Alligator Alcatraz Was Built on Secrecy, Expansive Emergency Powers, and an Unprecedented State Power Grab
Shadowy deals and unilateral powers created Florida's notorious immigration detention camp.
BIG CYPRESS NATIONAL PRESERVE, Florida—Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sold the public on the detention camp known as Alligator Alcatraz as an efficient and cost-effective way to deal with a major public disaster—illegal immigration—and his administration relied on speed, secrecy, and a relentless public relations campaign to paint the project as a success. But the public record that media and civil rights attorneys scraped together has repeatedly contradicted the state's claims that everything ran smoothly.
For more than a month, both the Trump and DeSantis administrations refused to explain under whose authority the camp was operating, essentially playing a shell game with legal responsibility for detainees. Meanwhile, detainee and whistleblower reports began leaking out with accounts of inhumane conditions, lack of access to legal counsel, and abuse from guards.
Alligator Alcatraz may have succeeded as a headline-generating spectacle and show of force, but it's been a wildly expensive big-government failure in every other respect.
To get to Alligator Alcatraz coming from Miami, take the Tamiami Trail about 30 miles west past the urban development boundary, past the airboat tours and the Miccosukee Indian Village, to where the tall grass of the Everglades gives way to the moss-draped trees of the Big Cypress swamp.
There, about halfway between Miami and Naples in the wildest part of Florida, is a turnoff and an official blue sign that says "Alligator Alcatraz." The camp isn't visible, just a long fence-lined road receding into the forest. A state trooper sits in an idling cruiser at the entrance, keeping an eye on the drivers who frequently stop to take pictures in front of the sign and the protesters who gather on the other side of the two-lane highway.
On the afternoon of September 16, Christine Davies and Janet Martin, two silver-haired South Florida residents, are the only protesters keeping vigil in the sticky heat. They're sitting underneath a small canopy, filming the construction trucks coming out of the site on their cell phones. Davies has a sign propped up at her feet that says, "This is shameful."
Davies has been coming here regularly since late June, when the DeSantis administration announced, to a mix of fanfare and revulsion, that it would build a prison camp at an old municipal airfield deep in the Big Cypress to assist President Donald Trump's mass deportation program.
Davies says watching the razor wire and cages being trucked in was emotionally draining, and she stopped going as frequently after she started suffering from heat exhaustion. But, she says, "One feels one needs to be a witness."
Martin agrees. "Somebody has to say, 'This is not us. This is not what we're about.' Just being here, even if nobody's paying attention," she says.
Public attention has definitely drifted in the two-and-a-half months since the camp opened, although demonstrators still show up daily to register their dissent and monitor the comings and goings.
The whole thing should be a cautionary tale about government overreach and state malfeasance. Instead, it's become a curiosity for tourists and a proof-of-concept for other states. Copycat prisons with cutesy names have been announced elsewhere around the country: the "Speedway Slammer" in Indiana and the "Cornhusker Clink" in Nebraska.
Ron DeSantis Defines 'Disaster' Down
The tent prison that Florida officials would dub Alligator Alcatraz was built in a matter of days, but it was born out of a years-long sham.
In 2023, DeSantis issued an executive order declaring a state of emergency over what the order called the "Biden Border Crisis." The order declared that "the migration of unauthorized aliens to the State of Florida is likely to constitute a major disaster."
The state of emergency was ostensibly declared in response to a wave of Cuban and Haitian migrants landing in the Florida Keys in makeshift boats. The landings were real, although they hardly constituted a major disaster by Florida standards. (Since the repeal of the "Wet Foot, Dry Foot" policy in 2017, Cubans arriving by boat are swiftly apprehended and repatriated, whether or not they make it to shore.)
The migrant landings would ebb, but the state of emergency remained firmly in place. DeSantis has renewed it every 60 days since 2023. Although President Joe Biden is no longer in office, the most recent executive order states that the disaster continues because a large number of illegal aliens who entered the U.S. "because of the Biden Administration's failure" remain in Florida.
The state of emergency—and a no-strings-attached disaster fund that the Legislature created for the governor's office—gave the DeSantis administration the unilateral power it needed to quickly seize land and build the detention camp while the second Trump administration began ramping up its mass deportation program earlier this year.
Florida officials have positioned the state as Trump's staunchest ally in immigration enforcement. For example, Florida requires county officials—under threat of removal from office by the governor—to cooperate with federal immigration authorities in what's formally called a 287(g) agreement.
