“Alligator Alcatraz” and the Business of Human Cruelty in Florida

 

When Amnesty International releases a report using phrases like torture, enforced disappearances, and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, that is not rhetorical inflation. That is an alarm bell, clanging hard enough to wake anyone who still believes the United States’ immigration detention system is merely “imperfect” rather than fundamentally brutal.

Last week, Amnesty International published a damning investigation into conditions at Florida’s Everglades detention facility, grimly nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz.” The report calls on the State of Florida to shut the facility down entirely, prohibit state-run immigration detention, and redirect money away from cages and toward healthcare, housing, and disaster relief. In other words, it asks Florida to behave like a functioning society rather than a punishment laboratory.

What Amnesty found should shock no one who has been paying attention, but it should still horrify anyone with a functioning conscience.

A Prison Camp in the Everglades

According to Amnesty’s research, people detained at Alligator Alcatraz are being held in conditions that would be unacceptable for animals, let alone human beings.

The report documents:

• Overflowing toilets with fecal matter seeping into sleeping areas

• Limited or inconsistent access to showers

• Constant exposure to insects, without protective measures

• Lights left on 24 hours a day, a known form of psychological stress

• Poor-quality food and unsafe drinking water

• No meaningful privacy

This is not a matter of a few broken pipes or bureaucratic oversight. These are structural conditions that reflect how little the system values the people trapped inside it.

Medical care, when it exists at all, is described as inconsistent and inadequate. In some cases, it is outright denied. The consequences are predictable: untreated physical conditions, worsening mental health, and preventable suffering layered on top of detention itself.

Then there is the punishment.

Shackles, Boxes, and Torture by Another Name

People detained at Alligator Alcatraz report being shackled any time they are moved outside their cages. Others describe being placed in what they call “the box”, a 2x2 foot cage-like structure, used as punishment. Some are kept there for hours, exposed to the elements, with minimal water, their feet restrained to the ground.

Amnesty International does not hedge its language here. It states plainly that these conditions and practices amount to torture.

That matters, because torture is not a policy disagreement. It is a violation of basic human rights under international law. When a government engages in it, the question is no longer “is this efficient?” or “is this legal under some technical framework?” The question becomes: what kind of state are we willing to be?

Disappearances by Design

Perhaps the most chilling finding in the report is that Alligator Alcatraz operates outside normal federal oversight. Unlike ICE facilities, it lacks basic tracking and registration systems. People can be detained without reliable records of where they are, how long they’ve been held, or how to locate them.

Amnesty uses a term that should stop anyone cold: enforced disappearances.

This is language typically associated with military dictatorships and death squads, not a supposed liberal democracy. Yet here we are. A state-run, federally funded immigration jail where people can effectively vanish into a swamp-backed detention system with little accountability.

If that sounds extreme, consider that the facility was once ordered closed by a Miami federal judge. That decision has since been put on hold by a federal appeals court, proving once again that legality often lags far behind morality.

The Official Response: Deny, Dismiss, Repeat

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ administration responded exactly as expected. His press secretary, Molly Best, dismissed the report as a “politically motivated attack,” calling the findings “fabrications” and suggesting that reporting on them could somehow endanger staff.

This move is as old as power itself: deny the evidence, attack the messenger, and imply that scrutiny itself is the real threat.

The Department of Homeland Security joined in, with spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin labeling the report “another hoax” and insisting that the facility meets federal detention standards. Which raises an uncomfortable question: if this meets federal standards, what does that say about the standards?

This Is the System Working as Intended

It is tempting to frame Alligator Alcatraz as an outlier, a uniquely cruel experiment dreamed up by Florida’s far-right political leadership. But that lets the broader system off the hook.

Amnesty’s report also condemns conditions at Krome, a federally run detention site in Miami-Dade County managed by Akima Global Services. For decades, advocates have documented severe overcrowding, chronic medical neglect, abusive treatment, and procedural failures that block access to lawyers and due process.

Private contractors. Federal funding. Emergency powers. No-bid contracts. Minimal oversight. This is not an accident. It is the predictable outcome of an immigration system designed to deter through suffering and profit through incarceration.

Alligator Alcatraz is simply the logical conclusion of that design.

A Wake-Up Call We’ve Heard Before

Mary Kapron of Amnesty International described the findings plainly: “The treatment of people inside these immigrant detention centers is cruelty, hard stop.”

She is right. And yet the cruelty continues, because cruelty is politically useful. It signals toughness. It reassures donors. It feeds a culture war where immigrants are cast as threats rather than workers, neighbors, and human beings.

Closing Alligator Alcatraz would not fix the immigration system. But leaving it open tells us exactly who the system is for, and who it is willing to grind down in the process.

The question now is not whether the report is credible. Amnesty International has done its work. The evidence is on the table.

The question is whether we are willing to accept a future where cages in the Everglades, disappearances without records, and torture-by-punishment-box are treated as normal features of American governance.

Because once you accept that, the swamp is no longer the location. It’s the moral condition.