More regarding Gulag Noem aka Alligator Alcatraz
According to the report, the whereabouts of nearly two-thirds of the 1,800 men brought to the facility during the month of July could not be determined
Hundreds of the more than 1,800 men brought to the recently constructed South Florida immigration detention center, branded “Alligator Alcatraz,” have disappeared from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) records, according to new reporting from the Miami Herald.
According to the report, the newspaper could not determine the whereabouts of nearly two-thirds of the 1,800 men brought to the facility during the month of July. Around 800 detainees showed no record in ICE’s database, and more than 450 detainees listed no location and were only instructed to “Call ICE for details.”
It is possible that some of the men detailed in the report could still be detained at Alligator Alcatraz, but unlike federal facilities, the Everglades detention center is run by the state of Florida, which does not maintain a searchable database of people detained at the facility. According to the report, they are also often not included in federally maintained databases.
But that alone would not have accounted for all the detainees without records in the federal database, as the facility’s population had declined rapidly by late August, falling below 400 people due to a federal court ruling essentially halting operations at the site.
The outcomes for the hundreds of detainees have become even more important recently, with a federal appeals court overruling the lower court’s decision, allowing the facility to resume normal operations for now while the case proceeds through the courts.
Some of the detainees that were not able to be located by the outlet may have already been deported, despite the internal data obtained by the Herald showing the vast majority of detainees didn’t have final orders of removal from a judge before entering the facility.
Many of those deportations were a result of detainees deciding to abandon their ongoing immigration cases to put an end to their detention at the facility, which human rights organizations have criticised for its abhorrent conditions.
“It became a game of chicken to see who’s going to blink first, to see if the client’s going to say ‘I don’t want to be detained in these conditions, just send me back,'” Miami immigration attorney Alex Solomiany told the Herald.
However, some of the detainees who didn’t want to voluntarily surrender their immigration cases were also deported, even if they had a legal right to remain in the country. One of Solomiany’s clients is a 53-year-old man from Guatemala who has been in the United States since 2001.
According to the Herald, the man was sent to Alligator Alcatraz after being stopped by the Florida Highway Patrol in Palm Beach County.
Solomiany told the Herald that he filed a motion to be released on bond for the Guatemalan man, who worked as a house painter and is married with children. He then attended a scheduled hearing at the Krome Detention Center in Miami on Aug. 1, expecting to see his client. That’s when an attorney for the government told Solomiany his client had accidentally been deported to Guatemala, instead of being transferred to Krome ahead of the hearing, Solomiany told the Herald.
The attorney is now working with ICE to have his client returned to the U.S.
https://www.themirror.com/news/us-news/two-thirds-detainees-brought-alligator-1407183