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'Ruinous Venture' Alligator Alcatraz Closes, But Systemic Abuse of Immigrants Continues
"The fact that this site ever existed is a travesty, given the cruelty behind it, horrific conditions, and blatant violations of due process," said the deputy director of the ACLU's National Prison Project.
Jun 25, 2026
While welcoming Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' confirmation on Thursday that the immigrant detention center dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz" has closed, rights advocates also renewed criticism of how immigrants are being treated across the country as President Donald Trump continues his deadly push for mass detention and deportations.
The facility in the Everglades opened last summer despite concerns about both human rights and the environmental impact. DeSantis said Thursday that "Florida led the way in increasing much-needed detention capacity and working with our federal partners to streamline deportations, removing thousands of the most dangerous criminal aliens from our country."
Despite claims from the president and his allies, federal data have shown that most immigrants detained during his second term lack criminal convictions. In addition to flooding US streets with agents from Customs and Border Protection as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Trump has repeatedly demanded that Congress give CBP and ICE more funding.
"Our detention operations support has led to nearly 30,000 additional deportations, and Florida accounts for more than 40% of all state/local immigration arrests nationwide," DeSantis added Thursday. "Alligator Alcatraz has fulfilled this mission. Detainees who are still awaiting deportation have been transferred to other federal facilities, and demobilization efforts are underway."
Responding to the governor on social media, Thomas Kennedy of the Florida Immigrant Coalition said: "You wasted more than $1 billion of Florida's emergency response fund on a failed PR stunt that hurt people and destroyed families. You should never be anywhere near public office again."
As The Associated Press noted Thursday:
Immigration advocates said the center’s tents were never safe or humane for holding people. Detainees at the facility have talked about their difficulty accessing lawyers and described poor physical conditions, including worms in the food, toilets that didn't flush, floors flooded with fecal waste, and mosquitoes and other insects everywhere.
They described large white tents with rows of and rows of bunk beds surrounded by chain-link cages. The air conditioning could shut off abruptly in the sweltering Florida heat. Detainees could go days without showering or getting prescription medicine.
The state and national ACLU as well as Americans for Immigrant Justice (AIJ) had sued over the facility last year.
"The fact that this site ever existed is a travesty, given the cruelty behind it, horrific conditions, and blatant violations of due process. We challenged the Trump administration and the state of Florida over the facility, and now celebrate its closure," Carmen Iguina González, deputy director for immigration detention with the ACLU's National Prison Project, said Thursday.
Keisha Mulfort, deputy executive director and strategy officer of the ACLU of Florida, declared that "with its official closure, 'Alligator Alcatraz' seals its reputation as a ruinous venture. This detention center stands as a monument to what happens when a state government abandons its conscience in service of a federal cruelty agenda."
"The DeSantis administration deliberately built a detention facility in the middle of the Everglades—not despite the harsh conditions, but because of them—and spent over $1 billion of Florida taxpayers' money to do it," she pointed out. "That is not governance; that is cruelty dressed up as policy, and complicity dressed up as leadership. In spite of this, hundreds of thousands of Floridians protested, organized, called their legislators, and refused to look away. They made this moment possible, and we should name that clearly: This is what accountability looks like when the government won't hold itself accountable."
Mulfort also stressed that "as people are transferred to other facilities, the abuses do not disappear—they relocate." She and Iguina González pledged that the state and national ACLU will not stop tracking abuses of immigrants across the country.
"The nightmarish scene found at 'Alligator Alcatraz' is not wholly unique and reflects systemic patterns of abuse at other ICE detention facilities nationwide," Iguina González said. "We remain very concerned that people may be transferred to other sites with sordid and dangerous conditions, and we will continue to monitor this situation."
Paul Chavez, director of litigation and advocacy at AIJ, also emphasized that "closing this facility is an important step, but the government's obligation to respect due process does not end at the facility gates. Constitutional rights must follow every person wherever they are detained."
"We remain deeply concerned that people transferred out of this facility will continue to face mistreatment and civil rights violations in other detention centers," he said. "Americans for Immigrant Justice will continue to defend due process, offer free legal representation to low-income immigrants, and stand strong with our immigrant neighbors, friends, and their families."
After using $1 billion to brutalize immigrants, the concentration camp known as "Alligator Alcatraz" has been emptied. Its victims still need justice.truthout.org/articles/flo...
