Hundreds Are Disappearing from Alligator Alcatraz

In one of the country’s most notorious detention centers, detainees are disappearing from court records and ICE’s online locator system.

By Danielle Han | October 7, 2025 | 9:33am

Photo: Getty Images Politics

Hundreds Are Disappearing from Alligator Alcatraz

Lately, Trump’s been sparking some particularly bizarre headlines. Between baselessly connecting Tylenol with autism, literally shutting down the U.S. government, and telling the U.S. Navy that Democrats are “gnat[s]” to take care of, it feels like one alarming headline has gotten lost in our relentless news cycle: hundreds of people are disappearing from Alligator Alcatraz.

In one of the most egregious detention centers in the country, built as a makeshift facility at the end of June in the Florida Everglades, countless detainees are going missing from court records and the ICE’s online locator system. The Miami Herald, which managed to obtain a few detainee rosters, broke the story on September 16:

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As of the end of August, the whereabouts of two-thirds of more than 1,800 men detained at Alligator Alcatraz during the month of July could not be determined by the Miami Herald. The Herald had obtained the names from two detainee rosters.

Around 800 detainees showed no record on ICE’s online database. More than 450 listed no location and only instructed the user to “Call ICE for details” — a vague notation that attorneys said could mean that a detainee is still being processed, in the middle of a transfer between two sites or about to be deported.

One of the detainees in the acquired rosters was Michael Borrego Fernandez, a Cuban National, who went missing after being detained at Alligator Alcatraz in July. He was moved to another facility in Miami in early August, where he regularly spoke to his mother, wife, and three-year-old daughter. Then, according to ICE’s detainee tracker, he was moved to a privately-run detention site in California around Labor Day. After that transfer, his family did not hear from him for over a week.

“We don’t have anyone by that name,” staffers at the Californian facility told Borrego’s lawyer, who’d used the tracker to find his whereabouts. “You should call ICE.” ICE officials said the opposite. According to the outlet, by the time his family and lawyer heard from him, he’d been inexplicably deported to Mexico.

During his imprisonment, Borrego also endured a hemorrhoid-related surgery, but after staying at a hospital for three days, he was sent back to Alligator Alcatraz, denied adequate medical care, and guards refused him the most basic painkillers. He is one of several detainees suing the Trump and DeSantis administrations for the facility’s mistreatment.

This awful story has been overshadowed by the notoriety surrounding Charlie Kirk’s murder and the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel:

Immigration advocates warned that the Trump administration would “disappear” migrants

Now 1800 men detained at the so-called Alligator Alcatraz gulag can’t be located

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— Adam Cohen (My Personal Views Only) (@axidentaliberal.bsky.social) September 24, 2025 at 5:16 AM

As of now, there are no other state-run facilities like Alligator Alcatraz. But in July, Noem alluded that five other GOP governors are considering similar measures.

Because Alligator Alcatraz is state-run, not all its detainees appear in ICE’s federally managed online locator system, making it easier to deny them due process, legal recourse, or medical treatment. There’s currently no other facility like it, but in July, Kristi Noem said she’s in conversation with five other GOP governors to build similar ones. In August, she told CBS News that “the locations we’re looking at are right by airport runways that will help give us an efficiency that we’ve never had before.” Swap out “efficiency” for “evil”—and her quote makes much more sense.

“What we’re seeing at Alligator Alcatraz is basically a new model of immigration detention, where a state-run facility is operating as an extrajudicial black site, completely outside of the previous models of immigration detention in this country,” Thomas Kennedy, a policy analyst at Florida Immigrant Coalition, explained to Democracy Now! of what he calls the “administrative disappearances.”

It’s “making what was already a terrible system somehow even worse,” he said.

Since running for office, Trump has promised to carry out the largest deportation in American history. And in July, owing to his disgusting megabill, he got $170 billion to help fund it. And while a legal order shut down Alligator Alcatraz in August, citing environmental concerns, that preliminary injunction was overturned in September by a federal appeals court.

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