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torture
'A Human Rights Disaster': Report Details Torture and Chaos at 'Alligator Alcatraz'
Conditions at Florida detention facilities "represent a deliberate system of cruelty designed to punish people seeking to build a new life in the US,” said an official at Amnesty International.
Dec 04, 2025
Two immigration detention centers in Florida have gained notoriety for inhumane conditions since Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, in close alignment with President Donald Trump's anti-immigrant agenda, has rapidly scaled up mass detention in the state, and a report released Thursday detailed how human rights violations at the two facilities amount to torture in some cases.
Amnesty International published the report, Torture and Enforced Disappearances in the Sunshine State, with a focus on Krome North Service Processing Center and the Everglades Detention Facility, also known by its nickname, "Alligator Alcatraz."
As Common Dreams has reported, many of the people detained at the facilities have been arbitrarily rounded up by immigration agents, with a majority of the roughly 1,000 people being held at Alligator Alcatraz having been convicted of no criminal offense as of July.
Amnesty's report described unsanitary conditions, with fecal matter overflowing from toilets in detainees' sleeping areas, authorities granting only limited access to showers, and poor quality food and water.
Some of the treatment amounts to torture, the report says, including Alligator Alcatraz's use of "the box"—a 2x2 foot "cage-like structure people are put in as punishment—which inmates have been placed in for hours at a time with their hands and feet attached to restraints on the ground.
“These despicable and nauseating conditions at Alligator Alcatraz reflect a pattern of deliberate neglect designed to dehumanize and punish those detained there,” said Amy Fischer, director of refugee and migrant rights with Amnesty International USA. “This is unreal—where’s the oversight?”
At Krome, detainees have been arbitrarily placed in prolonged solitary confinement—defined as lasting longer than 15 days—which is prohibited under international law.
"The use of prolonged solitary confinement at Krome and the use of the ‘box’ at 'Alligator Alcatraz' amount to torture or other ill-treatment," said Amnesty.
The report elevates concerns raised in September by immigrant rights advocates regarding the lack of federal oversight at Alligator Alcatraz, with nearly 1,000 men detained at the prison having been "administratively disappeared"—their names absent from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's detainee locator system.
"The absence of registration or tracking mechanisms for those detained at Alligator Alcatraz facilitates incommunicado detention and constitutes enforced disappearances when the whereabouts of a person being detained there is denied to their family, and they are not allowed to contact their lawyer," said Amnesty.
The state of Florida has not publicly confirmed the number of people detained at Alligator Alcatraz.
One man told Amnesty, "My lawyers tried to visit me, but they weren’t let in. They were told that they had to fill out a form, which they did, but nothing happened. I was never able to speak with them confidentially.”
At Krome, detainees described overcrowding, medical neglect, and abuse by guards when Amnesty researchers visited in September. ICE has constructed tents and other semi-permanent structures to hold more people than the facility is designed to detain.
The Amnesty researchers were given a tour of relatively extensive medical facilities at Krome, including a dialysis clinic, dental clinic, and a "state-of-the-art" mental health facility—but despite these resources, detainees described officials' failure to provide medical treatment and delays in health assessments. Four people—Ramesh Amechand, Genry Ruiz Guillen, Maksym Chernyak, and Isidro Pérez—have died this year while detained at Krome.
"It’s a disaster if you want to see the doctor," one man told Amnesty. "I once asked to see the doctor, and it took two weeks for me to finally see him. It’s very slow.”
Researchers with the organization witnessed "a guard violently slam a metal flap of a door to a solitary confinement room against a man’s injured hand," and people reported being "hit and punched" by officials at Krome.
In line with the Trump administration, DeSantis and Republican state lawmakers have sought to make Florida "a testing ground for abusive immigration enforcement policies," said Amnesty, with the state deputizing local law enforcement to make immigration arrests and issuing 34 no-bid contracts totaling more than $360 million for the operation of Alligator Alcatraz—while slashing spending on healthcare, food assistance, and disaster relief. Florida has increased the number of people in immigration detention by more than 50% since Trump took office in January.
The organization called on Florida to redirect detention funding toward healthcare, housing, and other public spending, and to ban "shackling, solitary confinement, and punitive outdoor confinement" in line with international standards.
"At the federal level, the US government must end its cruel mass immigration detention machine, stop the criminalization of migration, and bar the use of state-owned facilities for federal immigration custody," said Amnesty.
Fischer emphasized that the chaotic and abusive conditions Amnesty observed at Alligator Alcatraz and Krome "are not isolated."
"They represent a deliberate system of cruelty designed to punish people seeking to build a new life in the US,” said Fischer. “We must stop detaining our immigrant community members and people seeking safety and instead work toward humane, rights-respecting migration policies.”
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UN Report Details Israel's 'De Facto State Policy' of Torturing Palestinian Prisoners
A United Nations committee found Palestinian prisoners are regularly deprived of food and water and subjected to attacks by dogs, electrocution, and sexual abuse.