These agreements let trained and supervised local officials assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in a limited capacity. However, Florida is going beyond not only what the law requires of it, but also beyond what the law allows.
The Supreme Court ruled in Arizona v. United States (2012) that the federal government has "broad, undoubted power" over immigration law and enforcement. The effect of the ruling was that states can't create their own criminal offenses for violations of federal civil immigration law or otherwise usurp the federal government's authority to perform civil immigration arrests.
Nevertheless, Florida enacted a law in February that would have made it a first-degree misdemeanor for a person to enter the state as an "unauthorized alien." A federal judge blocked the state from enforcing the law in April and held Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier in contempt on June 17 for telling law enforcement to ignore the ruling.
Undeterred, the DeSantis administration began pursuing its most audacious plan yet: a state-run facility to both hold and deport federal immigration detainees.
At Alligator Alcatraz, 'There's Nowhere To Run'
The DeSantis administration publicly rolled out the plan in an exclusive June 18 Fox Business interview with Uthmeier. The cable news segment even included a helicopter flyover of the planned location: a small county airstrip in the middle of the Big Cypress National Preserve.
The idea was to build a one-stop shop to carry out Trump's mass deportation agenda—a place to detain, process, and march immigrants onto waiting deportation flights. And to build a facility that no one would want to escape from.
"If somebody were to get out, there's nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Only the alligators and pythons are waiting," Uthmeier said in the interview. "That's why I like to call it Alligator Alcatraz."
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) gave the green light to the DeSantis administration two days later.
"As discussed with Attorney General Uthmeier, this email confirms DHS's interest in working with you to detain aliens under 287g in facilities provided by Florida," DHS general counsel appointee James Percival wrote to Florida's Office of the Attorney General. "If you go forward, we will work out a method of partial reimbursement."
That email would only be disclosed several months later in a court filing in one of the lawsuits challenging the detention camp. The Trump and DeSantis administrations refused to release these 287(g) agreements until compelled by a discovery order in court.
With a snazzy name chosen and the go-ahead from the federal government, the DeSantis administration just needed control of the land. The Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport and the 17,000-acre parcel of land it sat on were owned by Miami-Dade County.
Because the detention camp was authorized under the ongoing state of emergency, administration of the camp fell to the Florida Division of Emergency Management (FDEM), the state agency that typically coordinates disaster response.
On June 21, FDEM director Kevn Guthrie sent a letter of intent to Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava and other county officials to purchase the land for $20 million.
In a response letter, Levine Cava asked the state to delay the purchase while the county sought more information on the project, "as the impacts to the Everglades ecosystem could be devastating." Levine Cava was also concerned that the state's offer for the airfield was "significantly lower than the most recent appraisal" value of $195 million.
But the state government had no plans to wait. On June 23, Guthrie informed Levine Cava that FDEM was taking immediate control of the land. "While the negotiations to purchase the property are underway, the Division will begin immediate utilization of the improved area of the site, as I now deem it necessary to meet the Division's current operational demands in coping with the emergency," Guthrie wrote. "Time is of the essence."
Guthrie did inform Levine Cava that the FDEM's use of the property "will last no longer than the duration of the state of emergency." But that was probably not so reassuring given the many times that DeSantis has renewed the original emergency declaration.
Once the state took control of the site, heavy construction equipment began pouring into the remote airfield. The FDEM had quickly awarded more than $200 million in contracts for construction, maintenance, and personnel costs of the camp.
To pay for the up-front costs, the DeSantis administration tapped the state's "Emergency Preparedness and Response Fund," a bank account flush with $2 billion in Florida taxpayer money. The legislature created the fund in 2022 at the request of DeSantis, ostensibly to allow the state to nimbly respond to major emergencies. Florida House Democrats tried to amend the bill to only include natural disasters, but the effort failed. As independent Florida politics reporter Jason Garcia explained, "It's a pot of money that the governor can tap into during any declared state of emergency without any oversight whatsoever from the Legislature—the branch of government that is, at least in theory, supposed to control the state's purse strings."
The DeSantis administration said Alligator Alcatraz would have beds for up to 3,000 detainees, with plans to expand it to 5,000. The whole thing was estimated to cost $450 million a year, but state officials said they would save money by using the airfield's existing concrete flattop and temporary structures—trailers for staff and large tents to hold cages of detainees. Potable water would be trucked in and wastewater trucked out.
