This summer, attorneys working with detainees at the “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration jail noticed a pattern: They would schedule in-person or video conference visits with clients who were stuck in the mysterious facility, only for the facility to cancel the appointments at the last minute because authorities had transferred their clients elsewhere.
What might have looked like a victory — getting people out of a hastily constructed jail already known for its poor conditions and chainlink cages — instead felt ominous.
In August, for example, one attorney’s five-hour block of meetings was canceled the night before, despite only being scheduled two days earlier. Authorities had released all 10 people the lawyer was supposed to talk to. They “are no longer here,” a contractor emailed attorney Troy Elder, who directs the detention program at Americans for Immigrant Justice. (The nonprofit firm has a hotline for people seeking legal assistance.)
The following week, Elder was informed that all 21 detainees he’d planned to speak to via videoconference that day had also been transferred. The news came in an email sent two hours after the meetings had been scheduled to start.
“The detainees you were scheduled to visit have been transferred by ICE,” an email signed simply “Southern Detention Coordination Team” read. “The visits are therefore canceled. We have no information on their current location.”
Several attorneys involved in a lawsuit spearheaded by the American Civil Liberties Union say they have experienced the same thing, including as recently as last week. The suit, which was transferred to Florida’s middle district last month, “challenges the government’s unconstitutional limits on attorney-client communication” at Alligator Alcatraz. Now, though, “all individuals who were originally named in the case as plaintiffs” have been transferred out of the facility, the ACLU’s Eunice Cho, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the case, told HuffPost.
“This sort of pattern causes me to second-guess whether to contact my clients at Alligator Alcatraz for fear that they could/would then be transferred out of state,” Elder wrote in a declaration for the lawsuit this month. He noted that at other immigration detention facilities in the state, as well as jails and prisons, he would be allowed to visit clients without first scheduling an in-person appointment.
But Alligator Alcatraz and, increasingly, other new detention centers celebrated by the Trump administration that are popping up across the country, aren’t playing by those rules.
While detention standards differ based on facility type, a wave of new immigration jails — built quickly, and meant at least in part to produce propaganda and pressure detainees to leave the country — is drawing widespread criticism for terrible conditions and restricted access to legal resources.
The number of people in immigration detention has exploded over the past 30 years, “from approximately 7,000 in 1994, to 19,000 in 2001, and to over 50,000 in 2019,” according to Detention Watch Network. Now, that number hovers around 60,000 daily. And with the giant infusion of cash from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Department of Homeland Security has projected adding 80,000 beds for ICE to use.
To do that, the administration is building capacity wherever it can, from military bases and state prisons to tent cities in the middle of the Everglades. It all adds up to a dizzying mix of federal, state and private players, making oversight even more challenging. Crucially, immigration detention is not meant to be punitive; as opposed to prisons, where people are held as the result of criminal convictions, immigration jail is merely meant to hold people pending developments in their immigration case. But the Trump administration has moved to aggressively expand the pool of people who can be jailed during those proceedings, saying that millions of immigrants are eligible to be held without bond.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said last month that Alligator Alcatraz could be a potential model for other states, and immigration advocates are concerned that the facility’s legal and human rights issues are spreading.
Over the past few weeks, the Everglades jail has been joined by a wave of alliterative additions to the immigration detention system, including the so-called “Deportation Depot” in north Florida, “Cornhusker Clink” in Nebraska, “Speedway Slammer” in Indiana, “Lonestar Lockup” in Texas and the “Louisiana Lockup” in Angola, one of the most infamous prisons in the world.
For Mich González, a co-founder of Sanctuary of the South, a legal aid group that’s an organizational plaintiff in the suit over legal access, Alligator Alcatraz has created a blueprint for obfuscation, misdirection and rights violations.
“It’s a black site,” González told HuffPost. “It’s this totally new and worse type of facility, [one] that the Trump administration is probably trying to propagate around the country, to use as propaganda for their base.”
One of González’s clients, Michael Borrego Fernandez, a named plaintiff in the legal access lawsuit, was transferred from Alligator Alcatraz down the road to Krome Detention Center in August, and then to Otay Mesa Detention Center, in California, where his family didn’t hear from him for several days, only to end up being deported to Tabasco, Mexico.
The grim reality for detainees stuck at the Everglades jail, González said, is “being detained indefinitely while having no idea what your process is going to be.”
