confirmation.
A Bosnian immigrant who fled the genocide in her homeland, Spahić said senators were endorsing as a university trustee a person “who profits from torture and tearing parents away from their children.”
Vidal-Duart told me afterward that she’s the victim of misinformation by the media. She said that every report of immigrants being mistreated at Alligator Alcatraz is “completely inaccurate.”
A report by Amnesty International, based partly on interviews with former Alcatraz detainees, said: “Access to medical care at ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ is inconsistent, inadequate, of poor quality and frequently denied altogether,” putting people at risk. The treatment of people is “cruel, inhuman and degrading,” the report said.
She calls herself a “turnaround expert” whose specialty is reviving financially distressed rural hospitals. She certainly turned around her own political prospects to win a Senate confirmation vote.
Steve Bousquet is Opinion Editor for the Sun Sentinel and a columnist in Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. You can contact him at sbousquet@sunsentinel.com or at (850) 567-2240. Follow him on X @stevebousquet.