At a press conference on June 25, DeSantis repeatedly said that federal agencies would fully fund the detention center, even though the DHS email only mentioned partial reimbursement.
"This is something that was requested by the federal government, and this is something that the federal government is going to fully fund," DeSantis said. "From a state taxpayer perspective, we are implementing it…but that will be fully reimbursed by the federal government."
DeSantis also told Floridians that the construction would have "zero impact" on the sensitive habitat surrounding the airfield, but environmental groups were already collecting evidence for a court battle to prove otherwise.
Conservation Groups Warn: There Are No Other Everglades in the World
Plopping a prison camp down in the middle of the Big Cypress was bound to raise environmental complaints, but the DeSantis administration's choice of location for Alligator Alcatraz was also a symbolic poke in the eye to Florida's conservation groups.
In the 1960s, the strip of land was part of a planned airport for supersonic jets. It was supposed to be the biggest airport in the world, but Florida environmental activists, such as Marjory Stoneman Douglas, rallied together and defeated the proposal. It was a landmark victory for conservationists in a state where developers had typically gotten their way. The jetport fight directly led to the creation of Friends of the Everglades, one of the most influential environmental advocacy groups in the state.
Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit on June 27 in federal court, arguing that the hasty construction hadn't gone through any of the required environmental impact reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
It's impossible to overstate the ecological value of the area. As Stoneman Douglas famously wrote, "There are no other Everglades in the world." It is one of one, sui generis. The federal government and the state of Florida have poured billions of dollars into Everglades restoration efforts. It's a UNESCO World Heritage site and a habitat for the critically endangered Florida panther, as well as several other endangered or threatened species.
Big Cypress National Preserve was also certified as a "Dark Sky Park" in 2016 by DarkSky, an international advocacy group that catalogues the increasingly rare places where the night sky is free of artificial light pollution. Now, the site is plagued by floodlights. The Naples Daily News reported in July that the lights of the detention camp at night were visible from 18 miles away.
The particulars of NEPA aside, this is another example of where the DeSantis administration's rhetoric is belied by the reality on the ground. The administration chose the location and name of the detention center to evoke fear and menace. But for the people who spend serious time in Big Cypress and the Everglades—tribal members, sportsmen, naturalists, and artists—it's a special and serene place.
The daily protests outside the detention camp have brought together some of the Everglades' most well-known advocates, such as Betty Osceola, a Miccosukee environmental activist, and Clyde Butcher, a photographer whose stunning images of the Everglades and Big Cypress shifted public perception and boosted conservation efforts. Butcher's studio is not far away from the detention camp.
"You just lay in the water, you get all refreshed, and you get going again. That's how un-dangerous it is. That's what got me so upset with this whole thing—this Alligator Alcatraz," Butcher said at a July event at his gallery. "I've been doing walks in Big Cypress for 40 years. Never met another person. I never met a gator. I mean, I've seen little gators. Every once in a while, you'll see one swimming away from you, but he's not swimming towards you."
The land is also sacred to the Miccosukee, and the tribe would later successfully petition the court to be added as a plaintiff to the environmental lawsuit challenging the detention camp.
"I think Clyde has said it best through his photography that this is not a god-awful place," Osceola said at the July event. "It's a beautiful place, full of life and very healing."
In fairness to DeSantis, there are no reports of anyone escaping or even attempting to escape the camp. But DeSantis had always positioned himself as a Teddy Roosevelt-style Republican on conservation issues—as a guy who got why Florida's wetlands were worth preserving—but here he was talking about one of the crown jewels of Florida's natural environment, frankly, like a tourist.
Of course, DeSantis was working to impress a much different audience in Washington.
Alligator Alcatraz Became a Right-Wing Meme
On July 1, DeSantis joined Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem for a tour of the soon-to-be-completed Alligator Alcatraz detention camp, accompanied by a swarm of news cameras.
The entourage inspected the rows of cages that would hold several dozen detainees each inside large tents.
"Very soon, this facility will house some of the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet," Trump said.
Right-wing influencer Benny Johnson tagged along on the tour and made sure to show off a complimentary hat he was given.
"Hi guys. I have just been handed official Alligator Alcatraz merch," Johnson tweeted from outside the facility. "I repeat, this prison has merch. Things are going insanely well."
