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A DHS Inspector General report confirmed for the first time that 79 detainees at "Alligator Alcatraz" were held in small metal cages — some for close to two hours — that staff called "calming areas."
- Investigators also documented severe overcrowding, contaminated drinking water and insect-infested showers, and found the facility failed to meet multiple federal detention standards.
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DHS defended the facility by pointing to past administrations, but the report shows the agency never acted on the watchdog's recommendations before the site closed in June.
A federal watchdog has now put on the record what advocacy groups alleged months earlier: detainees at Florida's "Alligator Alcatraz" detention center were locked inside small metal cages that staff referred to internally as calming areas. A report released Monday by DHS's Office of Inspector General found that 79 people spent time inside these enclosures between July 2025 and January 2026, in spans that ran from just a few minutes up to close to two hours.
The confirmation lands more than a year after the facility opened on a remote airstrip inside the Everglades, and months after President Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis toured the site and held it up as a template for immigration enforcement nationwide. It also arrives as the administration faces mounting questions over conditions inside its detention network.
A Practice Investigators Call Unprecedented
Inspectors documented small metal enclosures both in an outdoor recreation yard and inside the facility's Special Management Unit. NBC News rounds the outdoor cages down to roughly four feet square, or about 16 square feet, comparing them to a phone booth, while separately citing 18 square feet for the indoor units. CNN, the Associated Press and HuffPost instead attach a precise government measurement, four feet three inches wide and seven feet nine inches tall, to the outdoor enclosures, which works out closer to 18 square feet.
Investigators were blunt about what they saw, warning in the report — as Common Dreams first quoted it — that the setup "presents significant risks to detainee health and safety."
One Detainee Held 26 Minutes as Punishment
Facility staff told inspectors the enclosures were voluntary spaces where people could de-escalate, and that some detainees even asked to use them. But the watchdog's own paperwork undercuts that account: in at least one documented case detailed by News4Jax, a detainee sat inside a cage for 26 minutes after failing to follow a staff order, a use investigators flagged as disciplinary rather than calming.
Crowded Cells, Dirty Water, Bug-Infested Showers
The cages were only part of what inspectors found. On the day of their unannounced visit in January, the site held roughly 1,470 people against a contracted capacity of 1,500, split across eight windowless housing pods with no natural light. Some units packed in as many as 31 people, leaving each detainee with about 28 square feet of personal space — well under the 75-square-foot benchmark cited by The National Desk. Showers ran only three days a week instead of daily, and inspectors photographed insects on shower ceilings. Six of eight detainees interviewed described their drinking water as dirty, with no means of rinsing their cups.
From Amnesty International's Torture Claim to a Federal Admission
None of this is the first time these allegations have surfaced. Amnesty International reported in December, after interviewing former detainees and touring the site, that the enclosures amounted to torture, a claim Florida officials dismissed at the time as a politically motivated fabrication. That report helped trigger a congressional inquiry. What changed this week is the source: rather than an advocacy group or a leaked account, it is DHS's own internal watchdog putting the practice on the record for the first time, describing it as something its inspectors had never encountered before in a facility overseeing ICE detainees.
DHS Pushes Back, but Never Fixed the Problems
Asked to respond, a DHS spokesperson said, according to Jacksonville Today, that the site "was consistent with the same federal detention standards employed by previous administrations," naming both the Biden and Obama presidencies. The agency separately argued it never held authority over daily operations in the first place, since Florida and private contractors ran the facility. What DHS did not do, according to the inspector general, was act on any of the watchdog's ten recommendations while the site was still open. Those recommendations, which included an immediate end to using the enclosures for any purpose, were only closed on paper once the facility itself shut its doors in June, making the fixes moot rather than fulfilled.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Washington Democrat who has pushed for oversight of the facility, said the findings demand consequences. "DHS needs to be dismantled and held accountable for this complete inhumanity," she said in response to the report.
A Watchdog Who Survived Trump's Purge of Inspectors General
The report's existence is itself notable. Since returning to office, President Trump has removed at least 18 inspectors general across the federal government, a mass firing that spared only a handful of agencies, including DHS. That left Joseph Cuffari, who has led the department's watchdog office since 2019, in position to send his own team into the Everglades site on an unannounced, congressionally mandated inspection in January.
The Facility Is Gone, but the Scrutiny Isn't
Alligator Alcatraz stopped taking detainees in mid-June, after Florida had processed somewhere between 22,000 and 25,000 immigrants through the site, figures DeSantis has cited publicly. Its closure hasn't ended the fallout. Lawmakers who opened an inquiry after Amnesty International's report now have federal confirmation of many of the same conditions, and the findings are likely to feature in pending legal challenges and continued demands for accountability over how the site was run.