[image or embed]
— UAINE (@mahtowin1.bsky.social) June 22, 2026 at 10:36 PM
As for the environmental impact, The New York Times reported that after the Trump administration announced that detainees had been relocated, Paul J. Schwiep, an attorney for groups suing over Alligator Alcatraz, promised last week to continue the lawsuit against what he called the "secret gulag in the Everglades."
"They hope that they can slink away in the middle of the night without explaining to anyone what they did, why they did it, or how they proposed to clean up the mess that they've made," said Schwiep. "And we don't intend to let them get away with it."
Ripping the facility as an "internment camp," Congressman Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) similarly asserted on Thursday that "the fight isn't over. We need accountability for the billions of taxpayer dollars wasted, the abuse and harm inflicted on detainees, and the damage done to one of Florida's most sacred ecosystems."
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‘Brazen Partisan Power Grab’: Florida Supreme Court Defies State Constitution to Give GOP Another Redistricting Win
Florida's constitution explicitly bans partisan gerrymandering. But a court full of DeSantis appointees just upheld maps that give the GOP 24 of the state's 28 seats with no time to reverse it before November.
Jun 11, 2026
In defiance of state law and the will of voters, the Florida Supreme Court has handed Republicans another major win in the redistricting wars in time for this year’s midterms, approving a ruthlessly gerrymandered map that could hand another four US House seats to the GOP.
Florida’s state constitution is unusually explicit in its ban on partisan gerrymandering; the Fair Districts Amendment (FDA) approved in 2010 by 63% of voters expressly states that maps may not be drawn “with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent.” The court has struck down previous attempts by Republicans to draw more favorable maps on these grounds as recently as 2015.
But six of the seven justices that make up the current court have been appointed by Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. And when voting rights groups challenged a new map signed by the governor last month that is projected to give Republicans an advantage in 24 of the state’s 28 House districts, the right-wing court gave DeSantis what he wanted.
By a 6-1 ruling, the court on Wednesday declined to rule on the merits of the case, denying opponents' request for an emergency injunction, with the majority arguing that, despite the rapidly approaching election, this was not enough of a reason to rule on it while it's still being reviewed by a lower court.
The lone dissenter, Justice Jorge Labarga, who happens to be the only justice not appointed by DeSantis, argued that the case could be reviewed under the court's "pass-through" provision, which allows the court to expedite rulings on matters of great public importance.
"Surely," he said, "the upcoming 2026 congressional elections affecting the representation of millions of Floridians meet that threshold.”
With the state’s primaries set for August 18, this virtually guarantees that, despite its unconstitutionality, the map will be in place come November, as Republicans across the nation try to "pack and crack" enough Democratic strongholds to cling to control of the House in 2026.
In a post to social media, Florida's Republican Attorney General, James Uthmeier, celebrated the order as a “COMPLETE AND TOTAL VICTORY.”
The Florida Supreme Court has REJECTED the challenge to the state’s redistricting plan and new map.
This assures that the recently enacted map will be in place for the 2026 election.
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) June 10, 2026
Opponents of the map—including Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, and the League of United Latin American Citizens—have said that the governor has made no effort to hide the overtly partisan nature of his redistricting push, which he carried out rapidly under an emergency session of the state legislature without public input.
In their lawsuit last month, they pointed out that the governor himself provided a color-coded version of the map to Fox News to highlight projected GOP gains—although Republicans won just under 57% of votes in House elections across Florida in 2024, they’d be expected to control nearly 86% of seats under the new maps.
Meanwhile, Jason Poreda, a senior DeSantis adviser who has described himself as the map's "drawer" has acknowledged that he used "partisan data" to draw the map in spite of the FDA.
As is the case with many of the maps drawn to maximize GOP power, DeSantis' cracks up majority-minority districts, including one predominantly Black district in Palm Beach and Broward County, and splinters the Orlando-Kissimmee area's Latino community across four districts.
And here is the new Florida congressional map in Dave's Redistricting: https://t.co/fTqDHjncwz pic.twitter.com/UTxflFazT0
— The Redistrict Network (@RedistrictNet) June 10, 2026
“The fact that this is a partisan gerrymander is as obvious as it is unconstitutional,” said Bradley Heard, deputy legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which represented the plaintiffs last month. “And while this unnecessary map is egregious in how it advantages Republicans and disadvantages Democrats, the people who will suffer the most if it is allowed to stand are once again Black and Brown communities, whose voices are consistently silenced in these redistricting battles."
