In one of the scariest moments in modern history, we're doing our best at ScheerPost to pierce the fog of lies that conceal it but we need some help to pay our writers and staff. Please consider a tax-deductible donation.
On April 2, guards at the remote Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) jail known as “Alligator Alcatraz” allegedly brutally beat several detained men who demanded access to phones. It took nearly a week for word to get out.
Six days after the reported attack, Raiko Lopez Morffi’s right eye was still swollen and black during a video call with his lawyer Katie Blankenship, who took screenshots of his injured face and arm.
Another man held in the same cage with Morffi, Lazaro Hernandez Galban, spoke to Blankenship on April 10 about the incident and told her he and others were loudly asking, “When are we going to get the phones back?” after service was cut for an entire day without warning or explanation. Galban said one guard told him to “watch what you say” before a group of them entered the cage in a cloud of tear gas that prompted an older detained man to pass out, and began to beat and kick Morffi and others.
Blankenship said Morffi “does not know which guards were involved, as they do not wear ID badges, but he believes he would recognize them.” She told Truthout he never received medical care and was instead placed in solitary confinement.
“Cutting them off from just the very last thread of access they have to the world is a big deal,” Blankenship added. “It’s like a strategy of obstruction.”
ACLU lawyers argued guards are engaging in obstruction and noncompliance on April 13, in their first hearing with U.S. District Judge Sheri Polster Chappell since her March 27 order demanded officials who operate the facility in the Florida Everglades provide constitutionally guaranteed “access to timely, free, confidential, unmonitored, unrecorded outgoing legal calls.” Phone access can make a huge difference in whether someone gets deported, as Truthout has reported.
The ACLU cited the April 2 incident as an example of how state and federal officials in charge of running the facility are making little effort to comply with the judge’s order, and people held there are suffering as a result. Judge Chappell appeared to agree, for the most part, telling officials to “stop sandbagging the court.” She did not move to require officials to submit evidence of their compliance, as suggested by the ACLU and “vigorously” rejected by Nicholas Meros, attorney for the Florida officials in charge of the immigration jail.
Meros said “the quickest and most practical option” for meeting a part of the judge’s order to provide access to at least one phone for every 25 people jailed at the camp was “to have a large amount of cellphones, approximately 80 or 90, using Starlink,” which he said is already used on site. He noted that officials had rejected other options like building a cell phone tower, and “are moving forward” with the other plan “as quickly as we can.”
ACLU attorney Corene Kendrick told Truthout she was disturbed by how Florida and ICE officials were taking such a “flippant stance toward the court’s order” by not already having the new cell phones in use, noting that Gov. Ron DeSantis cut no-bid contracts with Republican donors to erect and open the jail in just eight days last July.
Democratic Senators Jon Ossoff of Georgia and Dick Durbin of Illinois have launched an inquiry over the “credible allegations” raised in this case that people held at Alligator Alcatraz faced constitutional violations, including lack of access to phones and lawyers and “particularly egregious” claims that they “have been punished with confinement in a small cage-like structure known as ‘the box,’ where they are held in stress positions with hands and feet tightly shackled for hours at a time, in direct sunlight with no access to food or water.”
Immigrant rights advocates argue ICE’s entire immigration detention system is inherently abusive. “When ICE puts a person in solitary confinement, the agency is subjecting them to a form of torture where their life hangs in the balance,” Carly Pérez Fernández, communications director of Detention Watch Network, told Truthout. “We denounce the abuse at Everglades and demand people be immediately released and the facility shut down for good.”
The ACLU said in an April 10 filing titled “Notice of Non-Compliance With Court Order” that Alligator Alcatraz was “put on lockdown all week due to several disturbances that were precipitated by the facility’s denial of phone access.”
At the April 13 hearing, Judge Chappell said she “does not intend to … serve as a super warden,” for Alligator Alcatraz, but expects the demands she laid out in her March 27 order to be met. Lawyers for Florida officials have appealed the order, even though they argue they are already meeting the requirements. Assistant United States Attorney Chad Spraker told the court that federal officials “had no position” on whether to stay the case proceedings as that appeal plays out before a magistrate judge. The ACLU of course has no plans to ask the court to delay the proceedings, either.
“The open defiance of an order like this one, I think, is what sets Alligator Alcatraz aside,” ACLU attorney Carmen Iguina Gonzalez told Truthout. “The government should be respecting individuals’ rights to demand access to their attorneys and to speak up when that is being denied without explanation or without reason.”
She noted the ACLU has won judicial orders to grant legal access in many ICE jails. In an Arizona case, Iguina Gonzalez said “a judge mandated the facility build additional rooms for virtual appointments,” and while the case is ongoing, “at the very least the contractor there complied with that part of the order.”
Renée Feltz is an award-winning investigative journalist whose coverage of immigration, mass incarceration, environmental justice, and more spans 25 years. She is a former news co-director at Democracy Now!.
Editor’s Note: At a moment when the once vaunted model of responsible journalism is overwhelmingly the play thing of self-serving billionaires and their corporate scribes, alternatives of integrity are desperately needed, and ScheerPost is one of them. Please support our independent journalism by contributing to our online donation platform, Network for Good, or send a check to our new PO Box. We can’t thank you enough, and promise to keep bringing you this kind of vital news.
You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.
Please share this story and help us grow our network!
