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On a recent Sunday afternoon, Arianne Betancourt stood across the road from the infamous Alligator Alcatraz immigrant detention camp that opened last year in Florida by the Everglades. Her 54-year-old Cuban father, Justo Betancourt, is among the roughly 1,500 immigrants detained there.
Before her father’s arrest, Betancourt, a 33-year-old Miami native, spent her days guiding tourists through the city’s most iconic sites like Little Havana and South Beach. Now, she is holding a microphone and a bright orange sign that reads, “Give Justo Betancourt the right to due process.” She peered across the crowd of about 100. When she came to the weekly vigil for the first time, Betancourt told them she was “absolutely broken.” She then added, “Week after week, I’ve come here, and I’ve felt stronger. I feel love, I feel empathy, compassion from absolute strangers.”
“Week after week, I’ve come here, and I’ve felt stronger. I feel love, I feel empathy, compassion from absolute strangers.”
For 31 consecutive weeks, hundreds have gathered at these vigils held outside Alligator Alcatraz, hastily erected by the DeSantis administration in July to house immigrants swept into Trump’s deportation machine. The facility has detained thousands of people since its opening despite a long trail of reports of harsh conditions and a federal lawsuit that has challenged the legality of the detention camp’s opening within the environmentally protected area of Big Cypress National Preserve. Oral arguments in the case are scheduled for April 7.
By now, Betancourt has become a regular presence at the vigils. She hopes that her advocacy will help free her father and other immigrants. Justo Betancourt received an order of removal following his release from prison in 2020 after serving time for drug-related charges. Immigration authorities required him to report to an ICE office in South Florida for yearly check-ins. Then, in July, ICE told him to report every three months. That change troubled Arianne, who was following the news of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants. “I was already mentally preparing myself for the worst outcome,” she recalled, even though family members and friends in Miami didn’t understand why she was so concerned. “I was just like, no, you guys are not paying attention. You’re not seeing the bigger picture. Just because we’re not seeing ICE do the raids that they’re doing elsewhere, it doesn’t mean that they’re not coming for people here, too.”
And indeed, during a routine immigration check-in appointment in October, ICE officers arrested him. Betancourt soon began attending vigils outside Alligator Alcatraz, spoke to local news outlets about her father’s case, and traveled to ICE protests in Chicago and Minneapolis. Just this week, she attended US Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s testimony at a Senate oversight hearing. As Noem left the chamber, Betancourt and others held up photos of people held in immigration detention. She recently quit her tour guide job and was hired as an organizer by the Workers Circle, the organization that is coordinating the so-called Freedom Vigils. Over the past few months, she’s met about 30 families with loved ones in Alligator Alcatraz. Most don’t want to speak out because of the stigma associated with being an immigrant.
“Every time I meet a family, I take on a sense of responsibility,” she said. “You don’t want to speak up, but I’ll speak up for you.”
Arianne Betancourt talking to the press. Philip Cardella Courtesy Noelle Damico
During a summer of rapidly intensifying immigration raids across the country last year, when the Department of Homeland Security faced challenges in finding facilities to house immigrants pending their deportations, the administration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis swiftly constructed an immigration detention center on a little-used airfield surrounded by wetlands. Crews brought in massive tents, generators, kitchen and restroom facilities, and industrial lighting. In a branding exercise that had become part of these facilities—such as Florida’s Deportation Depot and the Speedway Slammer in Indiana—the state dubbed it Alligator Alcatraz. By July, immigrant detainees were being sent there. Detainees are separated into chain-link fenced areas, each containing 32 beds and three toilets.
Soon, reports of mosquito infestations, flooding, poor medical care, and lackluster food and limited water access inundated social media and news reports. Most of the detainees are from Latin America, according to the ACLU. Many, as the Miami Herald reported, do not have criminal records. The facility became the center of lawsuits that are continuing. Additionally, the state has spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to run the facility, and it remains unclear if the federal government will honor the state’s reimbursement request of $608 million, the Herald also reported.
In addition to the dire circumstances reported by detainees, they also have faced problems in their legal efforts to gain release. The ACLU sued federal and Florida officials in July after attorneys reported issues with seeing their clients, and the government’s failure to designate an immigration court that would accept filings from detainees. After the government finally designated an immigration court for Alligator Alcatraz detainees, a federal judge dismissed part of the lawsuit. The ACLU then filed an amended complaint in September with additional claims, including limited virtual visits and outgoing confidential calls between attorneys and their clients.
