OUR DAILY THREAD: Alligator Gitmo
What's in the box?
THE SET-UP: “Hey, you actually can force-feed!”
That was a young Navy JAG officer’s response when a commanding officer sought a way to “combat” a widespread hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay in 2006. And, after the Pentagon concurred, that’s exactly what happened. Per The Washington Post:
Detainees were strapped into a chair and a lubricated tube was stuffed down their nose so a nurse could pour down two cans of a protein drink, according to military records. The detainees’ lawyers tried and failed to stop the painful practice, arguing that it violated international torture conventions.
That’s just a taste of what the then “fresh out of Harvard Law School” officer saw throughout a year he spent meeting “directly with lawyers and detainees to hear their complaints as they were held without formal charges.” Again, per The Post:
DeSantis had an up-close view of some of the most disturbing incidents at the detention camp during one of its most violent years, according to a review by The Washington Post of public records, media reports and dozens of interviews, including with DeSantis’s commanding officer, the prison warden, other base officials, former detainees and defense lawyers.
Yup. Long before now-Governor Ron DeSantis gleefully opened the intentionally bleak “Alligator Alcatraz” facility, he proudly served as legal counsel at one of the world’s most notorious prisons … and he did so at a time when the US was defiantly claiming torture wasn’t torture.
In the case of the forced feedings, DeSantis later referred to the hunger strikes as “part of a ‘jihad’ against the United States,” and he dismissed “claims of abuse from detainees and their lawyers as attempts to work the system.”
So, it should come as no surprise that Gov. DeSantis dismissed out of hand a new report from Amnesty International detailing claims of abuse at Alligator Alcatraz and the Krome detainee processing center. In fact, DeSantis said the immigrants held at Alligator Alcatraz were being “coddled” because they have access to “a mess hall, a library and other amenities.”
Amnesty summarized some of the “amenities” being lavished on “coddled” detainees at the two facilities:
[P]eople arbitrarily detained in “Alligator Alcatraz” are living 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 – including cameras above the toilets.
People interviewed shared that access to medical care is inconsistent, inadequate, or denied all together, placing individuals at serious risk of physical and mental harm. People reported being always shackled when they were outside their cage. Other treatment those detained have endured amounts to torture, including being put in the “box”, described as a 2×2 foot cage-like structure people are put in as punishment – sometimes for hours at a time exposed to the elements with hardly any water – with their hands and feet attached to restraints on the ground.
Is the “box” is one the “other amenities” DeSantis referred to? Or, like rendering suspects off the street, holding detainees incommunicado and DeSantis himself, is it another ominous link to the Global War On Terror? In the specific case of the “box,” Veteran national security journalist Spencer Ackerman recognized it as one of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the CIA’s playbook:
A “2x2 cage-like structure… [an] extremely small space that prevents sitting, lying or changing position” has dimensions startlingly reminiscent of those the Senate documented in the black sites. The major difference is that in Florida, the Small Box is exposed to the elements and constructed as a barred cage, whereas in Catseye, it was a closed structure inside the larger closed structure of the black site. And in Florida, the box is used as punishment. According to one of the Alligator Alcatraz survivors in the Amnesty report, people were put into the box simply for alerting the guards to someone’s need for medication. “They were taken to ‘the box’ and punished for trying to help me,” the person told Amnesty.
And that’s not the only example linking DeSantis the JAG officer with DeSantis the Governor:
Amnesty International witnessed firsthand the disciplinary action taken against individuals detained at Krome. When touring the Special Management Unit of the facility, a man being held in solitary confinement put a sign through the metal flap opening in the door saying, “Help Me. I’m on Hunger Strike.” Amnesty International staff asked if they could speak with the individual and were initially allowed. Kneeling to hear the man through the metal flap, Amnesty International was told by ICE officials that the man had a broken hand and was being held in solitary confinement because he was on a hunger strike. The man showed Amnesty his bruised and mangled hand and said he had been waiting 37 days to receive medical attention for his hand. As the man was describing his injuries, an ICE official repeatedly and violently slammed the metal flap against the injured man’s hands and forced Amnesty International out of the solitary confinement area stating, “This is a detained population. They can be dangerous. Allow security to do their jobs, also he’s not on a hunger strike. He ate yesterday and today.”
