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immigration detention
'This Is an Internment Camp': Lawmakers Horrified by Inhumane Conditions in 'Alligator Alcatraz'
"I saw 32 people per cage—about 6 cages in one tent. People were yelling, 'Help me, help me'," said Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost.
Jul 13, 2025
For the first time, Democratic lawmakers were allowed to tour U.S. President Donald Trump's sprawling Everglades immigrant detention center on Saturday. They said what they witnessed was "disturbing" and "disgusting."
After Democrats were previously denied entry to the facility known as "Alligator Alcatraz," three Democratic congresspeople from Florida—Reps. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Jared Moskowitz, and Maxwell Frost—journeyed to the remote compound along with another group of Republicans as part of a state-arranged tour.
"Alligator Alcatraz" was erected within a matter of weeks and now contains approximately 900 people who have been rounded up as part of Trump's "mass deportation" crusade, which a court determined was rife with illegal racial profiling.
The administration said they hope to fill the camp with as many as 5,000 people at a time.
Detainees have previously described heinous conditions to their attorneys, including worm and maggot-infested food, sweltering heat, and the denial of medication and showers for days at a time.
Though the Democrats who visited the facility were not allowed to speak with detainees or see their conditions up close, their descriptions of the facilities at a press conference following the visit paint an appalling picture.
- YouTube
Wasserman-Schultz described it as an "internment camp" where detainees are "essentially packed into cages."
"Wall-to-wall humans. 32 detainees per cage," she said. This, she noted, is unusual for immigration facilities, like the nearby Krome detention center in Miami-Dade County, where detainees are allowed to roam freely between buildings.
"The only thing inside those cages are their bunk beds," she said. She later noted that in the unused dorm they toured there were already "bugs all over the mattresses that had not yet been used."
"There are three tiny toilet units that have a sink attached to it," she said. "They get their drinking water, and they brush their teeth where they poop, in the same unit," she continued.
Frost said the lawmakers asked to view the toilets currently in use by detainees, but were denied and instead showed ones in a currently unused part of the facility.
He brought up prior complaints made by prisoners of the camp about the sanitation.
"Some of the biggest complaints we've heard is, yes, there's three toilets, but a lot of the time, only one is working," he said. "They get backed up: Feces being spread everywhere."
Wasserman-Schultz said they also viewed a meal-prep area. While employees of the facility were given large, hearty portions, she says prisoners were fed a "small...gray turkey and cheese sandwich, an apple, and chips" that she said was far too small to sustain a fully-grown man.
Wasserman-Schultz also said she brought a thermostat to measure the temperature within the facility, which the Department of Homeland Security has claimed was "air conditioned." She said that the area just outside the tents that housed the detainees was 83°F and said it was likely much hotter inside due to the body heat.
Moskowitz said there was "evidence of flooding" and "floors that are only about eight inches above the ground," while other lawmakers noted that a hurricane or even a lighter tropical storm could prove catastrophic.
Last week, videos circulated on social media of the facility already beginning to flood due to a minor storm:
Moskowitz also noted the extraordinary cost to assemble and run the makeshift facility, which is estimated to cost $450 million per year according to one U.S. official who spoke to The Associated Press.
"Why are they spending all this money for this?" he asked. "One can't help but understand and conclude that this is a total cruel political stunt meant to have a spectacle of political theater."
The Trump administration has described the facility as a holding tank for "the worst of the worst" criminals as they await deportation. But according to reporting by the Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times on Sunday, only a third of the people in the facility have criminal convictions, which range from crimes like attempted murder to traffic violations. More than 250 of the people in the facility have not been convicted of or even charged with a crime.
No outside journalists have been allowed to tour the facility, and there are no photos or videos available publicly beyond what has been released by the Trump government. The congresspeople on the tour were told they were not allowed to take any photos or videos inside or meet with any of the detainees.
Instead of being shown the conditions in which detainees were currently being housed, they were shown facilities that had not yet been filled. They were still denied access to some, including medical facilities.
