Renée Feltz | Truthout
When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) started sending people to a new tent-based jail nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz” deep in the Florida Everglades last July, it indicated a shift toward using quickly opened soft-sided structures and converted warehouses to hold thousands of people in chain-link fence cages with no access to a lawyer.
“It was kind of a black box,” Paul Chavez, the director of litigation with the Florida-based Americans for Immigrant Justice, told Truthout. “Attorneys would drive out there to ask to see their clients and be turned away at the gate by armed guards.”
Now, a federal judge has ordered officials with ICE and the Florida Department of Emergency Management as well as the contractors who run Alligator Alcatraz to ensure people held there can access confidential legal calls and meetings, and to allow their lawyers to make unscheduled visits. The constitutionally guaranteed rights are also mandated in ICE’s own detention standards, and can make a huge difference in whether someone gets deported. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and immigrant rights advocates filed the case. The way it plays out could shape legal access at future ICE jails.
“This case presents a moving target,” U.S. District Court Judge Sheri Polster Chappell wrote in her preliminary injunction in late March, before launching into a caustic summary of how she faced “late-breaking evidence” when the contractor who coordinates legal visits announced new policies several times during his testimony.
“I was heartened, and frankly, a bit surprised by some of the judge’s language in regards to calling them out for how much things switch on a dime or don’t comport with what happens on the ground,” said Katie Blankenship, who has clients at the camp and founded Sanctuary of the South, which is a plaintiff in the case. “It was a little like feeling seen.”
Officials running Alligator Alcatraz claim it was first built to hold people for just 72 hours.
“Make sure they’re all ready to go, and then put them on aircraft and fly them out of the country,” was how Frank Lumm, an incident commander for Florida’s disaster response team in charge of overseeing contractors, described the original plan. “Folks that are now coming through need more legal assistance,” he later explained, so “these policies are being revamped and rewritten.”
The day before Lumm testified in a two-day hearing in January, an asylum seeker identified as J.E. testified via Zoom from Haiti about how he had been deported earlier that month, even though his claims for asylum and Temporary Protected Status were still pending in court.
“Let’s talk about when ICE gave you papers to sign while you were at Alligator Alcatraz,” said Amy Godshall, an attorney with the ACLU of Florida.
“They gave me a first paper that said deportation on it. I didn’t touch that one,” J.E. answered through a Creole interpreter. “They gave me a second paper that said Mexico.”
Confused when ICE told him that “the president had canceled” his legal options to fight his case, J.E. asked to speak to a lawyer he had already hired. Guards told him that “there was nothing that they could do.”
On a call with his family, J.E. got the attorney’s phone number, “but I didn’t have any pen or paper,” he explained. “So I would write them with soap, the soap that they gave us, I would write them on the walls.”
Florida law permits state prisoners to “have four pens in their personal possession” but officials said security concerns prompted them to ban pens and paper at Alligator Alcatraz where people have pending civil immigration violations.
“Yet when deportation officers are trying to compel people to sign those deportation orders, they have pens at the ready,” noted Eunice Cho, one of the ACLU attorneys originally arguing the case.
J.E. said when he tried to call his lawyer, he would only hear a “tuk, tuk, tuk” sound, and after multiple failed attempts he agreed to sign the papers for his self-deportation, noting how “anytime you’re in a place like that, if you don’t comply with what they’re doing, they punish you.”
After boarding an ICE plane weeks later, the agency told him he was actually being sent to Haiti, from where he had fled a dangerous and deepening humanitarian disaster two years prior. “I believe that if I had an attorney on my case, the possibility for me to be released would have been higher,” J.E. said.
In fact, any immigrant facing deportation has the right to a private meeting with their lawyer, even in detention.
But Nakamoto Group, the company subcontracted by Critical Response Strategies, the contractor operating Alligator Alctraz, to provide legal access, never made this or other legal policies clear until its vice president, Mark Saunders, took the stand in January.
“There was no formula if you will,” testified Saunders, a former prison warden who helped re-open Iraqi prisons after the war there. “Policies were written rather quickly.”
During his testimony he said staff at the facility now “post and hand out flyers directing detainees to inform their attorneys to request legal visits by sending an email to legal@privacy6.com” since this information is still not included in the detainee handbook.
Saunders acknowledged “the policies lag behind the practices” but “were going to be honored regardless.” He and other officials called by the defense testified the policies had been in effect since Thanksgiving.
Nakamoto used to have the main federal contract to inspect ICE jails but lost its decades-long deal after it was accused of rubber-stamping its findings; it was the subject of a 2018 Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General report that found even ICE’s own staff considered the inspections “useless.”
Saunders’s testimony in January appeared to be contradicted by J.E., who testified he was deported in January without a chance to speak to his lawyer.
Meanwhile, immigration attorney Diane Aburto said her client asked an officer at Alligator Alcatraz in early February for permission to make a confidential legal call, but was not allowed to do so, as Saunders claimed was now possible.
Another attorney, Andrea Jacoski, emailed legal@privacy6.com to “confirm if I can visit a client at Alligator Alcatraz without scheduling the visit ahead of time.” The next day she got a reply from the “Florida Detention Team” instructing her to submit an attached “legal counsel visitation form and Form G28. Once we receive them, we will schedule the visit/call accordingly.”
The next hearing in the ACLU’s case is set for April 13, when Judge Chappell may ask for an update on whether officials have posted the new policies and acted on her order to provide at least one operable phone for every 25 people to use, rather than the two now available upon request for around 1,500 people.
This case could impact legal access for people held in warehouses that ICE plans to buy nationwide to convert into eight mass detention sites, with 16 more feeder sites, to add 92,000 additional beds by November.
Floor plans to convert a warehouse in Social Circle, Georgia, show no location for people to meet with their lawyers. The ACLU’s Haddy Gassama said in a recent meeting with activists she is “alarmed at the scale and pace” of how ICE is proceeding with little transparency or oversight for billions already spent.
Judge Chappell is not the first judge to rule that people held in various ICE facilities still have the fundamental right to confidentially consult with an attorney.
“There have been rulings from across the country in cases involving the so-called temporary ICE holding rooms at 26 Federal Plaza in New York, Broadview [near] Chicago, and in San Francisco and Minneapolis,” Corene Kendrick, deputy director of the ACLU National Prison Project and a lead attorney on this case, told Truthout. “They’re spending good chunks of time there, and so they do have constitutional rights to basic conditions of confinement, to access to counsel. So I think that that’s another way to look at this order and see how it fits within the broader context of what federal courts across the country have been saying repeatedly about these actions by ICE and [the Department of Homeland Security] and the Trump administration.”
As this and other challenges to Alligator Alcatraz wind their way through court, the tent-based ICE jail remains open. Many of the 1,500 people held there were first arrested by police through 287(g) partnerships that ICE has with law enforcement officials in all of the state’s 67 counties, as well as many public universities.
Immigrant and human rights activists continue to hold weekly vigils at the gates of the jail and have also organized against potential new ICE warehouse sales in Orlando and Palm Beach.
“I think our communities are rightfully scared about what’s happening,” said Yareliz Mendez-Zamora, the American Friends Service Committee-Florida policy coordinator. “But that doesn’t mean that we give up or stay silent … there are ways for us to organize and uplift the fact that this is evil.”
