Inside Trump’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’: Detainees allege abuse in a legal black
OCHOPEE: At US President Donald Trump’s new migrant detention center in the Florida Everglades, time has no discernible meaning.
Prisoners are barely able to see sunlight in the windowless space, living under fluorescent lamps that are always on, with no clocks or anything else by which they might mark the days.
Several detainees, their family members and lawyers have denounced appalling conditions at the facility, nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz” by an administration that has likened undocumented migrants to “animals” and promised to deport millionsAFP spoke with several “Alligator Alcatraz” detainees by phone and obtained further information about conditions there from relatives, lawyers and legal documents.
Detainees spoke of facilities covered in filth, a lack of medical care, mistreatment, and the violation of their legal rights.Gonzalez arrived in the United States in 2022 and settled in Florida after authorities released him while his asylum application was being reviewed.
Last month, when an immigration judge dismissed his case, ICE agents arrested him and took him to “Alligator Alcatraz.”
They kept him chained by his hands, waist, and feet on a bus with other detainees for more than a day before taking him to one of the large tents that house eight cells each, he said.
“I haven’t seen sunlight in the 14 days I’ve been here,” he said.He lives in a cell with about 30 people, a space enclosed by chain-linked fencing that he compares to a chicken coop.
It is hardly ever cleaned, he says, not even the three toilets that everyone shares. At the time of the call, Gonzalez had not showered for a week.Michael Borrego Fernandez, 35, complained of pain but was not treated until he began to bleed, according to his lawyers and legal documents.
He underwent emergency surgery for hemorrhoids, only to have to be hospitalized again when he was not given antibiotics and his wounds became infected.
Some prisoners, such as Marcos Puig, 31, have rebelled.
Before a visit from officials, guards isolated him to prevent him from protesting, he said by phone from another Florida facility where he is now being held.
The days are hot, with swarms of mosquitoes in the cells, and the nights are not much better.
“They don’t even treat animals like this. This is like torture,” said Luis Gonzalez, a 25-year-old Cuban who called AFP from inside the center.
Florida authorities built the facilities in eight days — opening the center on July 2 at an abandoned airfield in the Everglades wetlands.