Last week a group of Democrats in Florida's state legislature were turned away when they attempted to tour the camp, with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) saying they could not show up unannounced to perform oversight over a federal facility.
Frost said that there has been "ambiguity" about who has authority over the prison, but it was made abundantly clear during the visit that every decision being made was directed by the federal government.
"What we heard very clear is that ICE is giving them the directions from A to Z," he said. "Which means members of Congress are able to come here unannounced. And we will come here unannounced."
"Even with this invitation, so much was kept from us," Frost said.
In a video filmed while riding back from the camp, Frost spoke even more candidly about what he saw and how much it disturbed him.
Though the congresspeople were not given access to the detainees and "pushed back" by security guards, Frost said, "We could see in, and we could hear everybody."
"When those doors opened, what I saw made my heart sink," he said. "I saw a lot of people, young men, who looked like me."
"People were yelling, 'Help me, help me!' I heard in the back someone say, 'I'm a U.S. citizen,'" he continued. "And as we were walking away, they started chanting 'Libertad! Libertad! Libertad!'... 'Freedom.'"
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The Fate of Detained Workers Depends on Us
Only by making it politically and socially unacceptable—and ultimately illegal—to hunt for undocumented people and treat them inhumanely, can we really change this situation.
Jul 13, 2025
For everyone who cares about Migrant Justice leaders Ignacio “Nacho” de la Cruz and his 18-year-old stepdaughter Heidi Perez, it’s great news that the immigration court has ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to release them—at least for now.
Well more than 100 people protested outside Burlington, Vermont’s Federal District Court for a rally with moving speakers both Monday and Tuesday—and just as many had shown up at the Statehouse a few weeks before to demand their release. The courtroom itself was also packed for a habeas corpus hearing for Heidi, which is probably irrelevant given her upcoming release. But she and her stepfather are still vulnerable to deportation.
Why were the two detained at all? Coverage in Vermont Digger presents an unnerving picture of a “fishing expedition.” Perez and de la Cruz describe in “declarations” injuries which occurred when the driver’s window was broken by a Border Patrol supervisor, as well as physical maltreatment and a threat to their children once they were in custody. At the time, they say the agent refused to answer why he had stopped them apart from the fact that the driver spoke Spanish. The report of his affidavit in Digger reported that he expected to see more people in the back of the van (which he did not). He said that the driver and Perez refused to roll the window down fully, produce a driver’s license, or respond to his questions. From their point of view, they were within their rights to call the Migrant Justice hotline, and asked repeatedly why they were stopped and whether they were free to go. Since the detention, the government has also alleged that de la Cruz may have been involved in smuggling people based on the phone they seized from him. The alleged incident involves six people (reported here.) No charges have yet been filed against him.
Situations like this are going to arise more and more often everywhere in the country, and on our doorstep in Vermont. Under new legislation which eviscerates low-income healthcare access, ICE will gobble up more than the combined budgets of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the U.S. Marshals Service; and the Bureau of Prisons.
If there was ever a time to show up in public and financially for Vermont’s dairy workers and their organization, it’s now.
Even after hearing of the upcoming release, a progressive lawyer friend and I were left with a queasy feeling about the ultimate outcome after Monday’s hearing for Heidi—despite Heidi’s being a poster child for everything we would want for an immigrant in this country. She graduated from Milton High School just days before she was detained. Even as a junior, she was a leader and speaker with the Milk with Dignity campaign to improve conditions for Vermont’s migrant dairy workers. Perez was among those behind the Education Equity Act, which allows financial aid and in-state tuition regardless of a student’s immigration status. Her opinion piece in Vermont Digger, coauthored with Brissia Hernandez, said, “When we first moved to Vermont, there was basically no hope for students like us to go to college, even though we have been dreaming of it since we were little.” Perez has a scholarship to attend Vermont State University this fall. She thinks far beyond her own needs, and made our state a fairer, better place.
She’s done everything right—except that she is undocumented.
