Amnesty International’s new report, “Torture and Enforced Disappearances in the Sunshine State,” documents severe human rights violations at Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” and Miami’s Krome detention centers. The report concludes that conditions “amount to torture” and describes enforced disappearances, unsanitary facilities, and punitive confinement practices.
Amnesty’s 61‑page report comes on the heels of the organization’s September 2025 research mission to Florida. The organization focuses on the Everglades Detention Facility, nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz,” and the Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami. According to the report, the findings show a “deliberate strategy that dehumanizes and punishes migrants and people seeking safety” on the part of federal and Florida authorities.
Krome sits on the edge of the Everglades. “In 2025, the facility has faced heightened scrutiny after reports of severe overcrowding and several deaths.” Amnesty found delays in intake procedures, “overcrowding in temporary processing areas, inadequate and inaccessible medical care, alarming disciplinary practices including the use of prolonged solitary confinement, and challenges in access to legal representation and due process” at the detention center.
Alligator Alcatraz opened in 2025 and can detain roughly 3,000 people. Amnesty’s investigators describe conditions at Alligator Alcatraz as profoundly unsanitary. Detainees reported “overflowing toilets with fecal matter seeping into where people are sleeping,” constant lighting, and cameras installed above toilets. Amnesty has concluded that the facility operated without the basic tracking systems used in ICE facilities, which lead to “incommunicado detention” and “constitutes enforced disappearances when the whereabouts of a person being detained there is denied to their family.”
The most disturbing revelations involved punitive confinement. AI documented use of “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.”
At Krome, Amnesty has corroborated accounts of overcrowding, medical neglect, and prolonged solitary confinement. One detainee held in isolation pushed a note through the metal flap reading: “Help Me. I’m on Hunger Strike.” He showed investigators his “bruised and mangled hand” and said he had waited 37 days for medical care. According to the report, an ICE official “repeatedly and violently slammed the metal flap against the injured man’s hands and forced [Amnesty] out of the solitary confinement area.”
The organization says the “use of prolonged solitary confinement at Krome and the use of the ‘box’ at ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ amount to torture or other ill‑treatment in violation of international law.”
Of the 25 people that have died in ICE custody during the 2025 fiscal year, Amnesty notes, six died while detained in Florida, including four at Krome.
At Alligator Alcatraz, Amnesty alleges detainees were effectively “disappeared.” As the report puts it, “The absence of registration or tracking mechanisms for those detained at Alligator Alcatraz facilitates incommunicado detention, and constitutes enforced disappearances when the whereabouts of a person being detained there is denied to their family, and they are not allowed to contact their lawyer.”
The budget for Alligator Alcatraz has already topped $360 million and “is projected to require approximately $450 million USD annually to operate once it is fully functional,” according to the report.
Federal officials have rejected previous criticism about Alligator Alcatraz. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said: “Nearly every single day, my office responds to media questions on FALSE allegations about Alligator Alcatraz. The media is clearly desperate for these allegations of inhumane conditions at this facility to be true. … Here are the facts: Alligator Alcatraz does meet federal detention standards,” according to the Miami Herald.
The report compares the punitive practices at Alligator Alcatraz to torture methods used at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. One detainee told investigators: “It’s a copy of Guantánamo. The conditions are inhuman.” Another said: “Any time that anyone demanded that our rights be respected, they were punished.”
The report concludes that “the detention of asylum seekers and migrants is the norm, not the exception” under international humanitarian law. And the conditions which these detainees face at Alligator Alcatraz and Krome “fall far below international human rights standard.”
In Amnesty’s words, Florida’s detention centers violated international law. As the report states, “Immigration enforcement cannot operate outside the rule of law or exempt itself from human rights standards. What we are seeing in Florida should alarm the entire region.”