‘A Rush Job’
Much of what happens at Alligator Alcatraz is a dramatic departure from even infamous existing detention centers, like Krome in Miami, a 50-minute drive east. Though conditions there are known to be terrible, for example, attorneys can visit clients without prior scheduling and the facility has its own immigration court.
But detainees at the Everglades jail have no access to legal calls or videoconferences that aren’t monitored or easily overheard, attorneys have alleged. There is no legal mail system; all documents are subject to inspection. Detainees’ locations are regularly inaccurate in ICE’s detainee locator system; two-thirds of 1,800 detainees listed in July rosters weren’t fully accounted for as of the end of August, with their names and case numbers returning either no information at all in ICE’s detainee locator, or simply prompting the user to “Call ICE for details,” the Miami Herald recently found. Attorney visits are frequently delayed or mired in red tape and require advance notice of three business days. Until mid-August, there was no immigration court associated with the site, and detainees were unable to move their cases through the Byzantine immigration legal system at all.
The new facilities have varying legal structures. Texas’ new facility is staged within Fort Bliss, the massive military installation, while those in the Midwest and north Florida are based in state prisons where authorities have most likely simply rented bed space to the federal government.
Alligator Alcatraz, for its part, is state-run, and essentially rests on a section of immigration law that empowers the federal government to deputize local law enforcement. Florida’s reading of the law is so expansive that the state faces another ACLU lawsuit on those grounds alone.
Yet another lawsuit concerns allegations from the Miccosukee tribe that the state ignored federal environmental regulations with the site’s rapid construction. A federal district judge in August ordered the facility to effectively shut down, only for that order to be reversed by a federal appeals court earlier this month. It’s unclear how many detainees are currently at the facility.
Despite the structural differences, the rapid pace with which the various facilities have been opened imperils immigrants’ legal and human rights, advocates told HuffPost.
A spokesperson for the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the Justice Department body that oversees immigration courts, deferred to the Department of Homeland Security “for questions regarding their detention and removal operations,” including questions regarding legal access for detainees. DHS did not respond to a lengthy list of questions, nor did several state authorities whose work with the agency is detailed in this story.
In the so-called “Louisiana Lockup,” housed in Camp J, a wing of the notorious Angola prison formerly known as the “Dungeon,” newly arrived immigration detainees went several days without receiving toilet paper, and are given drinking water in shared five-gallon buckets, according to Bridget Pranzatelli, a staff attorney with the National Immigration Project. Sinks and toilets in the facility have malfunctioned, and overflowing toilets have contaminated cells with urine and fecal matter, Pranzatelli said, citing conversations she’d had with several detainees and their family members.
Over a dozen detainees, all part of a single wing of the detention facility, recently launched a hunger strike, reportedly because they did not have regular access to medication for chronic conditions like diabetes and mental health diagnoses. Pranzatelli said she’d heard from detainees’ family members that those participating in the hunger strike were placed in solitary confinement, and that one was hospitalized Monday but later brought back to Angola. As of Friday afternoon, four detainees were still participating in the hunger strike, she said, citing a colleague who’d just visited the facility.
Also, contrary to ICE Deputy Director Madison Sheahan’s claim at the facility’s grand opening press conference that it would have a law library — one aspect of ICE’s National Detention Standards — “every single person we spoke to said that there is no law library,” Pranzatelli said.
The Camp J facility will “expand ICE detention space by up to 416 beds,” according to a DHS press release.
The hunger strike “appears to have been sparked by false narratives in the media that put that idea in the detainees’ heads,” Louisiana’s Department of Public Safety & Corrections told NOLA.com in a statement Monday, adding that reports of poor conditions “create a false narrative about the facility’s operations” and were “misleading.” “Detainees have full access to medical treatment, three proper meals per day, legal counsel, and other essential items,” a DHS spokesperson told Fox News.
Neither state nor federal immigration officials, nor LaSalle — a private prison company that recently posted job openings for Angola, NOLA.com reported — responded to HuffPost’s questions about conditions there.
The so-called “Lonestar Lockup” — its real name is Camp East Montana — was holding some 1,400 detainees as of earlier this month, and could ultimately hold up to 5,000 migrants, The Washington Post reported. Yet within 50 days of opening, the massive tent city racked up 60 violations of federal immigration detention standards, the Post found, citing an internal inspection report.
