Pressroom

Everglades, Florida — Yesterday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced that they have transferred all people detained at the Everglades Detention Camp, cruelly dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” to other facilities across the country without specifying how many people were moved or where they were taken, effectively disappearing people into ICE’s immigrant detention system.

The Everglades Detention Camp has served as a focal point of the Trump administration’s cruel mass detention expansion, piloting a model of governors offering make-shift, state-run detention camps. The embattled facility faced widespread opposition even prior to its opening, led by Florida based groups who said the location and lack of infrastructure mixed with ICE’s well-documented record of abuse was a recipe for disaster. In just under a year of operation, people detained at Everglades faced egregious abuse, including inadequate or denied medical care, the regular use of shackles when they were outside their cage, and reports of being put in the “box”, described in Amnesty International’s 2025 report as a “2x2 foot cage-like structure people are put in as punishment – sometimes for hours at a time, and exposed to the elements with hardly any water – with their feet attached to restraints on the ground.”

Immigrant justice advocates demand:

• People previously detained at the Everglades Detention Camp be located immediately and released to reunite with their families and loved ones while navigating their immigration cases
• The permanent closure of the Everglades Detention Camp and all detention centers in Florida as a first step to ending the immigrant detention system in its entirety 

Immigrant justice advocates issued the following statements:

Renata Bozzetto, Deputy Director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, said: "The conditions reported at Alligator Alcatraz are a stain on our state's conscience. Detainees described overflowing toilets leaking into sleeping areas, inadequate access to showers, constant 24-hour lighting, insect infestations, unsafe food and water, and degrading treatment that no human being should endure. Some were forced to scoop human waste from clogged toilets with their bare hands because there was not enough water pressure to flush. Reports documented routine shackling, physical abuse by guards, and prolonged solitary confinement. Closing Alligator Alcatraz will not, by itself, end the harm. Many of the people detained there will be transferred to other detention facilities, while their families continue to face uncertainty and hardship. At the same time, Floridians deserve accountability for the nearly one billion taxpayer dollars funneled to private vendors through no-bid state contracts. When this detention camp closes, many corporations and contractors will have walked away with millions in profits, while immigrant families are left to pick up the pieces.”

Nery Lopez, Organizing Manager at Detention Watch Network, said: “ICE disappears people into its detention system, sowing confusion and distress — no one is safe in ICE custody. It is shocking that ICE is not accounting for lives that were in its custody, yet, we know it follows the agency’s well-documented culture of secrecy to evade accountability at every turn. ICE must locate the people they transferred now and release them immediately while ensuring the permanent closure of the Everglades Detention Camp. Trump is executing his cruel mass deportation agenda at the expense of all Americans while valued and vital community members and family members are disappearing and dying in detention at a record scale. This year has been the deadliest year in ICE custody in decades. Nineteen people have died in the first 22 full weeks of this year, and 50 people total under the current Trump administration. The death toll in ICE custody is heartbreaking and enraging. We must collectively call for an end to the ICE age to stop the loss of life in ICE custody, permanently shut down detentions, and to keep people and communities safe.”

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Detention Watch Network (DWN) is a national coalition building power through collective advocacy, grassroots organizing, and strategic communications to abolish immigration detention in the United States.