In the same Vermont Federal District courtroom, habeas corpus hearings were also held for Rümeysa Ozturk, Mohsen Mahdawi and Kseniia Petrova. Each was in the country legally, and their legal status was capriciously revoked without due process. In contrast, Perez and de la Cruz are caught in a trap, a “cruel system” as several rally speakers described it. We depend on their labor but make it all but impossible for them to achieve legal status in the U.S. The government in power is pushing to expunge them from our country.
The power of the federal government is now behind every Border Patrol agent, the quotas are out there, and the agents are expected to fill them. We can’t really count on the administration’s mixed messages. Most of Vermont’s dairy workers and many of our construction and landscape workers are vulnerable to the same treatment that was meted out to Perez and de la Cruz. Recent raids have upset the whole dairy industry. No matter what someone’s rights may be in the technical sense, Border Patrol has carte blanche in most of Vermont. Only by making it politically and socially unacceptable—and ultimately illegal—to hunt for undocumented people and treat them inhumanely, can we really change this situation.
Even if these two prominent leaders were not targeted initially (and they may have been), a simple identity check would have revealed who they are. Conservative estimates say we have 800-900 dairy workers plus families in Vermont, and only a handful have been detained, fewer deported—and two of that handful are Migrant Justice leaders.
Will the legal system—whether the District Court or the immigration court—ultimately give relief to the undocumented workers who have been persecuted under every president, Democrat or Republican? Except when the government missteps or treats people badly, it’s hard to imagine real relief. Watching a 4-year-old girl in pigtails cavorting on the edge of the rally, I shuddered to think her undocumented parents might be deported. Among the speakers was Wuendy Bernardo, the primary caregiver for her own five children and two orphaned younger sisters. ICE requires her to report every month now, where hundreds have accompanied her on the last several visits. Her quiet dignity, her grave face, and the child clinging to her side told the whole story. She said “Here, we can feel the sun and the wind. In detention, you don’t feel that. You don’t even know if it is night or day.”
If the legal system offers only limited relief because it has now been tuned toward cruelty and persecution, our answers are in the streets, in the legislature, in the media—and beyond that in human kindness. People on dairy farms are afraid to go shopping. They are afraid to send their kids to school. Migrant Justice needs our presence and our help. As a worker-led organization, it has been a consistently positive force in winning legislative victories, with de la Cruz as an important figure in most. It builds solidarity, exposes abuses, and fights for better conditions.
If there was ever a time to show up in public and financially for Vermont’s dairy workers and their organization, it’s now. It's too dangerous for them to be on the streets themselves, and besides, most of them are working 12-hour shifts. It’s our turn.
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Stop Alligator Alcatraz Now, Before They Build Another in a Remote Area Near You
America stands at a crossroads. Down one road lies the fragile promise of democracy: messy, imperfect, but built on the belief in human dignity and the rule of law. Down the other lies the swamp—where cruelty is policy, and fear is law.
Jul 02, 2025
When Louise and I lived in Germany in 1986-87, we visited Dachau with our family. The crematoriums shocked our children, but even more so because this was simply a “detention facility” and not one of Hitler’s death camps. The ovens were for those who had been worked to death or killed by cholera.
The death camps, it turns out, were all located outside of Germany so Dear Leader could deny responsibility for them. You know, like Gitmo.
Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (aka the “GOP Donor Fellatio Act”) contains a 13-fold increase in Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s budget, turning it into the largest single (secret, masked) police force in America, along with, in aggregate, close to $100 billion to build a new series of “detention facilities” all across America.
The most dangerous thing about Alligator Alcatraz isn’t the alligators. It’s the message.
If this passes, soon the country will pockmarked by concentration camps. As Trump said yesterday:
Well, I think we'd like to see them in many states, really, many states. This one, I know Ron’s doing a second one, at least a second one, and probably a couple of more. And, you know, at some point, they might morph into a system where you’re going to keep it for a long time.
Let’s stop pretending. Let’s stop dancing around the language, around the morality, and around the history.
