Video above: Lawsuit filed by lawmakers denied access to Wannial Catraz
Miami (AP) – Food bugs. Non-flush toilets, flooding the floor with fecal waste. Days without showers or prescription drugs. Mosquitoes and insects everywhere. Lights all night. An air conditioner suddenly closed amid a tropical fever. Detainees were forced to use recorded telephone lines to talk to lawyers and loved ones.
Just days after President Donald Trump visited the Florida Everglades’ new immigration detention center, authorities are called “Crocodile Alcatraz.”
Lawyers, advocates, detainees and families competed to build on an isolated runway surrounded by swampland. The center began accepting detainees on July 2nd.
“These are people with inherent rights and have the right to dignity,” said immigration lawyer Josephine Arroyo. “And they are violating many of their rights by putting them there.”
Government officials have firmly challenged the terms described by the detainees, their lawyers and their families, but have provided little detail and denied access to the media. The aired tour for Trump and DeSantis showed a row of chain link cages, each containing dozens of bunk beds under a large white tent.
“Reporting on the conditions of the facility is completely false. The facility meets all required standards and is functioning properly,” said Stephanie Hartman, a spokesman for the Florida Emergency Management Department, which built the center.
A group of democratic lawmakers sued the DeSantis administration for access. The administration is allowing state legislators and members of the legislature to visit the site on Saturday, July 12th.
Lawyer and family explanations are different from government “models”
Families and lawyers who spoke with the Associated Press pushed detainee accounts where they call them, descriptions of places that are unsanitary and lack proper medical care, into a state of extreme distress.
These conditions will be other immigration detention centres that advocates and staff have warned that they have “advanced” about unsanitary confinement, medical negligence and food and water shortages, immigration attorney Atara Eig said.
Trump and his allies have praised the rigour and remoteness of the detention center as a “worst, worst, worst,” and as a national model for deterrence needed to persuade immigrants to “declare themselves” from the United States.
However, some of the people locked inside the chain link enclosures are without criminal history and at least one teenager, the lawyer told the Associated Press.
Concerns regarding medical and drug shortages
Immigration attorney Katie Blankenship explained concerns about the lack of medical care at the facility and passed the accounts on a 35-year-old Cuban client who told his wife that she would go to detainees for a few days without a shower. The toilet is in the same space as the bunk bed and cannot handle their needs, she said.
The wife, the mother of a 28-year-old green card holder and a two-year-old daughter of a couple who are US citizens, passed on his complaints to the Associated Press. Fearing government retaliation against her and her detained husband, she asked not to be identified.
“They’re bathing and washing their mouths, the toilets are overflowing and the floor is overflowing with piss and poop,” the woman told the Associated Press. “They eat once a day and eat for two minutes. There are insects in their diet,” she added.
The woman said the detainees “everyone had taken a hunger strike” Thursday night.
“There are days when I don’t know anything about him until the evening,” she explained to me that she was waiting for his phone, interrupted every three minutes by the announcement that the conversation was being recorded.
There are no meetings with lawyers
Detainees’ lawyers say their rights to the rights of the legitimate process are one of many constitutional protections that have been denied.
Blankenship is one of the lawyers who have been denied access. After travelling to a remote facility and waiting to talk to a 15-year-old Mexican teenager with a client without criminal charges, she was relegated to a security guard who told her to wait for a call in 48 hours to notify her when she returned.
“Well, what phone number can I follow up with? There’s nothing,” recalls Blankenship. “You have a legitimate process obligation, and this is a violation of that.”
Arroyo’s client is a 36-year-old Mexican man who came to the United States as a child and has been detained at the Center since July 5 after being greeted to drive on a suspended license in Orange County, Florida. He is a beneficiary of the DACA program and was created to protect young adults who were brought to the United States as children from deportation and who provided work permits.
Blankenship’s Cuban client was told he would pay the bond and be released in Miami on criminal charges, but was taken into custody and transferred to the Everglades.
EIG is seeking releases of clients in their 50s with no criminal history and will not have removal stays. That is, the government cannot legally expel him while he sues. However, she was unable to get a bond hearing. She heard an immigration court in Miami’s Chrome Detention Center “may be heard” from an Everglades facility, but as of Friday they were still waiting.
“Jurisdiction remains an issue,” Eig said, adding that “the question of who is in charge here and there is a great concern.”