Florida Circuit Judge Joshua Hawkes, a DeSantis appointee who upheld the maps last month, declined to weigh in substantively on the question of whether the new map violated the FDA, but said it was more in line with the maps favored by the US Supreme Court in the recent Louisiana v. Callais decision, which struck at the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by effectively ending protections for districts drawn to give representation to nonwhite voters.
While Hawkes also did not weigh in on Republican arguments that the entire FDA should be thrown out because of Callais, he said it was ultimately fine for the court to defer ruling on DeSantis' map because "to the extent the court has to balance Florida’s FDA prohibition of improper partisan intent and the United States Constitution’s Equal Protection guarantees, it seems clear that the potential partisan intent is the lesser of the two evils."
The Callais decision has given Republicans a decisive upper hand in the redistricting wars that were kicked off last year when President Donald Trump called on red states to enact unprecedented hyperpartisan gerrymanders in an effort to beat back an expected Democratic wave in 2026.
An aggressive and explicitly racial gerrymander in Texas enacted without voter approval was upheld by the US Supreme Court last month, netting the GOP an expected five seats, and six other red states have redrawn maps to likely squeeze in one new Republican seat apiece.
And while GOP gains have been somewhat offset by California voters' approval of an amendment to allow Democrats to draw their own hyperpartisan maps, the US Supreme Court's refusal to stop the Virginia state supreme court from striking down of a voter-approved Democratic gerrymander dealt a critical blow to efforts to even the score, and Democrats have vanishingly few opportunities to make up ground before the coming midterms.
Florida Republicans blatantly violate their constitution and brutally gerrymander their map without a single vote = 100% legal.
Virginians vote to change their constitution so they can temporarily offset right wing gerrymandering = 100% illegal.
America is a banana republic. https://t.co/vTer29RSqQ
— Micah Erfan (@micah_erfan) June 11, 2026
Florida represents yet another notch in the win column for Republicans, but opponents say they will attempt to fight the gerrymander ahead of future elections.
"The Florida Supreme Court's failure to stop this brazen partisan power grab is not only an assault on democracy, but an abdication of its duty to the people of Florida," said Genesis Robinson, the executive director of the voting rights group Equal Ground. "Courts are meant to serve as a check on government overreach and a safeguard against constitutional violations, but, once again, when Floridians needed that protection most, the court declined to intervene."
"The time to protect voters from irreparable harm is before another election takes place under this map," he added. "And while we remain committed to ensuring that Florida's constitutional protections are fully upheld, Florida voters deserve fair maps, fair representation, and a democracy that works for everyone now."
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Florida Man's Wrongful Arrest Suit Highlights Dangers of AI Facial Recognition in Policing
"Over a year later, I'm still picking up the pieces of my life, all because the police relied on this dangerous technology instead of doing their jobs and actually investigating," said Robert Dillon.
Jun 10, 2026
A federal lawsuit filed Wednesday in the Middle District of Florida by a Fort Myers resident wrongfully arrested nearly two years ago highlights the risks of police agencies relying on facial recognition tools.
"This case is about what happens when police let an error-prone artificial intelligence (AI) system stand in for an investigation," explains the complaint, filed by attorneys with the state and national ACLU as well as the firm Hoguet Newman Regal & Kenney. "A facial recognition algorithm flagged Robert Dillon as the man who tried to lure or entice a child under 12 years old at a Jacksonville Beach McDonald's. It was wrong."
The 52-year-old "lives more than 300 miles from" and "had never set foot in Jacksonville Beach," the complaint continues. "But rather than test the machine's answer against the evidence that would have cleared him, the officers built a case to confirm it. Mr. Dillon was arrested and prosecuted for one of the most stigmatizing crimes a person can face."
Dillon—one of at least 15 people wrongfully arrested in the United States due to police reliance on incorrect facial recognition results—is suing the city of Jacksonville Beach as well as law enforcement officers from the Jacksonville Beach Police Department, Jacksonville Sheriff's Office (JSO), and Pinellas County Sheriff's Office.
Reporting on the case Wednesday, Wired noted that while the Pinellas agency did not respond to a request for comment, a JSO spokesperson simply said that "due to pending litigation, we would be unable to comment further on the incident."