What’s being built in the Florida Everglades, for example—what they’re calling “Alligator Alcatraz”—is not just another immigration facility. It’s a political prison engineered not merely to detain, but to humiliate, dehumanize, and broadcast terror.
It’s America’s first open-air symbol that our democracy is not just dying: it is being dissected publicly, cruelly, and with calculation.
Donald Trump is back in the White House. The Republican Party controls Congress. And with a permanent “immigration emergency” in place, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is running point on an experiment in authoritarian governance.
Alligator Alcatraz is the proof-of-concept.
Rising in a remote wildlife preserve in Big Cypress National Preserve—Indigenous land, no less—Alligator Alcatraz is expected to hold thousands of undocumented migrants. Some reports say 1,000 at launch; others say 5,000. Either way, it is the largest civilian detention project built on U.S. soil in a generation.
It’s surrounded by dense marshland, home to pythons and alligators.
“Let them try to escape,” Trump smirked at a recent rally. “They better know how to run from an alligator.”
This isn’t just cruelty. It’s performance. It’s state-sponsored sadism, broadcast as patriotism. DeSantis and Trump are now competing in a bizarre effort to show who can be more cruel.
But it’s not unprecedented. If you want to understand what’s happening in Florida, you have to travel back to 1933, to a small, remote town in Bavaria.
When Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany, the first thing he built wasn’t a tank or a warship. It was a “detention facility.”
The Dachau concentration camp, opened in March 1933 just three months after he became Chancellor, was described at the time as “the first concentration camp for political prisoners.” As the Dachau memorial site explains,
From the very beginning, the camp was a place of brutality. During the first years, most prisoners were political opponents of the Nazi regime.
They weren’t criminals. They weren’t traitors. They were “undesirable immigrants.” Trade unionists. Communists. Jews. Catholics. Writers. Teachers. Students. They were anyone the regime considered a threat or a convenient enemy.
The Nazis didn’t hide Dachau. They advertised it. It was a warning. A message. Step out of line, and this is where you go.
Sound familiar?
Alligator Alcatraz is not Dachau. It’s not exterminating people. Yet. But Dachau didn’t begin as a death camp either. It began as a “protective custody” facility, built on the idea that “certain people” posed a threat to the national body simply by existing.
That’s what Florida’s new facility represents. Not immigration enforcement. Not public safety. Protective custody for political purposes.
Under Trump’s new national emergency framework, virtually anyone deemed “unlawfully present” can be detained indefinitely without trial.
That means asylum-seekers. Victims of trafficking. Children.
And if you believe this won’t expand—if you believe this power will remain solely focused on brown-skinned migrants fleeing violence in Central America—then you haven’t read a history book lately.
Stripping people of their citizenship is called denaturalization, and it was one of Hitler’s favorite tools against his enemies and Jews, who were referred to as “undesirable foreign elements” and denaturalized en masse in 1935.
Trump’s DOJ just updated their guidelines relating to the 25 million American citizens who first came to this country as immigrants and then obtained citizenship through the naturalization process. It used to be that you could only lose your citizenship if you committed a serious enough crime.
And, yesterday, Trump said:
Many of them were born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too, if you want to know the truth. So maybe that'll be the next job that we'll work on together.
So now, the DOJ says, Trump can choose to denaturalize anybody and then immediately send them to Alligator Alcatraz:
“Any other cases referred to the Civil Division that the Division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue [may be stripped of citizenship]. These categories are intended to guide the Civil Division in prioritizing which cases to pursue; however, these categories do not limit the Civil Division from pursuing any particular case, nor are they listed in a particular order of importance. Further, the Civil Division retains the discretion to pursue cases outside of these categories as it determines appropriate. The assignment of denaturalization cases may be made across sections or units based on experience, subject-matter expertise, and the overall needs of the Civil Division.” (emphasis added)
And as a special bonus, the memo notes that stripping American citizens of their citizenship is a civil, not criminal, process so you are not entitled to have a lawyer or any of the other normal aspects of legal procedure like a trial that we generally think of as our rights. Franz Kafka would be proud.
