The following week, I drove west from Miami toward the Gulf of Mexico—Trump’s “Gulf of America.” After the last row of strip malls and subdivisions, the Everglades took over, in a vast, hot expanse of subtropical wetland. In the Miccosukee Indian Reservation, I passed shacks where tourists take airboat rides into the swamp to see alligators.
I was accompanied by Thomas Kennedy, a policy analyst at the Florida Immigrant Coalition. Kennedy is thirty-four, the son of Argentineans who came to the U.S. on tourist visas and stayed. After spending much of his childhood as an undocumented immigrant, he became a citizen, and has made migration issues his life’s work. A few days earlier, he had joined a group of Democratic state legislators who drove out to inspect Alligator Alcatraz and were refused entry by officials there. “What they told them was that they didn’t have the right to enter, and also that it was for their own protection,” Kennedy recalled. One of the legislators pointed out that it had been safe enough for the President of the United States. The officials still declined to let them in.
As the road extended into the deeper wilderness of Big Cypress National Preserve, signs marked the entrance to the prison. Turning off, we stopped at a roadblock guarded by two armed officers in flak jackets. One of the guards told us that unauthorized visitors were forbidden, but she was willing to talk for a few minutes. Her face was red in the heat, and she acknowledged that the swamp was not the most comfortable place to stand guard. But she couldn’t complain, she said—she had plenty of drinking water, sunscreen, and bug repellent.
The inmates were less well cared for. Kennedy was in touch with a Cuban woman whose son, a severe asthmatic, had been held in Alligator Alcatraz for a week, and was transferred only after his health significantly declined. Another Cuban man had been brought in with acute hemorrhoids; he was eventually taken away for surgery, then immediately returned to detention, despite being in constant pain. Kennedy said that it was difficult to keep track of detainees, because many were being transferred to prisons in Louisiana and Texas, but the cases of abuse were piling up. A fifteen-year-old boy had been held for a week before anyone realized that he was underage; another detainee who went on hunger strike had been chained up on the airstrip for several hours in the sun. (D.H.S. denies allegations of inhumane conditions.)
By the entry, vans with tinted windows pulled in to deliver more detainees. Kennedy gestured toward a spot in the swamp where he’d seen alligators lounging when he visited with the legislators. The prison was intended to hold migrants who had committed crimes, but, according to the Miami Herald, only a third of the inmates had criminal records in the U.S. Kennedy pointed out that Alligator Alcatraz existed in a legal limbo: the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, and the State of Florida had all eschewed responsibility for the facility. “Lawyers still have no idea where to turn to file their cases,” he said. “It’s a concentration camp. It operates outside any judicial framework, where people are put into a legal loophole from which there is no recourse.”
Later, Kennedy introduced me to Betty Osceola, a Miccosukee activist who was a prominent voice of opposition to Alligator Alcatraz. She told me that the abuses at the prison were obvious, but that no one in power seemed to care. “I’ve been trying to get people to listen, including local legislators,” she said. “Unfortunately, in Florida and across the U.S., the toxicity is such that, if you just talk about the human issues, they tune you out.” Instead, she and her allies had been raising concerns about the ecosystem. The prison, she pointed out, had been installed in the middle of a national preserve without an environmental-impact study. “What they’re doing to people there is not right, but it’s also affecting the panthers, the wood storks, and the fireflies, because of the light pollution,” she said. Given the number of violations, Osceola seemed astonished that the government had been allowed even to start construction: “If they had been any other group or individual, they’d have been arrested.”
In August, a federal judge ordered the prison to be vacated on environmental grounds. As DeSantis complained of “an activist judge that is trying to do policy from the bench,” the state filed an appeal and secured a stay in the ruling. Still, inmates were hastily transferred to other facilities. Some went to Fort Bliss, in Texas, or to a prison in northern Florida called Deportation Depot. Others were sent to Miami’s Krome Detention Center—another facility that has been the site of disquieting incidents. In late June, a seventy-five-year-old Cuban American man died there, apparently of heart failure. He had been in the U.S. since the age of sixteen.
From Miami, I spoke by phone with one of the women who were arrested in Las Cañas after the incident with Morejón. Alina, as she asked to be called, is fifty-five, the mother of a grown daughter and son. She had served three years of hard labor, working on a banana plantation and cleaning an office.
Alina described Morejón as a “disgraceful human being,” but said that he did not seem to have suffered for his offenses or for trying to flee to the U.S. Since being deported back to Cuba, he had returned to Las Cañas. “We hear he’s going to be put in charge of a shop next to the slaughterhouse,” she said. In the years since the protests, Las Cañas had acquired a new police station, whose officers circulate frequently through the community in squad cars. “They want to send a message that if anyone ever thinks of doing anything like that again, they will go to prison for a long time,” she said. This summer, the state-owned telecommunications agency abruptly raised the price of data plans across the country, in what was seen as an attempt to stem the flow of information.