Among the violations, in the paper’s words, the facility “failed to properly monitor and treat some detainees’ medical conditions, lacked basic procedures for keeping guards and detainees safe and for weeks did not provide many of them a way to contact lawyers, learn about their cases or file complaints.”
The Trump administration accused the Post of “twisting inspector notes.”
Similar allegations have come up at other new facilities.
In Alligator Alcatraz, detainees and staff have long reported miserable conditions, from broken plumbing to flooding, mosquitoes and respiratory illness.
People jailed at Florida’s so-called “Deportation Depot” — at Baker Correctional Institution, outside Jacksonville — have reported issues since the facility opened to immigration detainees earlier this month: several-day waits to receive medical attention, a lack of cold-weather clothing even in chilly mornings outside, phone calls being limited to 15 minutes each, and mail being withheld, said González, whose group has a couple of clients at the facility. The facility could ultimately hold up to 2,000 people, state officials have said.
González said he had not yet been able to schedule a video call with a client there, something that would be routine at a more established facility.
“It seems like a rush job,” González said.
As with Alligator Alcatraz and the “Louisiana Lockup,” he said, it wasn’t immediately clear if there were any ICE deportation officers present for detainees to ask about their immigration cases. ICE’s National Detention Standards state that facility orientation should include “Procedures for the detainee to contact the [ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations] officer handling his/her case.”
So Much For ‘Worst Of The Worst’
The propaganda value of horrid detention centers is undeniable. The Trump administration has openly said it is using immigration jails to pressure people to leave the country, thus giving up their immigration case in the United States — what the administration calls “self-deporting,” though that term doesn’t have a specific legal meaning.
It’s also red meat for President Donald Trump’s base. Administration officials have used “worst of the worst” to describe people brought to every facility mentioned in this story thus far, suggesting that in addition to being in the U.S. illegally these detainees are violent criminals. (As soon as he returned to office in January, it became clear Trump was not actually prioritizing arresting people with serious criminal records.)
That has gotten a little bit awkward at times, such as when the Miami Herald pointed out in July that hundreds of Alligator Alcatraz detainees had never faced criminal charges at all.
More recently, the Trump administration’s claims about supposed “criminal illegal” immigrants has butted up against local politics: In Nebraska, Noem thanked Gov. Jim Pillen (R) “for his partnership to help remove the worst of the worst out of our country.” But the new Nebraska facility, located at Work Ethic Camp in McCook, Nebraska, likely won’t be housing the “worst of the worst.” The state’s governor, state correctional services director, and chair of the legislature’s appropriations committee have all suggested that the immigration detainees set to be housed there could be described as requiring “low” or “medium” security.
Efforts to find out more about the new immigration jail haven’t gone far: The governor’s office skipped a hearing on it held by state Sen. Terrell McKinney (D), and state Sen. Megan Hunt (I) told HuffPost that records requests she’d filed had been refused by state officials who cited exceptions to public records laws.
Not every state holds their documents so close to the chest. Annie Goeller, chief communications officer for the Indiana Department of Correction, sent HuffPost two contract documents describing that state’s relationship with ICE the morning after we asked for them. (Still, Goeller did not answer several questions about the nature of the facility.)
The documents, experts told HuffPost, appear to describe a fairly standard “intergovernmental service agreement,” or IGSA, through which the state agreed to rent bed space at Miami County Correctional Facility to ICE, starting on Sept. 30. If ICE doesn’t fill at least 450 beds in the facility “after 120 days of the execution of this contract,” it will “be required to reimburse the service provider for 450 beds at a minimum as a guarantee of security of payment,” one document says. Such agreements are commonplace in ICE’s modern mass detention era, though more so at the local level than among state governments.
The 287(g) Mystery
The explosion of immigration detention facilities during Trump’s second term has raised new concerns about the legal authority for the jails, and the risks that come with rapidly multiplying the number of people ICE holds behind bars.
There are nearly 200 detention facilities listed in ICE’s current statistics, up from 109 last October. Those include facilities owned by the federal government, private contractors, and state and local governments that make agreements with ICE to share detention space. That number will continue to rise in the new fiscal year, as ICE counts facilities that have only one or two beds set aside for ICE detainees, like local jails, said Adam Sawyer, a data analyst at Relevant Research, the group behind detentionreports.com, which breaks down government data on each of the facilities.