Hi guys. I have just been handed official Alligator Alcatraz merch.
I repeat, this prison has merch.
Things are going insanely well. pic.twitter.com/9MdYLj7nG2
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) July 1, 2025
The Florida GOP had indeed started selling Alligator Alcatraz merchandise and fundraising off the camp.
"The feds have greenlit 'Alligator Alcatraz'—Florida's gator-guarded, python-patrolled prison for illegal aliens who thought they could game the system," one fundraising email from the Florida GOP read. "Surrounded by miles of swamp and bloodthirsty wildlife, this ain't no vacation spot. It's a one-way ticket to regret for criminals who'll wish they'd self-deported."
The official DHS social media account posted an AI-generated image of alligators wearing hats emblazoned with "ICE" next to a prison tower and barbed wire fence.
Although Florida and DHS officials have insisted that conditions at the camp conform to federal detention standards for health and hygiene, the imagery and rhetoric all made its purpose clear: to hold detainees in such intolerable conditions that they would self-deport rather than exercise their right to appeal removal orders.
But while the DeSantis administration gave MTV Cribs-style tours to its allies, it would systematically block everyone else—lawmakers, attorneys, journalists, and detainees' families—from getting information about what was going on inside the camp.
A Legal Black Hole: Detainees Go Missing
On July 3, Alligator Alcatraz officially began accepting detainees. The same day the camp opened for business, five state Democratic legislators were denied entry. They quickly filed a lawsuit, alleging their statutory right to inspect any state-owned facility had been violated.
Others got the same treatment. Immigration lawyers who drove to the detention camp for in-person meetings with clients were turned away after waiting for hours, or told to send an email to an address that bounced back, or told to fill out a visitation request.
Once detainees arrived at the camp, they essentially disappeared. They didn't show up on ICE's online detainee locator, since ICE doesn't consider them to be in federal custody but rather the state of Florida's, even though Florida is operating under the color of law through authority granted to it by the federal government. The Trump administration and the state of Florida both refused to release public information on detainees being held there.
Florida officials even clawed back public information from an online database about the taxpayer-funded state contracts awarded for Alligator Alcatraz after reporters began investigating the companies involved and their political connections.
But within a week, stories on the miserable conditions inside began to leak out. On July 9, the Miami Herald published interviews with the wives of several detainees, whose husbands described a lack of showers, toilets without water, and oppressive heat and bugs.
Two days later, the Associated Press reported that "people held there say worms turn up in the food. Toilets don't flush, flooding floors with fecal waste, and mosquitoes and other insects are everywhere."
"The conditions in which we are living are inhuman," a Venezuelan detainee told the Associated Press by phone from the facility. "My main concern is the psychological pressure they are putting on people to sign their self-deportation."
"They are in cages like animals at the zoo," Regina de Moraes, a Miami immigration attorney, told Reason in July. "There's barely food to eat. The electricity goes off all the time, so the air conditioning is coming and going. Also that becomes an issue with the toilets, because the toilets don't function when there's no electricity."
A Guatemalan woman told CNN that her husband, a detainee at the camp, went six days without a shower. "The detainees are being held in tents, and it is very hot there," the woman said. "They're in bad conditions.…There's not enough food. Sick people are not getting medication. Every time I ask about his situation, he tells me it's bad."
On July 12, two days after the lawmakers filed their lawsuit, the DeSantis administration relented and allowed a group of Democratic legislators to tour the camp, although they were not allowed to see occupied cages where detainees were being held or view the camp's medical facilities.
"They are essentially packed into cages, wall-to-wall humans, 32 detainees per cage," Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D–Fla.) said during a news conference following the tour. (That figure has been widely reported elsewhere. Detainees speaking to NBC News and CBS News both said the cages held 32 detainees each, which they described as confined like a dog or chicken.)
Despite the information blackout at the camp, the Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times obtained a non-public list in mid-July of roughly 700 detainees. Although the Trump administration and Florida officials claimed that the detention center was holding hardened criminals and violent gang members—a spokesperson for Uthmeier called them "deranged psychopaths"—the news outlets found more than 250 people who were listed as having only immigration violations, with no criminal convictions or pending charges in the U.S. on their records. According to the news outlets, a third of the detainees had criminal convictions ranging from attempted murder to traffic violations, while hundreds of others only had pending charges. The DeSantis administration also claimed every detainee had been issued a final removal order by an immigration judge, which immigration attorneys said was a lie.