Attorneys were also required to submit clients’ documents for review by the facility, a practice that Eunice Cho, an ACLU senior attorney on the case, described as “patently unconstitutional.” At an evidentiary hearing in January, two men who had been detained at Alligator Alcatraz testified that they resorted to writing their attorneys’ phone numbers on the walls with bars of soap after guards refused to provide pen and paper, the Miami Herald reported. A decision on the ACLU case is pending. “What we’re asking for is something very basic: provide confidential outgoing legal calls in detention, make sure this information is posted to make sure detainees know it’s available, let attorneys come to the facility without scheduled visits,” Cho said. “It’s nothing out of the ordinary.”
“What we’re asking for is something very basic: provide confidential outgoing legal calls in detention, make sure this information is posted to make sure detainees know it’s available, let attorneys come to the facility without scheduled visits. It’s nothing out of the ordinary.”
Meanwhile, accounts of abuse have continued. In December, Amnesty International released a report that cited limited access to showers, stadium lights on 24 hours a day, and food and water of poor and limited quality. Other treatment “amounts to torture,” the report states, “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 feet attached to restraints on the ground.” The US Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not respond to a request for comment on this report. In a written statement, a spokesperson for the Florida Division of Emergency Management, which runs Alligator Alcatraz, called the report “false.” “No guards are punishing detainees. Officers are highly trained and follow all federal and state detention protocols. Additionally, detainees have access to clean working facilities for hygiene and receive three meals per day.”
Florida’s resistance movement against the current climate of punishing immigration policies has not been as visible as that of other states like Minnesota and New York, where ICE raids in public places have fueled protests. In Florida, many arrests happen quietly, with thousands of people being detained through traffic stops and other interactions with police. Out of Florida’s roughly 400 law enforcement agencies, nearly 90 percent have entered into so-called 287(g) agreements that give local officers the authority to arrest and detain immigrants on behalf of ICE.
The weekly vigils outside Alligator Alcatraz are a testament to the deep opposition to these policies that exists in the state, said Noelle Damico, director of social justice with the Workers Circle, a Jewish social-justice organization that has taken the lead in coordinating the gatherings. People come from all over the state, she said, with buses leaving from Naples and Miami to make the 90-minute drive to the facility. There they gather on a sandy stretch of land outside the detention camp’s entrance, holding signs, “Stop Alligator Alcatraz,” “All People are Created Equal,” “Due Process For All.” Often, families of detainees attend and field calls from their loved ones, placed on speaker mode, and broadcast on a mic. “The feeling is one overall of power and of solidarity with one another,” Damico told me. “We cannot let these people be forgotten for one minute.”
The interest in the Workers Circle vigils has caught on in about 35 other communities across the country as well. “People see these vigils matter,” Damico told me. “They are a fundamental building block in the fight for democracy.”
Betancourt’s father has been in custody for more than 100 days. In January, he was transferred to a Texas detention center and then forced to present himself for deportation to Mexican authorities at the border. But due to his health problems, including diabetes, he was turned away, and ICE transferred him back to Alligator Alcatraz, where he remains. Betancourt acknowledges that her father’s past may prompt less sympathy for his detention compared to those without criminal histories. “Regardless, if they have a criminal record or not,” she told me, “they’re all being treated the same way.” In 2016, her father was convicted on drug charges and possession of a firearm (which he did not use, according to court filings in his case). He served four years in federal prison. When ICE issued its order for removal in 2020, Betancourt reported to his check-ins with immigration and was issued a work permit, court filings state.
He made mistakes, he went to prison, he did his time,” Betancourt told me. Since his release, he’s been a devoted father to his daughters and became a grandfather of a baby girl, she said. When Betancourt started her tour guide business, he cobbled together the cash he had and gave it to her to help her get started. During their phone calls, the father and daughter try to keep the conversation light, but details of his time in detention seep through. He is shackled by his hands and feet when he is in the medical unit. He sometimes does not eat enough to balance his insulin. He’s gone a week without a shower. An attorney recently filed a Habeas Corpus petition to have Justo released on the grounds that his removal order had expired.
No matter what happens in her father’s case, Betancourt says she plans to continue working as an advocate. “As terrible as this whole situation has been, it led me to my purpose,” she said. “To what I want to spend the rest of my life doing.”
