We Forget About ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ at Our Peril
The abuses are piling up, and Democrats and activists are desperate to get the word out.
WHEN DONALD TRUMP, Kristi Noem, Ron DeSantis, and local Florida officials opened the Everglades detention center last summer, its harsh location and cavalier nickname—“Alligator Alcatraz”—gave rise to a lot of brutal joking about what awaited detainees at the facility, especially any who might try to escape.
But the jokes and the nickname weren’t funny to the native Miccosukee tribe, whose lands are adjacent to the detention facility grounds. They have joined lawsuits against state and federal authorities alleging that construction was greenlit without a tribal consultation or an environmental impact study, overlooking important lawful requirements, they argue, for such a project at the site.
“The Everglades is meant for our tribes, it protects life, it shields it. It’s not meant to detain life,” one member of the tribe said.
But detaining life is what it does—thousands of lives so far. The Everglades detention center is a key site for Trump’s mass deportation regime. So it makes good fractal sense, then, that Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), in an interview with me after an unannounced visit to the facility last week, described it as a “monument to cruelty.” The part reflects the whole.
One Cage, 32 Men, 3 Toilets, Zero Privacy
One of the first things Wasserman Schultz told me was that she wasn’t being provocative or inflammatory in calling the living quarters “cages”: It’s simply what they are. The congresswoman introduced the No Cages in the Everglades Act in the House last summer, but it never became law; she told me she saw 1,500 detainees housed in cages at the site, a cage area that smelled like urine, and one cage configuration where detainees appear to have no option but to go to the bathroom in front of everyone.
“It’s a vile, disgusting place that you would never want anyone you care about to spend five minutes in, let alone be warehoused in cages there,” she told me.
The facility, which was ordered closed by a district judge last summer due to the lawsuit from the tribe and others, before being reopened two weeks later by two Trump-appointed appeals court judges, already has a bad reputation for its poor treatment of immigrants. But often, things at the facility allegedly get even worse, sometimes declining for months at a time. This alarming pattern might owe to new guards coming in, or to more aggressive attempts to stamp out protests inside. That’s what I was told by Thomas Kennedy, a veteran Florida immigration activist who stays connected to the family members of detainees and has made it his business to bring what is happening at the facility to national attention.
New trouble began after a federal judge ruled in late March that the detention center must give free access to, as the Associated Press summarized the order, “timely, confidential, unmonitored, unrecorded outgoing legal calls.” Days later, guards cut off the phones entirely without warning or explanation. This happened on April 2, according to a Miami Herald report published this week. Things escalated from there. As the Herald put it, after the phones were cut off, “the beatings began.”
Raiko Lopez Morffi was dragged out of his cell and severely beaten, leaving him with a black eye, as seen in photos taken by his attorney and presented to the court as part of the lawsuit. (Morffi’s black eye can be seen in a screenshot from a Zoom call included in the Herald story.) He also sustained injuries to his shoulder and arm and was kicked in the head; at one point, an officer pressed a knee against his neck to restrain him. One of Morffi’s fellow detainees had his wrist broken. All men in the cage were pepper-sprayed, and one of the older men lost consciousness apparently as a result.
This was far from the first example of grievous mistreatment of detainees at the facility. Days before the judge’s phone order and the guards’ phone suspension, Sens. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) published a three-page letter to new Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin requesting information about the use of “the box”—a punishment that resembles those meted out by totalitarian governments and police states.
“Detainees placed in ‘the box’—located outside and in direct sunlight—are reportedly forced to endure high temperatures, high humidity, and ‘horsefly-size mosquitos,’” the letter states. “One Nicaraguan man reported that his ‘hands and feet were painfully shackled’ when he was placed in ‘the box’ in the recreation yard, prohibiting any movement. He reportedly remained in ‘the box’ directly exposed to the sun and heat for hours, with no water.”
This is unconscionable. But Kennedy, the immigration activist, told me that in the past month, he’s heard that things at the facility have gotten even worse.
“We don’t know why,” he said. “It goes in waves, maybe because there’s a lot of turnover with the guards. It was more calm at the beginning of the year. But over the last month, I’ve heard awful shit.”
An Amnesty International report from December tells some of the story. It’s entitled: “Torture and enforced disappearances in the Sunshine State: Human Rights Violations at ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ and Krome in Florida.”
Krome is another Florida detention center; it is located in Miami. Wasserman Schultz visited it as well and described the conditions as also being “awful.”
But Kennedy, who is in touch with families of Everglades detainees, shared a startling observation about the two sites.
“Krome has seen multiple civil rights and human rights complaints,” he told me. “But people in ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ still say, ‘I want to get sent to Krome.’”
Cubans Voted for Trump—Now in “Alligator Alcatraz”
Kennedy is in a group chat with eighty or so women—the mothers and wives of immigrants held at the detention center. Through that chat and his advocacy, he has learned that a large number of Cubans are being held at the Everglades facility.
“Predominantly, the population are Cubans whose families voted for or supported Trump, and they’re pissed,” Kennedy said.
Wasserman Schultz agreed.
“The most significant evidence that points to that is Eileen Higgins’s election,” she said, referring to the new Democratic mayor of Miami who swept into office on the strength of high Latino support. “In elections across the country, the Hispanic vote is shifting dramatically to Democrats. Even if people voted for Trump, the cruelty threaded through this administration’s policies and priorities is not what they signed up for.”
Kennedy has seen it up close.
In the group chat, the family members share videos and memes about Trump with one general message, he said: “This guy is a fucking lunatic.”
He shared screenshots of some of them with me.
One depicts Trump and Melania Trump with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, while another shows Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu in handcuffs. They also share videos of speakers declaring the “insanity” of Trump, pointing to him losing his mind, and they have recently been very upset by Trump attacking Pope Leo XIV.
But the general vibe is perhaps best captured by a YouTube video that recently made the rounds in the group. It’s a short clip of a song performed by the rapper YG at Coachella in 2016. As the crowd cheers, he sings “Fuck Donald Trump.”
The sentiment is only too easy to understand. Wasserman Schultz told me that when she says the Everglades detention center is a “monument to cruelty” and that the “cruelty is the point,” she wants to underscore that she sees the facility as a means to an end.
The reason DeSantis and Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier chose to place the facility “in the middle of the broiling hot swampy environment,” and the reason they have since made so many jokes about the perils that await escapees outside its fences, she told me, is that they want people to be afraid of getting sent there.
“They want to make it so awful people self-deport,” she said.
Thank you for continuing to cover this. But what can people outside of Florida do? It feels hopeless.
I have no patience for the Hispanics (or any voter) who voted for Trump and are now saying 'we didn't sign up for this." YES YOU DID! He said he was going to do mass deportations. SMH