Sep 25, 2025 | 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.
