Florida built an immigration detention camp in the Everglades in the summer of 2025 and called it "Alligator Alcatraz." Republicans praised it.

Now the federal government's own watchdog has been inside. On September 14, the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General made public a 33-page report from a surprise inspection of the camp on January 21, 2026.

Its most striking finding: between July 17, 2025, and January 18, 2026, the camp confined 79 detainees in small metal enclosures — each about 4 feet 3 inches wide, 4 feet 3 inches deep and 7 feet 9 inches tall, or roughly 18 square feet of floor space — for anywhere from several minutes to nearly two hours. Inspectors saw at least two of the enclosures standing in the camp's outdoor recreation areas.

Staff called them "calming areas."

The inspectors called them something else:

"The use of such restrictive spaces is highly unconventional and does not align with standards for humane treatment."

What the inspectors found

The report says use of the metal enclosures "for any reason is unprecedented" among the detention facilities the inspector general has checked, and "presents significant risks to detainee health and safety." Staff told inspectors that detainees asked to go inside and were not locked in. The inspectors saw locking mechanisms on the cages anyway. The average stay was just under an hour.

Staff described the cages as a place for detainees to calm down and have time alone. But the inspectors found at least one case where a cage may have been used as a disciplinary tool: facility records show one man spent 26 minutes in a cage because he "Failed to comply with a lawful command." ICE officials told the inspectors the cages were used for "disciplinary issues, crisis intervention, housing changes, and conflicts among detainees."

The cages were only the start. The camp also failed to meet detention standards for living space, medical care, food, hygiene and recreation:

• Crowding. Detention standards call for at least 75 square feet per person. At full capacity, the camp's housing units gave each detainee 28. Not one of the eight housing units in the pod inspectors measured met the standard.
• Showers three days a week. Detainees showered only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The standard is daily.
• Bugs. Inspectors found the showers infested with small bugs on the ceilings. Of eight detainees interviewed, seven said the facility was not clean.
• Dirty water. Six of those eight said they had no access to clean drinking water. Detainees drew water from shared 5-gallon containers and said they couldn't clean their plastic cups, which inspectors found sitting on floors, bed rails and bathroom ledges.
• Warm freezers. A food freezer read 10 degrees, then 14 degrees 17 minutes later. Frozen food is supposed to be kept at zero.
• Medical care. The medical contractor didn't use standard forms to document its monitoring of detainees at risk of drug or alcohol withdrawal.
• Almost no exercise. Detainees got one hour of recreation, three days a week.

The inspectors made 10 recommendations, including the obvious one: stop putting people in the cages "for any reason or amount of time." Then they closed every one of them on paper, because the camp had already stopped operating in June.

DHS's written response, the report says, "did not address our recommendations." Instead the department argued that Florida, not DHS, ran the place day to day.

Who ran it — and who paid for it

According to the report, the camp was set up under an emergency order signed by Governor Ron DeSantis and opened on July 3, 2025. A company hired by the Florida Division of Emergency Management employed the warden and staff. Even so, the inspectors wrote, the facility held ICE detainees, so ICE's detention standards applied.

Federal taxpayers are on the hook too. FEMA set aside $608.4 million for the state's detention camp in September 2025 and paid out $58.3 million in May 2026, the report says.

DeSantis's communications director, Alex Lanfranconi, responded to the report in a statement quoted by the Washington Sun:

"The left-wing media wants to focus on a confinement area for violent criminal aliens who have proven they cannot remain peaceful while awaiting deportation. While it adheres to all federal standards for criminal confinement, we'd make it even smaller if we could."

That is the governor's office saying it would shrink a cage the federal inspector general says already fails humane-treatment standards. DeSantis himself said, "I haven't read this report."

DeSantis isn't on our site. But four Republicans who are went out of their way to champion this camp.

Byron Donalds: a "blueprint," and now "busy work"

On July 1, 2025, Byron Donalds was among the officials who joined President Trump at a roundtable after touring the camp. The same day he went on Fox News and held it up as a model for the country:

"One, they were able to get that done very, very quickly. That's to the credit of the governor and his team. But it's also a blueprint for other states."

On September 14 — the day the inspector general's report came out — Donalds, now the Republican nominee for governor, was asked about it at a campaign stop. He said he hadn't read it, and waved off any investigation:

"Now that that facility has been closed, calling for an investigation on something that no longer is in operation honestly sounds more like busy work than anything else."

Asked whether the companies that built and ran the camp should be allowed to keep bidding on state work, he said, "I don't see why we wouldn't."

If he wins in November, whether those contractors get more state work would be up to him. We've already reported that the private prison company GEO Group was one of the top 10 sources of money to his campaign and leadership PAC in the 2024 cycle.

Ashley Moody: "activist litigants" and an "Obama era judge"

In August 2025, in a lawsuit brought by environmental groups and the Miccosukee Tribe under a federal environmental-review law, a federal judge ordered the camp shut down. Senator Ashley Moody went on Fox Business and attacked the ruling:

"And this Obama era judge played right into the hands of these activist litigants and has said, no, you have to shut down Alligator Alcatraz over a rule, a law, that was never intended to address a state facility..."

In May 2026, as DeSantis talked about breaking the facility down, Moody said it had done its job: "I think you're hearing from Florida officials that they feel it's served its purpose, and we can now move on to more permanent structures."

By then, according to the inspector general, the camp's own records showed 79 people had been put in those metal cages between July 2025 and January 2026.

Maria Elvira Salazar: "clean" cages and "soft" beds

Maria Elvira Salazar toured the camp in July 2025. Afterward she went on Fox & Friends to push back on how Democrats had described it. According to Fox News, she described the cages as "clean" and the beds as "soft," and said:

"It meets the highest standards for any federal facility that we've done."

The inspector general's report is a list of standards the camp did not meet — living space, medical care, food, hygiene and recreation — plus a cage practice the inspectors called unprecedented.

Bobby Charles: "We need our own version in Maine"

Florida Republicans weren't the only ones cheering. On July 3, 2025, the day the camp began operating, Bobby Charles, a Republican running for governor of Maine, posted:

"Kudos to @RonDeSantis for Alligator Alcatraz. We need our own version in Maine. Any ideas on names?"

We've written before about Charles's plan to ask Trump's border czar to put ICE agents at Maine's polling places.

Not the only report this summer

It isn't the only government report this summer on what goes on inside immigration detention. On July 31, Senate Judiciary Committee staff released a report on the ICE family detention center in Dilley, Texas, that described a "top-down culture of cruelty".

What the report shows

The Homeland Security inspector general found that Alligator Alcatraz confined 79 detainees in small metal enclosures with about 18 square feet of floor space, gave detainees 28 square feet each against a 75-square-foot standard, and failed standards for medical care, food, hygiene and recreation. Byron Donalds called the camp "a blueprint for other states" and now calls investigating it "busy work." Ashley Moody attacked the judge who ordered it shut down, and Maria Elvira Salazar said it "meets the highest standards" after touring it. DeSantis's office says it would make the cages smaller if it could.

Source

Unannounced Inspection of ICE's Florida Soft-Sided Facility in Ochopee, Florida (OIG-26-22) — DHS Office of Inspector General, September 11, 2026; DHS Watchdog Says Detainees Were Put in Small Cages at 'Alligator Alcatraz' — Jackie Llanos, Washington Sun, September 14, 2026; and 'Nothing Short of Torture': Critics Decry Abuse Affirmed by DHS Alligator Alcatraz Probe — Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams, September 14, 2026. Photo: President Trump and then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem touring Alligator Alcatraz on July 1, 2025 (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images, via Common Dreams).