Legal pressure and scrutiny of the camp continued to increase. On July 16, four detainees and several legal aid groups filed a lawsuit over the lack of access to legal counsel at the detention camp.
The lawsuit claimed that immigration attorneys couldn't schedule in-person visits, and that in the rare instances when they could arrange phone or video calls, they were monitored by staff. Nor could detainees receive vital legal mail.
In the lawsuit, Michael Borrego, one of the plaintiffs, reported that in addition to only being given one meal a day and not being permitted daily showers, "there have been physical assaults and excessive use of force by people working as guards, and a lack of medical care and attention."
The conditions led Borrego and his family to change their stance on his immigration case and seek his removal back to Cuba.
Also worrying was the fact that neither of the two nearest federal immigration courts would accept jurisdiction over the detainees or say which court did have it. Immigration attorneys with clients at the camp reported having bond hearings canceled at the last minute and not being able to get a straight answer about which court to file motions in.
"No instruction exists as to which immigration courts have been designated for submission of motions for bond redetermination for people detained at Alligator Alcatraz," the lawsuit said. "As a result, detainees held at Alligator Alcatraz effectively have no way to contest their detention."
Reason sent emails to the Justice Department Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), which oversees federal immigration courts, on July 17 and again on August 7, asking which courts had jurisdiction over detainees at the camp. EOIR did not respond to either inquiry.
The result of all this was that for more than a month, the prisoners at the Everglades detention center existed in legal limbo, outside of the typical federal immigration court system.
And the bad headlines continued to roll out. On August 5, NBC Miami aired an interview with a former corrections officer at the detention camp, who had turned into a whistleblower after being fired.
"They have no sunlight. There's no clock in there. They don't even know what time of the day it is," the woman said. "They have no access to showers. They shower every other day or every four days."
"When I got there, it was overwhelming," she said. "I thought it would get better. But it just never did."
Is Alligator Alcatraz Closing?
By the end of the detention center's first month in existence, the sheen had come off the project, and Florida's speed and recklessness were beginning to catch up with it in court.
On August 7, Judge Kathleen Williams of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida paused construction at the detention center while she ruled on the environmental groups' request for a preliminary injunction.
Meanwhile, in the lawsuit over lack of legal access, the EOIR finally designated the Krome Immigration Court in Miami-Dade County as the court with jurisdiction over all Alligator Alcatraz detainees on August 16. However, immigration attorneys still allege in an amended lawsuit that they face weeks-long delays and other unconstitutional barriers to representing their detained clients.
Then, on August 21, Williams ruled in favor of the environmental groups and ordered the detention camp to shut down within 60 days. Williams wrote in her opinion that the environmental groups "provided extensive evidence supporting their claims of significant ongoing and likely future environmental harms from the project," while the state "offered little to no evidence why this detention camp, in this particular location, is uniquely suited and critical to that mission."
Florida quickly appealed the ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, but the immediate effects of the injunction couldn't be avoided. Construction and new arrivals halted. The facility's population began dramatically declining, and by the end of the month, state officials said it could be empty within days.
The environmental lawsuit also pried loose the 287(g) agreements between Florida and the federal government, which could now be used to attack the legal foundations of the camp. On August 23, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Florida and other civil rights groups filed a lawsuit arguing that the detention camp is an illegal and unprecedented use of the 287(g) program.
"This facility has already become a disaster in the first few weeks of its operations, with mounting reports of disease, wrongful removals, and people being denied all kinds of basic rights," Spencer Amdur, an ACLU staff attorney, said in a press release. "This is exactly why Congress did not allow states to set up their own immigration facilities."
And the reports of brutality still kept coming in. The Spanish-language news channel Noticias 23 reported on August 28 allegations by three detainees that guards at the camp fired teargas and started beating prisoners after they started chanting, "Freedom!"
"They've beaten everyone here, a lot of people have bled," one of the men reportedly told Noticias 23 in a phone call. "We are immigrants, we are not criminals, we are not murderers."
A day after the news report, Williams denied Florida's request to stay her injunction while the state appealed it. In its arguments supporting a stay, the FDEM estimated that shutting down the facility would cost the state $218 million it had already sunk into the project. The Associated Press reported that the state had signed $405 million in vendor contracts, and Jason Garcia reported that DeSantis' office approved nearly $30 million in payments to those vendors.
