A group of attorneys bringing a class-action lawsuit against Alligator Alcatraz said detainees at the Florida facility have been denied the ability to meet with legal representation and that lawyers have been unable to contact their clients or find the proper venue to contest their detentions in court.
The immigration attorneys argued in federal court Monday that the conditions at the facility were an “emergency situation,” The Associated Press reported.
“Officers at ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ are going around trying to force people to sign deportation orders without the ability to speak to counsel,” said Eunice Cho, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union.
The complaint, filed July 16, includes statements from several attorneys who said they had been unable to locate their clients after they were taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In one case, they said, ICE’s detainee locator still did not show that their clients were being held at Alligator Alcatraz.
Trying to arrange contact was also near-impossible, the attorneys said.
In several cases, messages sent to an email address given to them at the facility went undelivered, and inquiries on how to contact clients went unanswered.
One lawyer received confirmation for a one-hour virtual visit at an unspecified time, only for it to be canceled, the complaint said.
“Attorneys have thus had to go through extreme measures to try and find any information to make contact with clients,” the complaint reads.
In several cases, lawyers drove to the facility, located deep in the Florida Everglades, to attempt an in-person visit, only to be turned away.
The complaint also contends that detainees’ communication to the outside world is restricted to paid, five-minute phone calls that are monitored and recorded, which makes confidential attorney-client communication impossible, the attorneys said.
Nicholas Meros, a lawyer representing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), said in federal court Monday that the facility has since allowed attorneys to make in-person visits and set up video conference rooms where detainees can make calls.
There were a “number of facts,” he said, that had changed since the complaint was first filed.
The class-action complaint is the second lawsuit filed against Alligator Alcatraz after a coalition of environmental groups sued in June to block its construction.
Judge Rodolfo Ruiz did not make an immediate ruling in court Monday and set a briefing schedule ending in an in-person hearing on Aug. 18. The Associated Press reported the judge warned that “attempts to transform the court into the warden of ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ is not going to happen here.”
The civil rights attorneys also said in their complaint that they had been unable to determine where to file motions to request a bond hearing for their clients. While the Department of Justice maintains a list of the detention centers supervised by individual immigration courts, Alligator Alcatraz does not appear on the list.
“The government has further made it virtually impossible for detainees, or their counsel, to file documents required to contest their detention with the immigration court,” they wrote. “As a result, detainees held at Alligator Alcatraz effectively have no way to contest their detention.”
The hastily constructed facility has been a flashpoint in the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation campaign, and Democratic lawmakers have raised concerns about conditions for detainees.
The first deportation flights from the Florida facility began leaving last week, DeSantis said Friday. It was unclear where they were transporting detainees.
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