Nov 29, 2025
Reports of Israeli authorities torturing Palestinian prisoners have been publicized for years, with freed detainees describing frequent beatings, attacks by dogs, and rape and sexual abuse, and the United Nations Committee Against Torture now says Palestinians have been victimized by a "de facto state policy of organized and widespread torture."
Both Palestinian and Israeli rights groups gave reports to the committee on conditions in Israeli detention centers, detailing Israel's regular deprivation of food and water for detainees as well as the "severe beatings," electrocution, waterboarding. and sexual violence Israeli guards and other authorities perpetrate.
A state policy of torturing prisoners constitutes the crime of genocide under international law, the committee said.
Peter Vedel Kessing, a member of the committee and a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for Human Rights, told the BBC the panel was "deeply appalled" by the accounts they heard, and expressed concern about the lack of investigations and prosecutions following allegations of torture.
The de facto policy of torture in Israel's has "gravely intensified" since Israel began bombarding Gaza after a Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023, the report found. Despite a ceasefire that was agreed to in October, those retaliatory attacks against the exclave are continuing and still constitute a genocide, Amnesty International said this week.
Friday's UN report, said progressive Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis, provided the latest proof that "Israel's insidious war crimes have not subsided just because Trump succeeded in convincing Western public opinion that the genocide in Gaza has paused."
The UN committee found that at least 75 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody since the Gaza war began—an "abnormally high" death toll which "appears to have exclusively affected the Palestinian detainee population."
"To date, no state officials have been held responsible or accountable for such deaths," said the panel.
"Israel's insidious war crimes have not subsided just because Trump succeeded in convincing Western public opinion that the genocide in Gaza has paused."
The report comes nearly two weeks after the Israel-based rights group Physicians for Human Rights released an analysis showing that at least 98 Palestinian prisoners have died in Israeli custody since October 2023.
The UN committee noted that Israel's use of "administrative detention," in which roughly 3,474 Palestinians are currently being held without trial, has reached an "unprecedented" level in the last two years, with children among those who have been imprisoned without charges.
Child prisoners, some of whom are under the age of 12—despite 12 being the age of criminal responsibility in Israel—“have severe restrictions on family contact, may be held in solitary confinement, and do not have access to education, in violation of international standards," the report says.
The report was released the same day the UN Human Rights Office accused Israeli soldiers of carrying out a "summary execution" of two Palestinian men who were seen with their hands up—indicating surrender—in the West Bank.
The committee emphasized its "serious concern" that Israel has no "distinct offense criminalizing torture, and that its legislation allows public officials to be exempted from criminal culpability under the so-called 'necessity' defense when unlawful physical pressure is applied during interrogations."
The report was released days after Israel was one of just three countries—along with the US and Argentina—that voted against a UN General Assembly resolution against torture.
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At Least 98 Palestinians Died in Israeli Custody Since October 7, 2023
"Israel has become one of the worst systematic abusers of human rights in the world," said one human rights advocate.
Nov 17, 2025
A report released on Monday by Physicians for Human Rights–Israel claims that nearly 100 Palestinians have been killed while being held in detention by Israel since the start of the war in Gaza on October 7, 2023.
The report, which PHRI said was based on "testimonies, official records, and extensive evidence" collected by the organization, shows that at least 98 Palestinians died in Israeli custody.
The report says that the deaths were part of a "deeply concerning pattern of systemic human rights violations committed against Palestinians," and that people who died while in custody included "the young and elderly, the healthy and the sick alike." PHRI also emphasized that the records in its report are far from complete, and indicated that the full death toll of Palestinians who died in custody is even higher.
Breaking things down further, the organization said it found that 42 Palestinians died while in custody of the Israel Prison Service (IPS), including Palestinians from Gaza, the West Bank, and even Palestinians who held Israeli citizenship. A further 52 Palestinians from Gaza died while in Israeli military custody.
The report shows a mixture of deaths from medical neglect, from physical abuse, or some combination of the two causes.
Witness testimony given to PHRI from both Palestinian detainees and Israeli physicians depicted military detention facilities as "sites of systematic torture and abuse, where dozens of Palestinians from Gaza died while in military custody."
Raed Jarrar, advocacy director at human rights organization DAWN, said the PHRI report was more evidence that "Israel has become one of the worst systematic abusers of human rights in the world," and he pointed the finger at the US for continuing to fund and enable such abuses.
"Despite overwhelming evidence of these crimes and grave violations of human rights, documented even by the State Department's own watchdog, not a single Israeli unit has been deemed ineligible for US weapons, making the United States complicit in Israel's systematic torture regime," said Jarrar.
In addition to the Palestinians killed in Israeli custody, more than 69,000 Palestinians have died during Israel's war in Gaza, which began on October 7, 2023 when Hamas launched an attack inside Israel that killed nearly 1,200 Israelis.
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