A federal judge on Thursday ruled that Alligator Alcatraz cannot detain any new immigrants and gave officials 60 days to begin dismantling portions of the facility. The decision was based on the detention center's environmental impact on the Everglades, and is a major blow to the facility. The ruling is preliminary, and officials plan to appeal. But no matter the future of Alligator Alcatraz, the Trump administration is turning it into a model for expanding detention capacity across the country. Similar large-scale facilities, opened in collaboration with state governments, are already in the works. These projects mark the first time that states have gotten this involved in large-scale immigration detention.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced that an Indiana state prison plans to begin holding immigrants for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The timeline, staffing, cost and other logistics have all yet to be worked out, according to state officials. But the announcement reprised the political spectacle that came with the Florida facility, including a controversial name: the “Speedway Slammer,” referring to the famous racetrack that hosts the Indianapolis 500. DHS announced that ICE will have access to 1,000 beds, about a third of the prison’s capacity.
This week, DHS announced a partnership with Nebraska to open a detention center, dubbed “Cornhusker Clink,” in a rural state prison. It will hold as many as 280 people, according to the agency.
In Louisiana, federal officials are making plans to hold immigrants at the troubled state penitentiary at Angola, several news outlets have reported. The prison is infamous for its plantation-style farm work, with armed guards on horseback, and medical care so terrible that both the Justice Department and a federal judge have called conditions cruel and unusual punishment.
Elsewhere in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced last week that the state plans to open a second immigration detention facility in a shuttered state prison, which Florida officials are calling “Deportation Depot.”
Immigration enforcement has traditionally been a federal function, but the feds have often partnered with local governments to carry it out, for example, by contracting with jails to rent bed space. But the new agreements mark a new chapter in the level and scale of cooperation. ICE is working with states to operate facilities under the controversial 287(g) Program, which allows local officials to work as an extension of federal immigration authorities. Historically, these agreements were used to allow state prisons and county jails to hold individuals after they’re arrested on criminal charges or have finished a criminal sentence, to give ICE a few days to pick them up. The agreements had never been used to run large-scale facilities long-term.
“It’s absolutely unprecedented,” said Eunice Cho, an attorney with the ACLU’s National Prison Project. Officials are “very much pushing the boundaries” of their legal authority under the program, she said.
After operating for less than two months, Alligator Alcatraz is already infamous. Attorneys have said they haven’t been able to meet confidentially with clients, and detainees said there are worms in the food and feces on the floor. ICE and DHS did not respond to questions. But in a news release, DHS denied the reports of poor conditions at the Everglades facility and said immigrants had access to lawyers. Allegations of inhumane treatment were an attempt to “slow down President Trump’s partnerships with States to turbocharge efforts to remove the worst of the worst,” the agency said.
The new agreements also raise troubling questions — both about conditions for immigrant detainees, and their effect on people already in state prisons.
Civil rights advocates warn that conditions at many of these prisons are already grim, and adding hundreds more people will only worsen the problems. The Miami Correctional Center, where Indiana plans to locate the Speedway Slammer, has been so dangerously understaffed that violence and overdoses are commonplace, according to local reporting and data from the state. Civil rights lawyers in 2022 sued over accusations of inhumane conditions there by over two dozen people, who said they suffered treatment that included being held in lightless cells flooded with sewage and with live wires dangling from the ceilings. Several of the suits are ongoing.
At Angola, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry used an emergency declaration to reopen a cellblock that was closed in 2018 due to dangerous, inhumane conditions — though state officials have not confirmed the space is for ICE detainees. The block, nicknamed “the Dungeon,” has hundreds of solitary confinement cells. Most immigration detention facilities, in contrast, are open dormitory settings with more human interaction and freedom of movement.
Nora Ahmed, legal director of the ACLU of Louisiana, said that, like Alligator Alcatraz and the Speedway Slammer, the name Angola has a certain terror associated with it. “I think it’s very intentional to say you’re sending people to Angola,” she said. “We’re going to give it the specter and the air that it is criminal punishment.”
Unlike prison, which is designed at least in part as punishment, immigration detention is meant to be a civil matter, according to experts in federal statute and case law — a way to ensure that people attend their immigration hearings. “I do think that the optics of housing people in civil detention in a prison is demonstrating what we already know to be true, which is that immigration detention is punitive and is punishment,” said Sarah Decker, a staff attorney at the advocacy organization RFK Human Rights.
The Everglades tent camp illustrates many of the problems that can arise when the boundary between state and federal authorities is fuzzy. Once a person is sent to Alligator Alcatraz, they no longer appear in ICE’s online system tracking their location, making it nearly impossible for family, friends and attorneys to find them. Despite evidence that the detention center has held at least 700 people, the facility also doesn’t appear in ICE data that lawmakers, advocates and activists rely upon. For weeks bond hearings were canceled, as immigration judges said they had no jurisdiction over people at the Everglades camp.
“This is an unprecedented situation where hundreds of detainees are held incommunicado, with no ability to access the courts, under legal authority that has never been explained and may not exist,” attorneys for the detainees wrote in legal filings.
Government attorneys said in court this week that the problem with the bond hearings has been resolved.
This month, new ICE data showed the number of people in detention in the U.S. reached a historic high of more than 59,000, not including the Everglades center and other facilities omitted from official government data. The Trump administration wants to grow that number even higher, with new money set aside to pay for 80,000 more detention beds. It’s not clear how it plans to accomplish that, but Noem has called the Everglades setup “much better” than current models and observed that it’s cheaper.
The pitfalls of the state-federal mashup worry Stacy Suh, program director at Detention Watch Network, an organization working to end immigration detention. “It is an immigration detention center, but are people under state custody? Are people under ICE custody? I think that ambiguity and confusion just leads to a greater potential for abuse.”
