Amnesty International Report Claims Torture and Enforced Disappearances at “Alligator Alcatraz”
A recently released report from the humanitarian group Amnesty International found that conditions at two migrant detention centers in Florida amounted to “cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment,” with some practices rising to the level of torture.
In September 2025, Amnesty researchers toured the federal Krome North Services Processing Center in Miami and interviewed former detainees at the Everglades’ site known as “Alligator Alcatraz.” At Krome, which is operated by private company Akima Global Services LLC on behalf of the Trump administration, the researchers documented intake delays, overcrowding, a lack of medical care, widespread violence and racist abuse from guards, and prolonged solitary confinement. The facility’s “humiliating and degrading treatment paint[s] a picture of harrowing human rights violations,” Amy Fischer, Amnesty’s director of refugee and migrant rights, told The Guardian.
Detainees at Alligator Alcatraz, according to the 48-page report, are similarly being held in inhumane conditions, including “overflowing toilets with fecal matter seeping into where people are sleeping, limited access to showers, exposure to insects without protective measures, lights on 24 hours a day, poor quality food and water, and lack of privacy.” Amnesty’s account highlighted the use of a two-by-two-foot punishment “box,” complete with shackles, that one detainee compared to a lion’s cage at a circus. Kept outside in the Florida heat and humidity, former detainees told Amnesty that migrants were sent there for even the slightest infraction against the guards, sometimes for an entire day. “It’s a copy of Guantánamo,” an ex-detainees said.
Alligator Alcatraz, officially named the South Florida Detention Facility, opened in July 2025 at the site of an abandoned airport in the Everglades. The facility was hastily constructed in a matter of days and almost immediately faced flooding from a “garden-variety South Florida rainstorm,” as The Miami Herald reported. Met by opposition from Democrats, environmentalists, Indigenous activists (the Miccosukee and Seminole Nations both claim the area as ancestral lands), and immigrant rights groups, a federal judge ordered Alligator Alcatraz to halt construction in response to a lawsuit in August of last year. In October, however, two Trump-appointed appeals court judges voted to block the preliminary injunction and the site was re-opened as litigation continues. [See: PLN, Sep. 2025, p. 43].
Sources: Florida Phoenix, The Guardian, Amnesty International
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