The actual suspect allegedly approached a girl at the McDonald's shortly before midnight on November 2, 2023. The following month, Dillon was flagged as a possible match by the Face Analysis Comparison and Examination System (FACES)—which "has been operated by the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office since 2001, making it one of the oldest police face-recognition systems in the country," according to Wired. "At its peak in 2021, its tens of millions of Florida mug shots and driver's license photos were accessible to more than 260 agencies."
After denying any involvement in the case in December, Dillon was arrested at his home in front of his wife the next August, "held overnight in jail, forced to borrow money and pledge the title to his truck to post bond, subjected to months of criminal prosecution, and publicly branded with a mugshot that remains accessible online, long after the charges were dropped," the complaint states. "Community members still approach him in public to ask about the case. He no longer feels comfortable being friendly to children."
"He had no connection to the McDonald's, to the child who was targeted, or to anyone involved in the crime. He became a suspect for one reason: a facial recognition algorithm included him in a list of possible matches to a suspect captured on grainy surveillance footage at the restaurant," the document emphasizes. "The investigating officer treated that algorithmic output as a near-certain identification, omitted critical exculpatory evidence from his arrest warrant application, and failed to pursue routine investigative steps that would have immediately excluded Mr. Dillon as a suspect."
"The arrest warrant that deprived Mr. Dillon of his liberty was the product of a cascade of investigative failures by the lead investigator, Jacksonville Beach Police Department officer (now corporal) Scott O'Connell," according to the filing. Among them was the officer's "complete failure to consider that the suspect was alleged to have been a 'regular' customer."
The complaint also notes that "O'Connell is an officer with a documented history of volatility and poor judgment, having previously been terminated from the St. Johns County Sheriff's Office for threatening to 'blow up' the agency, later reinstated, then arrested for domestic battery before resigning under the weight of those charges. Jacksonville Beach PD hired him anyway, assigned him as lead investigator on a sensitive child-luring case, and later promoted him to corporal after his investigation resulted in the wrongful arrest and prosecution of an innocent man."
Dillon said in a Wednesday statement that "the night I spent in jail after they arrested me for a crime I did not commit still haunts me to this day. I will never get over how terrified and worried I was, wondering if I'd ever go home to my wife and daughter again."
"Over a year later, I'm still picking up the pieces of my life, all because the police relied on this dangerous technology instead of doing their jobs and actually investigating," Dillon added. "Florida police must implement safeguards and ensure this never happens to anyone else, because until they do, nobody is safe."
Nate Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, stressed that "no one should lose their freedom or be scared to leave their house because an algorithm got it wrong."
"These Florida police departments owe it to Mr. Dillon to make amends and to take serious steps to make sure this doesn't happen to anyone else," he argued. "Police across the country are on notice: Unreliable face recognition technology is hurting people, and we will keep fighting to hold them accountable for these abuses."
The ACLU has previously sounded the alarm over other cases, including those of Robert Williams, a Black man wrongfully arrested in 2020 after software owned by Michigan State Police misidentified him as a shoplifting suspect, and Randal Reid, who spent nearly a week in jail in 2022 after he was falsely identified as a luxury purse thief by Louisiana authorities.
The legal group on Wednesday also pointed to the reported role of FACES in the 2025 wrongful arrest of New Smyrna Beach resident Beau Burgess, as well as another case involving the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office: Jalil Richardson told Action News Jax earlier this month that after being misidentified as a vehicle thief, he "sat in there for over 50 days, in the most worst jail ever."
"There was no proper investigation done... to even reach out to me or to see if I was even in Florida," said Richardson, whose charges were dropped after he provided time sheets showing that he was at work in North Carolina when the vehicle was stolen.
In his case, JSO provided a lengthy statement, saying in part that "facial recognition software is just one tool in a large toolbox for investigators," and "calling the arrest the result 'police AI misidentification' is a catchy headline but does not provide accurate context," including that "the victim chose Mr. Richardson out of a photographic lineup to include other potential suspects."
Nicholas Warren, staff attorney at the ACLU of Florida, said Wednesday that "one wrongful arrest is one too many."
"Florida's growing reliance on facial recognition technology threatens us all," he warned. "We must stop this dangerous pattern before it traps more innocent people. No one should have their freedom taken away because the police rely on faulty technology."
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