Guards at a state-run immigration detention facility in Florida’s Everglades, known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” allegedly severely beat and pepper-sprayed detainees earlier this month, according to a lawyer representing two of them.
In a court declaration, lawyer Katherine Blankenship said her clients and other detainees were targeted after they complained on April 2 about being unable to access working phones. The phones, which were not operational, serve as detainees’ main means of communicating with family members and legal counsel.
Blankenship stated that guards began taunting those held in a cell before becoming “more aggressive and were yelling and threatening to enter the cage.”
When one detainee approached a guard, he was punched in the face. The guards then started beating other detainees in the cell.
One of Blankenship’s clients was punched in the right eye, thrown to the floor and beaten by several guards. He was kicked in the head and his shoulder and arm were injured. A guard put his knee on the detainee’s neck while restraining him, according to the attorney’s declaration, which included a photo made during a video call almost a week later showing the detainee with a bruised eye.
“The officers beat several people during this incident and broke another detained individual’s wrist,” Blankenship wrote. The detainee whose wrist was broken is not one of her clients.
Phone service was restored the next day without any explanation for why it was cut off.
The Florida Department of Emergency Management didn’t respond to questions emailed Wednesday about the incident.
Blankenship’s declaration was included in a court filing accusing state and federal officials of failing to comply with a federal judge’s preliminary injunction last month ordering detention center officials to provide access to timely, free, confidential, unmonitored and unrecorded outgoing legal calls. U.S. District Judge Sheri Polster Chappell in Fort Myers, Florida also said facility officials must provide at least one operable telephone for every 25 people held in the facility.
The judge’s order came in a response to a lawsuit that claimed detainees’ First Amendment rights were being violated.
State officials have denied restricting detainees’ access to their attorneys and cited security and staffing reasons for any challenges. Federal officials who also are defendants denied that detainees’ First Amendment rights were violated.
The Everglades facility was built last summer at a remote airstrip by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration to support President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. Florida also has built a second immigration detention center in north Florida.
During a visit last week to the detention center, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida Democrat, said she wasn’t given the chance to talk to detainees. She described conditions at the detention center as “inhumane.”
“The way the detainees are housed is cruel and unnecessary,” she said.
