A federal judge ruled on Friday that officials at Florida’s state-run immigration jail, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz”, must give attorneys better access to their detained clients.
The order by federal judge Sheri Polster Chappell, from the middle district of Florida, said facility officials must provide access to confidential, private, free and unmonitored outgoing legal telephone calls from people detained in the facility. Polster Chappell also ruled that attorneys are allowed to make unannounced visits to see their clients, bypassing the facility’s pre-scheduling requirement.
The state of Florida opened the detention center in summer 2025 to detain undocumented immigrants caught within the state. Since its opening, the facility has faced severe criticisms of the treatment of detainees.
Amnesty International, the human rights group, published a report in December detailing conditions inside, finding that “people arbitrarily detained in ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ are being held in inhuman and unsanitary conditions, including overflowing toilets with fecal matter seeping into where people are sleeping, limited access to showers, exposure to insects without protective measures, lights on 24 hours a day, poor quality food and water, and lack of privacy”.
The facility is run by the state of Florida, not Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal agency tasked with carrying out the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. Since the Trump administration took office last January, Florida has been aggressively pursuing undocumented immigrants and collaborating with the federal government in its anti-immigrant push.
In July of last year, attorneys and civil rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Americans for Immigrant Justice, sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), ICE, Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, and other Florida agencies and state officials. They claimed the government was blocking attorneys from visiting and providing legal help to detained immigrants inside the detention facility.
According to the advocacy groups, as recently as February, officials required attorneys to schedule in-person legal visits three days in advance. But before they were able to meet, the detained immigrants were transferred to another facility “immediately” before the legal visits.
The facility is run by private contractors hired by the state to run operations there. One of the contractors operating in the facility told the federal court they “never enforced” the three-day requirement.
Additionally, the advocacy groups continued to report to the court that any outgoing calls from their clients were on monitored and recorded phone lines. According to court records, one man detained inside “Alligator Alcatraz” was not able to contact his attorneys and when he asked for help, officers inside the jail told him to contact his family instead “because there was nothing that they could do”.
The federal judge on Friday ordered officials overseeing the remote jail to publish policies allowing attorneys to visit their clients. The judge also ruled that officials would have to provide detainees access to private phone calls to their lawyers.
As part of the state’s push, local, county and state agencies have signed agreements with ICE to help target undocumented immigrants in the state. The program, known by its technical name, 287(g), after a section in the Immigration and Nationality Act, allows local officials to arrest immigrants and turn them over to ICE. The 287(g) program has been accused of perpetuating civil rights abuses.
As of Saturday, there are 344 local law enforcement agencies in Florida coordinating with ICE under the program, according to ICE data reviewed by the Guardian. The 287(g) program is what has allowed the facility to continue operating. According to the records, ICE has a limited role with the facility, but federal officials with the agency are “there every day” at the facility.
DeSantis’s government is spending over $1m a day to run and operate the facility. Although the federal government promised to reimburse the state, recent reporting suggests the reimbursement may not come through.