Dachau didn’t just hold communists. Over time, it expanded to include denaturalized Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma, and anyone who opposed Nazi policy. It became a national crucible of cruelty. It normalized the idea that “certain people do not deserve legal protections.”
That is the fire that Alligator Alcatraz is stoking today.
How is this being done? Through a cunning abuse of emergency powers.
Florida has been under a rolling immigration “state of emergency” since 2023, a legal status that allows the governor to bypass environmental protections, override public procurement processes, and redirect funds without oversight.
Sound familiar? It should. The Nazis used the 1933 Reichstag Fire Decree to grant themselves emergency powers in perpetuity. One crisis, one convenient boogeyman, and suddenly all democratic guardrails are removed.
Today, DeSantis is using Federal Emergency Management Agency funds intended for hurricane victims to build migrant cages. Tomorrow, it could be protesters. Journalists. Teachers. You.
This isn’t alarmism. It’s precedent.
Let’s talk about the location, because it matters.
Big Cypress is a remote and largely inaccessible swamp, home to endangered species, sacred Indigenous land, and—now—a prison surrounded by natural predators.
Human rights lawyers and journalists will find it hard to access. Escapes will be all but impossible. Oversight will be nonexistent. That’s by design.
Dachau, too, was deliberately chosen for its isolation. As the memorial website explains:
The camp was constantly expanded and served as the prototype and model for all later concentration camps.
It became a template. A blueprint. And its very existence reshaped what the German public considered “normal.”
Alligator Alcatraz is the same. A testing ground. If it succeeds—not as a legal institution, but as a political spectacle—there will be more. One in Texas. One in Arizona. One in Arkansas. Maybe even one in your backyard.
The most dangerous thing about Alligator Alcatraz isn’t the alligators. It’s the message.
The message that some people are less than human. That caging them is acceptable. That they deserve no rights, no hearing, no compassion. Just mud and barbed wire.
That was the logic behind Dachau.
And it’s becoming the logic behind Trump’s America.
This facility is being built not to solve a problem, but to create one. To manufacture outrage. To train the public to see brown-skinned immigrants not as workers or families or survivors but as invaders. Intruders. Animals.
And that’s when the door opens for something far worse.
We cannot afford to wait. We cannot afford to be polite. The time for half-measures and technocratic rebuttals and “strongly worded letters” is over.
America stands at a crossroads. Down one road lies the fragile promise of democracy: messy, imperfect, but built on the belief in human dignity and the rule of law. Down the other lies the swamp—literal and figurative—where cruelty is policy, and fear is law.
Alligator Alcatraz isn’t just a prison. It’s a mirror. And it’s asking us: Who are we, really?
The answer, as always, is up to us.
We must engage:
- Lawsuits: Civil liberties groups and Indigenous tribes must continue challenging this facility in court. Environmental statutes, tribal treaties, and international human rights laws can still be leveraged.
- Documentation: Journalists must risk everything to document the construction, conditions, and policies of Alligator Alcatraz. We need eyes in the swamp, or darkness will reign.
- Direct Action: Peaceful protest, civil disobedience, and national mobilization must become central. This is a fight for the moral compass of our country.
- Language: Stop calling this a “detention center.” Call it what it is: a political prison. A migrant concentration camp. Words matter.
- History: Teach your neighbors about Dachau. Show them how it started. Not with mass extermination, but with silence. With a single camp, surrounded by a fence, where people were put “for their own protection.”
Democracy doesn’t fall all at once. It decays from the inside. It erodes at the margins. It disappears not with a bang, but with a shrug.
The United States of America has reached a threshold. We can step back and reaffirm our commitment to human dignity, to due process, to liberty and justice for all.
Or we can cross into the swamp. And never come back.
Dachau was the beginning of something monstrous. Let Alligator Alcatraz be the end of something: the end of our innocence, the end of our complacency, and the start of a renewed resistance.
Because if we wait too long, we may wake up one day and discover we are no longer the land of the free, but only the home of the caged.
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