Hundreds Of Former 'Gator Gulag' Prisoners Can't Be Found, Is That Bad?
Hey, they're definitely *somewhere.* Have you looked in Uganda?
As we suspected a few weeks back, a federal judge’s order that the government shut down the Everglades immigration concentration camp they cleverly called “Alligator Alcatraz” didn’t actually come to pass, after an appeals court blocked that order September 4. So far, the camp, which Gov. Ron DeSantis created on a whim to suck up to Donald Trump, still houses fewer than 400 detainees, down from a high of 1,800 in July.
But in the process of moving detainees out of the camp in anticipation that it had to close, it seems that the government lost track of a lot of the prisoners — or maybe the government has that information, but it’s not possible for outsiders to figure out where the hell hundreds of them ended up. As the Miami Herald reports (non-paywalled Yahoo News reprint here),
As of the end of August, the whereabouts of two-thirds of more than 1,800 men detained at Alligator Alcatraz during the month of July could not be determined. […]
Around 800 detainees showed no record on ICE’s online database. More than 450 listed no location and only instructed the user to “Call ICE for details” — a vague notation that attorneys said could mean that a detainee is still being processed, in the middle of a transfer between two sites or about to be deported.
It’s also possible, the paper notes, that some of them are still in DeSantis’s swamp dungeon, which is run by the state of Florida and doesn’t use the federal government database. Florida simply doesn’t have any system that would let someone — like a detainee’s family or attorney — look them up. But even if many of the detainees fell into that paperwork black hole, there are way more than 400 prisoners that reporters couldn’t locate one way or another.
Hey, remember how back in 2018 Trump’s immigration people just didn’t bother keeping records to match parents to the children they took away at the border, and as late as 2024, as many as 1,360 children still couldn’t be returned to their families? These detainees are adults, though, so maybe disappearing them from official records is less scandalous. They’re only illegals, so it’s not like they’re people.
The Herald notes that some of the former DeSantis hostages may have been deported, although “internal data obtained by the Herald show the vast majority of detainees didn’t have final orders of removal from a judge” before they were sent to the camp. At least some deportations may have resulted when detainees decided to accept being deported just so they could get out of the prison, with its overflowing toilets, insect infestations, and inedible food.
“It became a game of chicken to see who’s going to blink first, to see if the client’s going to say ‘I don’t want to be detained in these conditions, just send me back,’” said Miami immigration attorney Alex Solomiany.
But that was definitely not the case for one of Solomiany’s clients, a 53-year-old man from Guatemala who had been in the US since 2001 and has a spouse and children. The man had a bond hearing scheduled, but the government “accidentally” deported him to Guatemala before it could be held. Funny how those “accidents” keep happening! Solomiany is trying to get ICE to return him so he can get due process, so good luck with that.
Another immigration attorney, Zachary Perez, said that it looked to him like his clients had all “suffered some pretty bad results just from being tagged with the Alligator Alcatraz label,” as if there were some kind of chaos curse following them around.
For instance, there’s Michael Borrego Fernandez, 35, from Cuba, who went missing for over a week after he was moved out of the Everglades prison camp. First he was sent to a private prison in San Diego, and then … his family didn’t hear anything more from him for over a week.
Borrego’s attorney Mich Gonzalez said he called the California facility repeatedly but was told each time that no one by that name was detained there.
His family was worried about him because while he was in the Florida swamp prison, he’d had surgery for severe hemorrhoids, and was in a lot of pain afterwards. He was kept shackled to his bed and they believe he didn’t get adequate care. His mother said that not knowing where he was was “like psychological torture.”
Finally, after more than a week, they heard from Borrego again.
But he wasn’t in California.
He was 2,000 miles away from where ICE said he would be.
Borrego had abruptly been deported to the Mexican state of Tabasco.
We can’t see why anyone could possibly complain about that, because it wasn’t South Sudan, now was it?
[Miami Herald via Yahoo News / Human Rights Watch]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or if you’d prefer to make a one-time donation, we can assure you that clicking this button won’t send your money to Libya.
This is why you shouldn't call them Nazis. The Nazis kept better records.
Start looking for fresh indications of digging.
We're at the mass grave stage of the ethnic cleansing campaign.