Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz flooded almost immediately and conditions at the detention center aren’t improving. Guards and detainees alike report a lack of clean water, swarming mosquitos, rainwater leaks, and other “inhumane” conditions.
An investigation from The Washington Post revealed worsening conditions at what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called a “makeshift detention space.” Since the remote detention center opened on July 3, detainees and their families have described the poor conditions at the facility – worms in food, lack of water, and extreme temperatures. Guards say staff conditions aren’t much better.
Three former guards at the facility told The Post that they were drawn to the job because of the pay – $26 an hour with significant overtime opportunities. They’ve found the work to be particularly brutal and mosquito-ridden.
“The mosquitoes are filling the bathrooms, the showers. You go in the shower, you shower with a million mosquitoes. They give you bug spray, but that still doesn’t help,” one former guard told The Post.
Guards said they were given a can of mosquito repellent on their first day, but detainees are only sprayed once, upon arrival.
They’ve been told to buddy up when taking trips to the latrines because of “alligators and Florida panthers and venomous snakes and different types of creatures.”
Some detainees say they are being denied access to legal counsel. The government isn’t allowing in-person visits and confidential phone or video calls. The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Florida, and Americans for Immigrant Justice filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on Tuesday, calling the facility an “unconstitutional abomination.”
“What’s happening here is not just a policy failure, it’s a moral one,” Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, said in a statement. “The state has hastily erected a costly and deadly shadow prison in the middle of the Everglades during hurricane season to warehouse human beings — stripping them of due process and dignity, cutting them off from their families and legal counsel, intentionally putting their lives in danger, and leaving them to suffer in silence. This is how rights are erased.”
Republican and Democrat lawmakers visited the facility on July 12, but shared wildly different perspectives of conditions at the Everglades detention center.
Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., said that what he saw during his visit “made [his] heart sink.”
“I saw thirty-two people per cage, about six cages in the one tent. I saw a lot of people – young men — who looked like me,” Frost said. “I heard in the back someone say, ‘I’m a U.S. citizen.’”
Republican Florida State Senator Blaise Ingoglia contradicted Frost’s claims in a post on X.
“The place is well run, safe, secure, clean and air conditioned,” Ingoglia said. ”I actually laid down in one of the beds and it was really comfortable.”
Florida scrambled to construct the facility earlier this month and the state says it will cost $450 million a year to run. The state estimates the costs of keeping detainees in the tent-based detention center at $411 per bed a day. Compare that to standard ICE detention centers, which averaged an ovehead cost of $157.20 per bed a day last year.
DeSantis doesn’t see an an issue, as he hopes detainees won’t stay very long. Because Alligator Alcatraz is housed near an airstrip, he said the facility is intended to facilitate quick deportations.
“All the minimum standards are upheld,” DeSantis said. “But the reality is it’s there to be a quick processing center, we have a runway right there. They can just be flown back to their home country.”
