Is Alligator Alcatraz empty? ICE says detainees were moved due to hurricanes

Immigrants held at Alligator Alcatraz have been moved to other immigration detention facilities, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, less than a year after the facility opened last summer.

Read more Hialeah mayor driving with flashing red and blue lights when pulled over in Miami

In a statement on Wednesday, a spokesman for ICE confirmed that people were moved for “safety” reasons as “as we enter into hurricane season.”

The federal agency did not clarify whether its statement applied to everyone held in the facility, which state and federal officials have said could be on the verge of closing.

The comments — interpreted by some media outlets and families as an announcement that the controversial facility had been emptied of all detainees — mark the latest mixed message between state and federal officials, after Gov. Ron DeSantis told reporters Tuesday that he didn’t think the state-run facility had been cleared out. He pointed to a recent influx in federal funding for ICE as the reasoning for a potential emptying in the coming weeks, not to hurricanes.

Noelle Damico, director of social justice at the social justice organization The Workers Circle, said the organization plans to “verify their claim that all people have been moved.”

She noted that the reason ICE gave for transferring detainees out — the start of hurricane season — is a reversal, after the state and federal governments opened the facility last July and scoffed at questions about whether they could safely and quickly transfer detainees out of the Everglades ahead of an approaching storm.

“As Floridians will remember, Alligator Alcatraz was opened during hurricane season last year, so their belated concern for the welfare of people detained at Alligator Alcatraz — people who they have shackled and put in torture boxes, denied medical treatment, pepper-bombed, given rotten food — strains credulity,” she said in a statement Wednesday.

Since the facility opened, the state and federal agencies have guarded information about the detention center, including who operated the site and its cost, and have repeatedly refusing to disclose the number of immigrants being held there.

DeSantis said Tuesday that it would be news to him if everyone held at the facility had been moved.

“I don’t think that it’s empty now, at least as of yesterday when I got briefed on it,” he told reporters during a stop in Winter Haven. DeSantis added, though, that he wouldn’t be surprised if it was empty soon, after Congress approved additional funding for the Department of Homeland Security.

Environmental organizations that have filed lawsuits against the state and federal governments for failing to follow federal environmental regulations in building the detention center are also skeptical of what ICE is saying.

Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, said Wednesday that the organization had not “received independent confirmation from ICE about this situation.”

“If we’ve learned anything over the past year is that we can’t take the government officials involved in this project at their word,” she said in a press conference on Wednesday.

Jessica Namath, the founder of Floridians for Public Land, has been spending time outside the facility’s gates, tracking who enters and leaves. She said was still seeing detainee buses, fuel trucks, vendors, and employee cars going in and out of the facility.

“It still looks like business as usual out here,” she said. “It seems like everything is still in operation.”

Read more Miami-Dade might be off the hook for half of planned $46M subsidy for World Cup

Why now?

ICE’s statement comes almost two months after state and federal officials confirmed they were discussing closing the facility, but details have been scarce about where people would be transferred and when the detention center would finally shut its gates.

When U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost, a Democrat from Orlando, visited the facility in May, he said the detention population was at 655 and that he observed signs that the detention center was winding down operations. Frost said that during his visit, he was told the facility was no longer taking in new detainees and that the plan was to let the numbers dwindle to zero.

Advocates and people held in detention say that over the past few weeks, many detainees have been transferred to the nearby Krome North Processing Center, Miami Federal Detention Center or moved to out-of-state facilities.

Arianne Betancourt, a community advocate with The Workers Circle whose father was once held in Alligator Alcatraz, said she had been speaking with family members and detainees who told her that the population had dwindled.

Betancourt said she and other advocates who are stationed outside the detention center’s front gates had observed an increase in the number of people transferred out at the start of the month.

She said some of the people who remained would call her four times a day to provide updates, but she had not heard from any of them since Sunday morning. She said one person locked up told her they were down to about 60 people.

“The few people who were detained that had family, they’re saying that everyone was taken out,” she said.

Another immigrant, who is currently being held at Miami Federal Detention Center, told the Herald that on Monday night, a new group of detainees arrived at the facility from Alligator Alcatraz. Four other immigrants the Herald had been tracking also appeared Tuesday in a federal immigration detention database as now being held at other out-of-state facilities.

How did we get here?

In early May, state and federal officials acknowledged for the first time that they had discussed closing Alligator Alcatraz.

DeSantis confirmed that the discussions had begun in late March, when Markwayne Mullin became the new Homeland secretary, but did not confirm whether a final decision had been made. He punted that to DHS, saying that if the new secretary decided it was not needed, then “we don’t need it.” He said the facility had always been planned to be temporary to support the Trump administration’s mass deportation mandate.

Almost a week later, vendors contracted to help operate the site told the Herald that the DeSantis administration had notified them that the site would close by June. But Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Division of Emergency, told WLPG that the state had “not been told to shut the facility down.”

“We’ve been told to continue to expect individuals,” he said.

Florida has committed at least $1 billion dollars to that effort over the past year, with the expectation that the federal government would reimburse the state $608 million of those expenses — but they only recently received the first installment of those funds.

DHS also skirted questions about the details surrounding the detention center’s closure and how much of the tab it will cover, saying it “continuously evaluates detention needs.”

Mullin said in May in an interview with CBS: “I don’t think we’ve said we’re shutting it down.”

Read more Juneteenth has been a federal holiday for 5 years. But a lot has changed for Black people

Miami Herald staff writer Syra Ortiz Blanes contributed to this report.