However, DeSantis reassured Floridians that they wouldn't be on the hook for the costs.
"We spent money and we will get reimbursed," DeSantis said at a September 2 press conference. "And getting illegals out, that saved you money because they are costly if they go to the medical care or all this other stuff. But we're getting reimbursed for all that stuff. So Florida will clearly benefit from a taxpayer perspective."
Alligator Alcatraz Survives—With a Murky Future
For a few days, it seemed like Florida's experiment in state-run immigration detention would end nearly as suddenly as it began, and the remote stretch of highway cutting through the swamp would go back to its quiet, unremarkable existence.
Then, on September 4, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit issued a 2–1 ruling lifting Williams' injunction and allowing the detention camp to resume operations.
The 11th Circuit panel ruled that the detention camp is not subject to environmental impact reviews required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) because it has so far been entirely paid for by the state of Florida.
"Here, no federal dollars have been expended on the construction or use of the Facility," Judge Barbara Lagoa wrote in the majority opinion. Thus "the Florida-funded and Florida-operated detention activities occurring at the Site" do not constitute "a 'major federal project.'"
"There may come a time when [the Florida Department of Environmental Protection] applies for FEMA funding," Lagoa continued. "If the Federal Defendants ultimately decide to approve that request and reimburse Florida for its expenditures related to the Facility, they may need to first conduct an [environmental impact statement]. But, having not yet formally 'committed to funding that project,' the Federal Defendants have taken no 'major federal action' subjecting them to the procedural requirements of NEPA."
The majority reasoned, not unfairly, that statements made by politicians to news cameras weren't the sort of funding commitments that could be depended on as a matter of legal certainty. However, that reasoning also meant that the 11th Circuit ignored the long record of unambiguous public statements made by top state officials, including the governor, indicating that Florida always intended to pursue reimbursement from the feds.
In fact, Florida has already applied for such reimbursement.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told Reason earlier this month in an emailed statement that: "The State of Florida submitted an application for reimbursement to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). FEMA has roughly $625 million in Shelter and Services Program funds that can be allocated for this effort."
So while the 11th Circuit saved Alligator Alcatraz, the court's ruling also created a problem for the state. Florida can either take the federal money, as DeSantis repeatedly promised it would, only to then face the high risk of the camp being shut down again in a morass of environmental litigation, or the state can eat the entire cost of the detention center and avoid facing such litigation.
Whether it survives the numerous legal challenges to its existence, or whether Florida taxpayers have to bear the cost of it, Alligator Alcatraz has already served its purpose as a stunt and trial balloon. Shortly after the 11th Circuit ruled that the Everglades detention camp could resume operations, DeSantis announced that Florida had opened a new facility to hold immigrant detainees north of Gainesville, complete with its own brand identity: "Deportation Depot."
Meanwhile, the state's efforts have left a path of destruction in their wake, including fiscal waste, lack of accountability, abuse of power, environmental degradation, civil rights abuses, and ruined lives.
In mid-September, the Miami Herald reported on the fates of detainees listed on the roster it obtained in July. Hundreds had dropped off the grid and couldn't be accounted for. One man was mistakenly deported to Guatemala before his scheduled bond hearing. Michael Borrego, the plaintiff from the lawsuit over legal access, was transferred to a private ICE detention facility near San Diego over Labor Day weekend and then promptly disappeared.
Borrego, a Cuban national, called his family a week after they lost contact with him. He'd been deported to the Mexican state of Tabasco.
Outside the entrance to the detention camp, Davies and Martin have been watching the cars and trucks entering and leaving. Given the high level of secrecy that the state maintains, this is one of the most reliable ways to gauge the activity level behind the fences.
It's a busy day. More than a dozen construction trucks exit the camp and turn east toward Miami, all of them with empty beds. An ambulance also leaves with its emergency lights on, presumably not with an empty bed. The day before, Davies says, demonstrators saw five buses of detainees arrive.
While media reports speculate about the future of Alligator Alcatraz, Davies has little doubt about what's going on from her vantage point.
"They're expanding it," she says.
A couple weeks later, Friends of the Everglades published an an aerial photograph by a pilot showing a large strip of freshly laid blacktop at the detention camp.
And then shortly after, a day before the federal government shut down, DHS approved Florida's application for FEMA grants and awarded the state $608 million.
