Since it opened this month, the Florida immigrant detention center known as Alligator Alcatraz — located for maximum punitive effect in the remote and gator-infested Everglades — has come under intense scrutiny for its controversial cage-cell conditions, not to mention its threat to the environment.
But WLRN has learned that detainees are also now alleging controversial punishments they receive — including, as one charges, being made to stand in the sun for hours on end for arguing with guards.
"They chained me to the ground," a Nicaraguan migrant seeking U.S. asylum told WLRN in a phone call from inside Alligator Alcatraz.
"I was in the sun, like, from one o'clock to seven o'clock in the evening — without no water."
The Nicaraguan man, who is Black and asked WLRN not to use his name for fear of government retaliation, claims that over the weekend he had an argument about new detainee clothing rules with a guard who he says called him the n-word.
He says his hands and feet were then painfully shackled, and he was put in a four-by-four-foot square in the recreation yard that he says guards call "the box." He says he was directly in the Everglades sun and heat, for several hours, with no water.
"I did nothing violent," he said. "I don't deserve this, nobody deserves this, 'cause this is unhuman, on top of all the other things here, like the lights being on all night while we're trying to sleep."
"They treat us like real criminals, like murderers — we're just immigrants," he said.
The 21-year-old came to the U.S. in 2023, he says, as a student protester escaping Nicaragua's brutal dictatorship. After applying for asylum at the southern border, he was released into the U.S. and joined relatives in South Florida.
He was later arrested in Broward County, charged with improper exhibition of a firearm. But, according to court records, he was acquitted and has no criminal convictions.
Despite his pending asylum application, federal immigration agents detained him last month in Fort Lauderdale. He was one of the first people sent to Alligator Alcatraz — and he claims other detainees there have also been punished in the so-called "box."
"A little friend that I got in the same [caged cell] that I'm in — he's from Honduras — complained about what they were doing to me," he says, "so they did the same thing to him."
WLRN was not able to reach the Honduran detainee to confirm. But audio of phone calls in recent days from detainees inside Alligator Alcatraz to relatives, provided to WLRN by the relatives, features accusations that guards were exacting discipline for questioning rules or actions.
In one, a Cuban detainee tells his wife in Miami, amid a loud shouting commotion in the background, that guards "are taking people away" to punishment similar to what the Nicaraguan detainee claimed. The reason, he says: they were accusing the guards of responding too slowly to an ill detainee who had collapsed by his bed.
A spokesperson for the Florida Division of Emergency Management, which operates Alligator Alcatraz, called the claims of the Nicaraguan and others "false." She insisted that "no guards are punishing detainees. Officials are highly trained and follow all federal and state detention protocols."
READ MORE: 'Cruelty for cruelty's sake': Protests ring out as Trump tours 'Alligator Alcatraz'
The FDEM also denies complaints about conditions there — like scant access to showers as well as lawyers, and bursting toilets.
Republican Florida House Speaker Daniel Perez of Miami recently told Local10 News to remember that Alligator Alcatraz is, after all, a prison.
"I went and saw this place in person," Perez told Local10's This Week in South Florida
"Um, look, it's no five-star resort, but ... we're holding criminals in these locations."
'Dehumanizing' detention
That was originally the pitch about Alligator Alcatraz — that its severe set-up was meant exclusively for criminal undocumented migrants.
But analyses by the Miami Herald and other media show that hundreds of detainees — like the Nicaraguan migrant who alleges the "box" punishment — do not have criminal records.
Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch, Americans for Immigrant Justice and Sanctuary of the South just released a report calling three other migrant detention centers in South Florida under the Trump administration "dehumanizing."
And new nationwide polls released this week show growing disapproval of Trump's sweeping migrant deportation program — especially the burgeoning arrests of non-criminal undocumented migrants, many of whom have lived productively in the U.S. for years and fill jobs most Americans won't take, in contradiction to his pledge to focus on criminals.
The campaign has often appeared to disregard constitutional due process and given carte blanche to federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, or ICE, whose raids and arrest tactics have drawn widespread criticism of late.
Trump insists anyone in the U.S. illegally is by default a criminal and should be expelled, as they would be in any other country. His critics, though, argue a big reason there are so many undocumented migrants in the country is that the U.S. makes it too difficult for working-class foreigners to attain employment visas.
Either way, in a CBS survey, 56% say Trump is now prioritizing the detention of non-dangerous criminals over dangerous criminals so that he can meet the extraordinary deportation goals he promised his MAGA voter base.
What's more, 58% told the CBS pollster they disapprove of the way Trump is using migrant detention facilities like Alligator Alcatraz.
Those numbers have Democrats like Janice Mitchell feeling borne out.
"I would not wish Alligator Alcatraz on my worst enemy at all," said Mitchell, a legislative aide to state Rep. Angie Nixon, D-Jacksonville.
Mitchell, who visited Alligator Alcatraz last week with Nixon and other legislators, argues that the hastily constructed, $450 million tent-building structure, on an idle Everglades airstrip, is in fact a disturbing project.
"I talked to several different detainees who were telling me the same story," Mitchell said.
"Like: We have food, y'know, that has maggots in it; we have a ceiling that's caved in; horsefly-size mosquitoes. When they do get water it's from the same place that they use the bathroom. It's — it's not a good place."
Mitchell argues it's one thing for Trump and other immigration-enforcement hardliners like Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — arguably Alligator Alcatraz's biggest champion — to want to detain and deport undocumented migrants.
But it's another, she says, to showcase peformatively cruel treatment of "people who were already suffering when they came to this country."
"I get DeSantis and Trump and whomever else decided to do Alligator Alcatraz. These people feel how they feel. OK, you don't want [undocumented migrants] here. I get it.
"But do you have to torture them while you send them to wherever you're going to send them back?"
Last week, Democratic lawmakers in Florida and Congress introduced a bill called the "No Cages in the Everglades Act" that would strip federal funding for Alligator Alcatraz and prevent any other state-managed facility in or near the Everglades. DeSantis has proposed building a center similar to Alligator Alcatraz in northeast Florida at Camp Blanding, a National Guard Base.
At the same time, detainees' friends and family are pushing for their release.
Fort Lauderdale restaurant server Leshaunti Gibson spoke by phone with the Nicaraguan detained in Alligator Alcatraz shortly after he claimed he was forced to stand in the hot sun for six hours as punishment for arguing with guards.
"He just told me that it just felt like he was being tortured," said Gibson, who is trying to raise legal-fee funds for her friend.
"But every day is something new that's disturbing. And it's like, the closer we get to his court date, the harder they get on him."
That court date — a bond hearing to determine if he can at least be transferred out of Alligator Alcatraz to another South Florida detention center if not freed from deportation entirely —is next Tuesday.
"That's quite a statement about Alligator Alcatraz," says Thomas Kennedy of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, "that migrants are hoping to transfer to awful places like Krome [in Miami] to be detained in better conditions."
But it may well be the sort of statement — the kind that might deter future undocumented migrants from coming to the U.S. and Florida — that Trump and DeSantis hope to send.
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