You can almost hear DeSantis writing off the hunger strike as a ploy by Tren de Aragua to make Trump’s mass deportation look bad. He didn’t do that, but he did reportedly “scoff” at the idea that detainees were kept in a ‘black box.” Said DeSantis:
“You have a lot of criminal aliens. If you look at their rap sheets, you’ve got people that are sexual predators, you’ve got people that have committed, you know, really serious offenses. They shouldn’t have been in this country to begin with. And now they’re making claims, ‘Oh, they’re being abused.’ None of that is substantiated.”
Like the many of the men who cycled through Guantanamo Bay, the detainees who were snatched from their homes, cars and workplaces are presumed guilty until proven innocent. And anyone who dares question that presumption or evokes “the rule of law” and/or “due process” is likely to be attacked for siding with rapists, murderers and violent criminal gangs.
It was an effective technique when the collapsing towers were still being replayed to a traumatized nation and the main suspect was still at large. Video landscapers and street vendors being ripped from their livelihoods doesn’t have quite the same indelible impact.
Regardless, DeSantis and Trump have assured the public that Alligator Alcatraz is, like Gitmo, a place for the “worst of the worst.” Again, like Gitmo, the facts tell a different story.
NBC 6 South Florida got access to a “huge trove of data released last week by ICE” and their investigative unit found a couple holes in the narrative peddled by both DeSantis and Trump:
Gov. Ron DeSantis falsely stated on July 25 that everyone being housed there had a final order of deportation…
…but…
...only 31% of the more than 1,200 men held there on July 25 had a final order of removal, according to the ICE detentions database. Nearly 70% did not.
Most of the 1,239 still had no final order as of Oct. 15, the last day entered in the data ICE released last week to the University of California, Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project, which obtained them through a lawsuit brought against ICE.
There’s a fairly blatant lie. As for Alligator Alcatraz holding “a lot of criminal aliens” with long “rap sheets” filled with “really serious offenses”:
About one-in-four of the more than 6,700 men had what ICE considers a criminal conviction, and the “most serious conviction” recorded by ICE for about 300 of the more than 1,700 with a “criminal conviction” were traffic offenses – not including driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol, hit-and-run or vehicular manslaughter.
When you exclude those non-DUI traffic offenses from the “convicted criminal” population, the data reveals about 22% of those who entered the facility since July have criminal convictions more serious than those traffic offenses.
Nearly a third have no criminal histories at all and the rest, 43 percent, had pending criminal charges, the types of which are not provided in the data.
In all, including all violent crimes, about 7% of the more than 6,700 men booked there before Oct. 16 had their most serious conviction for a violent crime, according to the NBC6 analysis of the data.
That’s at a facility supposedly reserved for the '“worst of the worst.” Imagine, then, what the bigger picture looks like when you take that 7% number and project it nationally. It would seem to indicate that a lot of the people being caught up in the foggy frenzy are far from the worst. And now they’ve found themselves imprisoned in a Kafkaesque nightmare.
Once again, Guantanamo Bay reverberates. Spencer Ackerman has a pretty good explanation why we are still hearing those echoes today:
Here we have Florida jailers using CIA-pedigreed torture techniques on migrants accused of being in the country without proper authorization, a civil, not criminal, violation. I have many questions about whose idea it was to import the confinement box to Alligator Alcatraz. But in the absence of answers to them at present, I submit to you that its appearance here, structurally speaking, is the direct result of there being no criminal or even substantial political penalties for the architects of the torture program, either at Langley or within the Bush administration. When there is no consequence for torture, torture will persist, going into abeyance—at most—until politically empowered sadists reach for a tool of domination. The lack of consequence ensures it is a matter of time before people who owe their positions of authority to declarations that they seek to dehumanize the vulnerable play a sick game of Well, if we did this to these Terrorists there, why not to these other Criminals here…
Here’s hoping America comes out the other side of this with an appetite for prosecution. - jp
Torture and enforced disappearances in the Sunshine State: Human rights violations at “Alligator Alcatraz” and Krome in Florida
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/AMR51/0511/2025/en/
ICE threatened to dump migrants in Mexico after ‘mental torture’ and ‘crushed genitals’ at Fort Bliss, complaint alleges
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/ice-fort-bliss-army-detention-center-b2880562.html
This Prison Rehabilitated Inmates. Until ICE Paid to Fill It With Immigrants
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/07/us/nebraska-prison-mccook-ice-immigrants-detention-trump.html
For-Profit School Opening in For-Profit ICE Family Prison
https://prospect.org/2025/12/10/for-profit-school-opening-in-for-profit-ice-family-prison/