Alligator Alcatraz Blasted as ‘Failed Experiment’ on Closing Day

Politics admin June 25, 2026 0 Comments

Alligator Alcatraz Blasted as ‘Failed Experiment’ on Closing Day

Alligator Alcatraz is closing with a bitter send-off from the families of once-detained immigrants.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Thursday that the notorious detention center is being shuttered nearly a year after it was established to hold immigrants caught in the Trump administration’s heavy-handed deportation blitz.

DeSantis opened the 39-square-mile facility in July last year with the backing of the White House and then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. It quickly drew widespread condemnation over decrepit living conditions, which one former detainee described as “a copy of Guantánamo” to human rights group Amnesty International.

“I said from the beginning that this was an emergency solution that would be temporary,” DeSantis said at a press conference in Ochopee. “And so Alligator Alcatraz fulfilled the role that it was designed to serve. Today, it now has zero detainees. It has helped remove many, many dangerous people from the street and get them out of not only the state of Florida but the United States of America.”

The Workers Circle, a social justice nonprofit that has organized vigils outside Alligator Alcatraz for nearly 50 weeks, hailed the facility’s closure as a victory for immigrant communities.

“Alligator Alcatraz is a failed experiment in cruelty by the Trump and DeSantis administrations,” Noelle Damico, the group’s social justice director, said in a statement. “For their own political ends, they tried to convince Americans to hate and fear immigrants and tolerate or justify brutality toward them. They failed.”

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said, “Trump Deranged Liberals can complain all they want, we won’t stop enforcing the law and deporting illegal aliens.” DeSantis’ office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A damning report by Amnesty International documented “delays in intake procedures, overcrowding in temporary processing areas, inadequate and inaccessible medical care, alarming disciplinary practices including the use of prolonged solitary confinement, and challenges in access to legal representation and due process” at Alligator Alcatraz.

The group concluded that “people arbitrarily detained in Alligator Alcatraz are being held in inhuman and unsanitary 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.”

Among the tens of thousands of immigrants who passed through Alligator Alcatraz was Justo Betancourt, a 55-year-old Cuban immigrant who was hospitalized several times during his six months in detention because he wasn’t getting insulin on time.

By the time Betancourt came out of Alligator Alcatraz, he had dropped 50 pounds. His speech was slurred, and he had lost mobility on one side of his body. His daughter Arianne joined The Workers Circle to vigorously campaign for his release.

“I think what is happening now can never happen again,” she previously told the Daily Beast. “I think that these stories need to be highlighted and be made an example of so that people understand the reality of what this immigration crackdown actually is.”

“It’s not meeting quotas; it’s not numbers. These are families that are being disrupted, people whose lives have been lost because of not just the detention centers, but just being in the street and ICE overexerting their power and overexercising their powers.”