One of the facilities newly being used for ICE detainees is Nassau County Correctional Center, a jail on Long Island where people arrested in the New York City area can be held temporarily.
Last week, a 42-year-old man arrested by ICE died at the facility. An investigation is ongoing, Sheriff Anthony LaRocco has said. ICE acknowledged the death of Santos Reyes-Banegas, a Honduran citizen, in a press release, and said the preliminary cause of death “appears to be liver failure complicated by alcoholism.”
Reyes-Banegas’ death behind bars is part of an especially deadly year for people in immigration custody.
Would the world know if someone died in Alligator Alcatraz? After at least one medical emergency last month, when a man collapsed at the site, attorneys and activists aren’t so sure.
That’s because the facility is unique. In the various lawsuits over its existence, state and federal officials have told judges that Alligator Alcatraz is a state-run immigration detention center operating under so-called 287(g) authority. The statute allows the federal government to deputize local police for things like immigration arrests and short-term jail detainers, and the Trump administration has been aggressive in encouraging the program, particularly in Florida. But it has not before been used as the foundation for a long-term state-run detention center.
In the most recent lawsuit against Alligator Alcatraz, lawyers for the ACLU laid out troubling implications of the jail. The suit describes hundreds of men spending weeks at the facility without formal immigration charges from the federal government, “detained at the facility in violation of federal law, by state employees and contractors who lack statutory authority to hold them for civil immigration violations.”
“In the thirty years since the statute was enacted, state officers have never claimed the authority to detain people under this statute, other than the short period after an arrest during transport to an ICE facility,” the suit alleges, saying that in the first month of operations, “a number of anomalies and severe problems have emerged at the facility,” many of them “previously unheard-of in the immigration system.”
Among other alarming accusations, the suit accuses jailers of using “Exposure to mosquitoes, sun, and other harsh elements [as a] form of punishment and retaliation, with restrained individuals placed outside for hours at a time to be bitten and sun burned.”
An anonymous plaintiff in the suit, M.A., “entered the facility able to walk, but he is now in a wheelchair,” the suit alleged. Like others, according to the complaint, he has gone weeks without appearing in ICE’s detainee locator. Florida officials didn’t respond to HuffPost’s request for comment about the suit.
For critics of the state’s immigration enforcement gambit, the secrecy around Alligator Alcatraz is a danger unto itself.
Anna V. Eskamani, a Democrat in the Florida House of Representatives and a candidate for Orlando mayor, told HuffPost last month that she had reviewed emails from a family member of an Alligator Alcatraz detainee. The communications look like “ping-pong, back and forth” with various contractors and authorities telling the family member different things about getting in touch with her husband, Eskamani said.
“This facility has no involvement with immigration courts or their proceedings,” an unnamed contractor emailing on behalf of Alligator Alcatraz told the family member in July, before Krome became the designated immigration court for Alligator Alcatraz detainees. When the woman protested that she’d gotten the email address from someone at the facility, the email address responded: “This email is for information that the facility possesses. The information you request, we do not possess.”
That sort of bureaucratic morass, and the indefinite detention it threatens, “is on purpose, because every day, they’re asking people to self-deport,” Eskamani said. “They create this environment that’s incredibly hostile, with the goal of basically pressuring you, psychologically getting to you, to the point where you just quit.”
“If you ask the Florida Department of Emergency Management, or ICE, everything’s going well, there’s no COVID, there’s no hospitalizations, the ambulances are just a hallucination,” Thomas Kennedy, an activist who has worked as a consultant with the Florida Immigrant Coalition, told HuffPost last month. CBS News and the Naples Daily News have reported on several alarming 911 calls from the facility, which the outlets obtained through public records requests.
“It’s really important, and really scary, what’s happening at Alligator Alcatraz,” Kennedy added, calling the facility “basically an extrajudicial black site.”
“Any effort to duplicate how Florida has operated is dangerous,” Eskamani said. “Dangerous to due process, dangerous to the Constitution, dangerous to our values as Americans. And it should be pushed back against in every way by local, state and federal officials, in whatever capacity that you have, because this is not appropriate, and the history books are going to look back at this moment as incredibly dark, as a stain on our country’s history.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article misidentified Nebraska state Sen. Megan Hunt’s party affiliation. She is an independent.