A detainee at the Florida immigration detention center known as Alligator Alcatraz has been on hunger strike for at least nine days, the latest in a string of detainees to allege being mistreated at the prison in the Everglades.
“Since my life no longer belongs to me, it’s up to them to decide whether I live or die,” detainee Pedro Lorenzo Concepción, 44, told El País from inside the facility.
State officials run the Florida detention camp, housing migrants in a series of hastily assembled tents and chain link enclosures on a converted airstrip as they await federal immigration court and potential deportation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The Independent has contacted the Florida Division of Emergency Management, one of the state agencies overseeing the facility, for comment.
Concepción, who came to the U.S. from Cuba in 2006 but lost his permanent resident status after going to prison, has been in detention since being arrested on July 8 after a check-in at a Florida Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, according to his family.
The Independent has contacted ICE for comment.
On July 22, he went on hunger strike and has collapsed multiple times inside Alligator Alcatraz. During the strike, he was taken to Miami’s Kendall Hospital, according to his family, where he said he sat in handcuffs as doctors tried to get him to eat, but he refused.
“I don’t want food, I refuse any treatment,” reads a document he signed about his protest, obtained by El País. “I didn’t even ask to be taken to the hospital, because I’m fighting for my family and all Cubans, and I belong where my people are, in prison, suffering the same hardship they are.”
The Independent has contacted Kendall Hospital for comment.
Concepción’s wife said she’s worried he could be deported back to Cuba without her or the couple’s two children.
“In a minute, your life falls apart,” she told the paper. “It’s been 19 years of being together.”
Concepción, who said he was shackled and left on a floor at Alligator Alcatraz for more than 10 hours upon his arrival, is not the only one to complain of alleged poor conditions at the facility, which federal officials say they plan to support with millions in reimbursement funds and use as a model for future detention centers.
Other inmates say they have faced poor sanitation and other brutal conditions inside the facility, which sits in the middle of a sweltering swamp.
“They only brought a meal once a day and it has maggots,” Leamsy “La Figura” Izquierdo, a Cuban artist who was housed at the facility, told CBS News. “They never take of the lights for 24 hours. The mosquitoes are as big as elephants.”
The facility is facing lawsuits on environmental and civil rights grounds, with lawyers accusing officials of largely barring them from being able to speak with detainees.
Deportation flights for detainees held at the facility have begun, state officials announced last week.
Earlier this month, Florida news outlets found that among those held at Alligator Alcatraz, only about one-third had a past criminal record, despite officials touting the prison as being designed to hold the worst of the worst.
