About 1,200 Immigrants Who Were in Alligator Alcatraz are Missing

It's like they disappeared into thin air...

By the end of August, the whereabouts of approximately two-thirds of the people detained at Alligator Alcatraz could not be accounted for, according to the Miami Herald. That is a little over 1,200 immigrants of the original 1,800 who were forcefully shipped there.

VIA Esquire.com

Around 800 of the detainees show no record on ICE’s online database, and more than 450 have no location listed. When you search for the detainees, it just instructs you to “call ICE for details”. This could mean that the detainee is being processed, getting transferred between locations, or being deported.

Indeed, some of the detained immigrants could still be at Alligator Alcatraz. But what about all of the detainees with no record in the federal database? Since an August 21 court ruling, the operations at the site were halted, and the facilities’ detainees declined rapidly to below 400 people.

Some of them could have been deported, but even then, according to the internal data obtained by the Miami Herald, most of the detainees didn’t have final deportation/removal orders from a judge before entering the detention center.

Some immigrants who didn’t want to leave were forcefully deported, even though they still technically had the legal right to remain in the United States.

Like the story of a 53-year-old Guatemalan man who had been in the United States since 2001, after he was stopped by the Florida Highway Patrol in Palm Beach, he was sent to Alligator Alcatraz. His attorney, Solomiany, filed a motion for his release on bond. A

He went to his client’s scheduled hearing in Miami on August 1, expecting to see his client, only to be met by a government attorney who informed him that his client had been “accidentally” sent to Guatemala instead of being transferred to Krome before the hearing.

Another previous detainee of Alligator Alcatraz went missing for more than a week once he was removed from the detention center, according to his family. 35-year-old Cuban national Michael Borrego Fernandez was at Alligator Alcatraz for most of July. He was moved to a private-run migrant detention center in San Diego called Otay Mesa Detention Center.

After his transfer, his family did not hear from him for more than a week. He is one of the few detainees who sued Trump and Florida Governor DeSantis’s administration over legal access to the facility. Even though he needed emergency surgery for his stage 4 hemorrhoids while detained at Alligator Alcatraz, after his surgery, for most of his recovery time, he was shackled to the bed.

The confusion of Alligator Alcatraz is used to highlight a dire fact about the U.S. immigration system, one where people are assigned case numbers, transferred from facility to facility, and often get lost in a sea of bureaucracy.

With over 1,200 missing detainees, families have no information, and lawyers are met with silence or some vague referral to "call ICE for information." Most of the missing had no outstanding final deportation orders, but were likely deported or disappeared, without any process.

The testimony of individuals like the Guatemalan man wrongly deported before he even had a chance to see a judge, or Michael Borrego Fernandez, handcuffed to a bed after emergency surgery and gone for a week after being shipped out, shows a system not just broken, but actively dehumanizing. The shutdown of Alligator Alcatraz operations after the August 21 court ruling might have interrupted the detainees' stream, but it has not brought justice or answers.

Until there is accountability and transparency, the question lingers: Where are the disappeared, and who will be held accountable?