Two Former ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Inmates Allege Migrant Detainees Were Confined in a Tiny ‘Box’ at Times

Two prisoners formerly at the Florida immigrant detention camp dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” told NOTUS they witnessed detainees being put in “the box,” a small cage exposed to the harsh elements of the swamp that guards used to confine and punish detainees.

This type of cage was described in an Amnesty International report earlier this month that decried “extreme forms of punishment and torture.”

Amnesty reported that four interviewed detainees described a “2x2 foot cage-like structure” kept in the prison yard. The two men who spoke to NOTUS alleged that “the box” was roughly a meter wide and a meter deep, with enough space to stand — but not enough to sleep lying down flat — forcing exhausted prisoners to sit and lean against the metal bars.

“It was like a dog crate,” said Rogelio Enrique Bolufé Izquierdo, a Cuban migrant currently jailed in New Mexico pending his deportation. “It was maybe two meters tall, like a little box. A little larger than a coffin.”

And that meant hours trapped in a pen under the scorching South Florida summer sun in the heart of the intensely humid Big Cypress National Preserve. Bolufé remembers dreading most the thought of being trapped inside and barely being able to move while the swamp’s massive gallinipper mosquitoes attacked.

“The mosquitoes were huge. And if someone tells you they’ll put you in the cage, you immediately get scared,” he said.

A fellow inmate in New Mexico, who did not want to be identified out of fear of reprisal but whom Bolufé said spent time with him at “Alcatraz,” also recalled seeing “the box.” This second man remembered that it was a tight, cramped space that was kept outside as a constant reminder for any inmates passing by. He recalled seeing several men who were subjected to “the box” and said punished inmates would be escorted to the cage in handcuffs, then have them removed on their way inside the confined space.

Bolufé said guards often scared detainees by threatening to put them in “the box” as a form of solitary confinement.

“There’s a place here called the ‘hole,’” he said, referring to the solitary confinement zone at the immigration jail in New Mexico. “But since there wasn’t a ‘hole’ at Alcatraz, they had the dog crate. They created that ‘box.’”

Both men spoke to NOTUS during a phone interview conducted in Spanish on Friday evening from the Torrance County Detention Center, a private prison run by the corporation CoreCivic that has been accused of mistreating prisoners.

Some high-security federal prisons punish inmates with solitary confinement in small and windowless rooms. But use of “the box” would appear to be new. Last week, the national security journalist Spencer Ackerman likened the practice to one of the most notorious CIA “black site” torture techniques, but it is now being used for domestic immigrant detainees. The CIA torture box was just small enough for a kneeling man to fit with his hands bound.

The hastily constructed immigration detention camp in Florida has had a short but sordid history.

It was first proposed by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier as a method to support the Trump administration’s rapid and widening deportation arrests.

“If somebody were to get out, there’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Only the alligators and pythons are waiting. That’s why I like to call it Alligator Alcatraz,” Uthmeier told Fox News in June.

Just a month later, journalists tracked the more than $225 million in no-bid contracts awarded by Gov. Ron DeSantis to quickly build and staff the center — and how documents were subsequently removed from the state’s website. DeSantis relied heavily on bending emergency powers to get it done.

In court, state officials pointed to emergency gubernatorial powers while the Department of Homeland Security claimed this was entirely a state operation — despite site visits from President Donald Trump, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and an explicit promise that the feds would reimburse the state, which FEMA eventually did to the tune of $608 million.

A federal judge in August determined the facility was causing significant damage to the Florida Everglades and gave the state 60 days to shut it down. In September, a federal appellate panel temporarily paused the order to dismantle the site while the case is litigated in the higher court.

Faced with questions on Monday about guards using “the box” as a form of punishment at the center, the governor’s office denied everything.

“This ‘report’ is nothing more than a politically motivated attack. None of these fabrications are true. In fact, running these allegations without any evidence whatsoever could jeopardize the safety and security of our staff and those being housed at Alligator Alcatraz,” DeSantis’ press secretary, Molly Best, said in an email.

DHS responded within two minutes with a previously prepared, 372-word statement from Tricia McLaughlin, the department’s assistant secretary for public affairs, that claimed “detainees are NOT being held in solitary confinement.”

“Another day and another hoax about Alligator Alcatraz,” the statement said. “Any allegations of inhumane conditions are FALSE. When will the media stop peddling hoaxes about illegal alien detention centers and start focusing on American victims of illegal alien crime?”

Bolufé, a 43-year-old Cuban, was picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents after he was arrested in Hialeah, Florida, where he was the rear passenger in someone else’s car and found with what a police officer described as “small clear plastic baggie with white powdery substance resembling cocaine” in his right pants pocket.

In an unsigned email, the DHS public affairs team told NOTUS Bolufé “had been living in the U.S. for several years after his B-2 tourist visa expired.”

Bolufé said he was relieved that he never spent time in “the box,” but he was emphatic that every inmate suffered nonetheless. He echoed claims from other inmates that the detention center — housed in a large tent — was kept freezing cold, with inmates only wearing two-piece orange prison uniforms while guards wore coats, hats, scarves and gloves. Bolufé said he was, for a time, shackled to the ground and could only move a foot or two in any direction — and bright lights on around the clock kept him awake.

“To be subjected to 20 hours without eating or sleeping in the cold and being chained to the ground, that’s torture,” he told NOTUS. “This is a torture concentration camp.”