The newly alleged brutality at two Florida prisons might be customary in some third-world dictatorship. It was assumed to be intolerable in America.
Reports from two respected organizations describe punishments indistinguishable from torture, prisoners held incommunicado from their families and lawyers as if they had disappeared into a Russian Gulag, toilets overflowing into sleeping areas, extreme heat and cold and inadequate medical care — just for starters.
At Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “Alligator Alcatraz,” his black hole in the Everglades for unwanted immigrants, former prisoners describe men being shackled in a man-sized dog crate too small to stand up in and kept there in the blazing sun for hours without water. That sort of punishment vanished from state prisons many decades ago, but DeSantis’ concentration camps for immigrants are run out of the governor’s office through the state disaster preparedness agency.
“People ended up in the ‘box’ just for asking the guards for anything,” said a prisoner quoted anonymously in the report. “I saw a guy who was put into it for an entire day.”
The brutalized prisoners at “Alcatraz,” it must be emphasized, are often immigrants who have committed no offense other than being here.
Runaway costs
DeSantis issued 34 no-bid “emergency” contracts to establish and run the camp on a mosquito-infested airfield. He has spent more than $360 million so far on what will cost $450 million a year, unless the Legislature belatedly puts a stop to it.
The cages are just one of the searing findings in a 59-page report from Amesty International, a highly respected global human rights organization. The full report deserves your attention. It can be found here: amnesty.org/en/documents/amr51/0511/2025/en.
At Gulf Correctional Institution in the Panhandle, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that prisoners have been denied meals for minor misconduct and subjected to extreme physical punishment.
“For the benefit of the prison cameras,” SPLC said, “officers deliver a meal tray covered by a lid, with no food under that lid.” Beatings are commonplace, SPLC found.
Tthe SPLC report can be found here: splcenter.org/resources/reports/florida-gulf-correctional-institution
Then there’s Krome
Amnesty International also alleged deplorable practices at the federal Krome Detention Center near Miami, but the Florida-run Alligator Alcatraz came off worse.
“The detention conditions at Krome do not comply with international human rights law and standards,” Amnesty said. “… Procedural deficiencies, including impediments to legal counsel, raise due process and arbitrary detention concerns. Amnesty International considers that the treatment of individuals at Krome constitutes cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”
ICE, which is responsible for Krome, replied that it “wholly disagrees” with Amnesty’s description, but offered no details.
The DeSantis administration didn’t bother to answer the Amnesty report. His office denounced it to the media as “politically motivated” and full of “fabrications.” But he has not allowed state legislators or anyone else to have appropriate access to Alligator Alcatraz. Amnesty got its information from interviewing former inmates.
Any good citizen reading these reports would be seized by disgust and shame. At the moment, though, the most constructive emotion is fury toward a governor and president who seem to relish cruelty, and with a Legislature that should have shut down “Alcatraz” long ago.
Your legislators need to hear from you.
Shut it down, now
Alligator Alcatraz should be closed now, and a Miami-Dade grand jury should investigate what has happened to people there. The federal courts should accelerate the lawsuit by Friends of the Everglades, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians that asserts it is in violation of environmental law.
State courts should expedite the suit by five Democratic legislators seeking unrestricted access to “Alcatraz” and a second immigrant detention center in Baker County near Jacksonville. DeSantis contends that the legal right of legislators to make unannounced visits to jails and prisons doesn’t apply to his immigrant netherworlds.
Former state Sen. Jeff Brandes, a St. Petersburg Republican who calls the regular prison system “Florida’s Department of Chaos,” wrote in a Florida Politics op-ed Nov. 11 that the state needs an independent corrections commission to oversee conditions and recommend reforms. It surely does.
What’s most damning about Florida’s “me too” participation in Donald Trump’s remorseless war on immigrants is that it has no business being in immigration at all. Lawful or not, it is a federal responsibility.
Goal: Out-MAGA MAGA
But Florida has a governor addled with presidential ambitions who means to show he’s more MAGA than Donald Trump himself.
The leitmotif laid down by Trump is racist. His stock-in-trade is cruelty.
Undocumented immigrants have been essential to Florida’s three major industries — hospitality, agriculture and construction.
DeSantis has Florida aping the venom of a bigoted president who recently denounced dark-skinned people from Somalia as “garbage,” and who previously trashed African nations as “s—hole countries.”
In its mere existence, “Alligator Alcatraz” embodies Trump’s nauseating biases as if they were DeSantis’ own. It will remain a disgrace to the state and nation, and to this governor, until the Legislature or some court shuts it down.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
