“When those doors opened, what I saw made my heart sink,” Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost — the first elected Gen Z member of Congress — said during a press conference on July 13, per USA Today. These comments — which he shared in videos on social media — were in reference to his tour of “Alligator Alcatraz,” the new and already infamous ICE detention facility in the heart of the Everglades, the 1.5-million-acre wetlands preserve in South Florida.
Whether you keep up with the news closely or mostly hear about today’s events through video snippets on TikTok, you’ve probably heard the phrase Alligator Alcatraz more than once by this point — or maybe you’ve even seen the merch that GOP and MAGA supporters have created to celebrate the facility’s opening. Until now, the menacing nickname has carried an air of ominous mystery, and despite a baseline knowledge of the facility’s purpose, the public has had very little information about it. But thanks to Frost and other elected leaders in Florida who toured the facility and then shared their observations in the press and on social media, the public now has a better idea of what Alligator Alcatraz actually is, and what the conditions are actually like on the inside.
Here’s what to know.
What Is Alligator Alcatraz?
The detention center was rapidly constructed in late June on the site of the unfinished and underutilized Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, following a 2023 executive order made by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis invoking emergency powers to curb the flow of undocumented immigrants.
And yes, this is the facility’s actual name. The “alligator” part of the nickname comes from the fact that the Everglades is teeming with alligators. The “Alcatraz” comes from the name of the maximum security federal prison on Alcatraz Island.
What have lawmakers said about Alligator Alcatraz’s conditions?
In a remote press conference on Sunday, Frost gave a detailed account of his experience at Alligator Alcatraz, with a solemn and concerned tone throughout. Per Frost, the center is comprised of tents containing cages, and is surrounded by swamp, bugs, and unforgiving Floridian heat. Each tent contains approximately six cages each, with 32 men ages 18 and older per cage.
Frost said he and other lawmakers weren’t allowed to see the bathrooms or medical facilities, but from what he did see and hear, detainees are not fed enough, are forced to drink from spigots attached to toilets if they need water while in their cage, and have access to very few working phones, making it very difficult to contact their lawyers and vice-versa. Alligator Alcatraz also has seemingly no protection against heat or relentless mosquitos, according to Frost.
Frost also explained how detainees are separated — or rather, how they’re not. According to Frost, they are given wristbands to denote the level of infraction they committed that led to their arrest. However, despite these distinctions, detainees are not jailed separately.
Republican lawmakers who also visited the facility have a different take. Per the Associated Press, State Sen. Jay Collins claimed there was “no squalor.” State Sen. Blaise Ingoglia added, per the AP, “The rhetoric coming out of the Democrats does not match the reality.” The visiting lawmakers were prohibited from actually entering any of the tents, and Ingoglia said he couldn’t tell what the detainees were shouting when his tour group arrived.
Frost, however, said he could. He said what they heard from the outside was enough to raise serious concern: chants for freedom, pleas for help and calls to loved ones, and even a desperate cry of, “I’m a U.S. citizen!” (To which Frost said in a self-recorded TikTok video that he’s going to “look into that.”)
“Every Floridian should be ashamed that our taxpayer money is being used for this,” Frost said in a TikTok video following his visit. “Terrorizing communities, putting people in an internment camp full of Latinos.”
Frost and other Florida lawmakers have repeatedly referred to Alligator Alcatraz as an “internment camp,” the kind last used in the United States to incarcerate Japanese American citizens during World War II. Characterized by extremely harsh living conditions, including cramped barracks, limited privacy, and inadequate medical care, internment camps are considered a shame on the U.S., and the government officially apologized for the inhumane conditions it subjected Japanese Americans to in 1988, even providing financial reparations to surviving detainees. Now, in the eyes of Frost and other Florida Democrats, the country is closer to returning to this practice than possibly ever before.
There is still very little known about Alligator Alcatraz, but Frost promised in his selfie video: “I will be back … That is a federal detention center that’s being run by the state. We [lawmakers] are all allowed to go there, unannounced, whenever we want, and see things how they actually are. So we’ll keep everybody updated.”
In the meantime, the Miami Herald published a list of the names of the people reportedly detained at Alligator Alcatraz — specifically for those looking for their loved ones who may have been taken there.