Hundreds of people who were once detained at the troubled immigration jail in the Florida Everglades, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” have disappeared. Democracy Now! speaks with Shirsho Dasgupta, a Miami Herald reporter who found that, as of late August, about two-thirds of the 1,800 immigrants who were held there in July have gone missing from ICE’s online database, with their families and attorneys unable to locate them. Earlier this month, a federal appeals court ruled the jail could continue to operate despite reports of abuse.
“What we’re seeing at Alligator Alcatraz is basically a new model of immigration detention, where a state-run facility is operating as an extrajudicial black site, completely outside of the previous models of immigration detention in this country. And it’s making what was already a terrible system somehow even worse,” says Thomas Kennedy, policy analyst at the Florida Immigrant Coalition.
It’s operating on top of a federal airstrip (yes, located in the middle of the Everglades) that was used as a staging ground for CIA extraordinary renditions.
That airstrip has ALWAYS been used for doing what they’re doing now—they’ve just scaled up operations. It’s ALWAYS been a ‘disappearing people’ center. Seriously.
The government started construction on it forever ago (it was initially supposed to be a 39 square mile international airport) but construction halted and they decided to just keep it for classified CIA/FBI/military activities. Source: am Floridian and also “Wilderness on the Edge: A History of Everglades National Park” by Robert W. Blythe.
We’ve always been the baddies. :( :(
Not great, but I assumed they were feeding them to the alligators