Detainees at Alligator Alcatraz Have Been Quietly Disappearing From the Site
Hundreds of the detainees at Alligator Alcatraz have vanished. We don’t know where they are.
I want you to imagine what it feels like when a person you love goes missing.
It’s a normal day, no major events, nothing special about it. You’re toiling away at work for most of it, bored out of your mind as you type away at your keyboard, walk the factory floor or ring up customers at the counter.
You’re tired, you’re looking forward to getting off work and making a quick dinner before relaxing for the rest of the night. Maybe you’ll try that viral pasta recipe that’s been making waves on TikTok.
On your way out the door, you get a phone call from one of your relatives. They sound worried.
“Hey, have you heard from [your loved one] today? I’ve been trying to call them all day, and they won’t pick up.”
Well, no. But that’s not necessarily unusual… except for the times you live in. These days, nobody in your community would go that long without telling their family where they were.
It isn’t safe to be alone. It isn’t safe to be out of contact and easy to isolate.
You feel the chill down your spine, and you hang up to try calling their number. No answer. You call their job. They aren’t there. You call the hospital in case they were hurt and needed to see a doctor. Nothing. Check the news, nothing. You try the police station. Nothing.
You go by their apartment building; their car is gone, nobody is home. Their neighbours shrug their shoulders. They left that morning for work like they always do, and never came back. Their home hasn’t been broken into or anything, it’s exactly like it was when they left.
A family member calls you, and lets you know the missing person’s car is sitting in the parking lot of their workplace. Their coworkers say they walked out the door to grab lunch nearby, but they never clocked back in. They’ve been gone for hours.
You and your family members hit the street and start asking the nearby restaurants and stores if they saw anything unusual today. You bring a picture of your loved one to show them, hoping somebody might have talked to them.
When you check the coffee shop down the street, you hit paydirt. The girl behind the counter tells you that they saw a person stopped by masked men in the parking lot around noon.
They shoved your loved one in a van and took them away. The only identification that the kidnappers had on them was a ‘Federal Agent’ stamp on their vests.
Imagine hearing those words. And then imagine never hearing from that loved one again.
And now that you’ve had a moment to sit with that awful feeling, I want you to realize that this is reality for thousands of families in the United States today.
For far too many people in the United States, that story is not a work of fiction. They’re living through that hell right now, wondering what happened to somebody they love and never getting a clear answer.
Since taking office for his second term, Donald Trump and the Republican party have made it their personal mission to extend human suffering.
From defunding pediatric cancer research all the way to stripping seniors of their much-needed food assistance, the Trump administration has been working around the clock to ruin as many lives as they can.
I hate how successful they’ve been.
While it’s by no means the only method they’ve been using, one of the worst tactics is the abuse and terror of mass kidnapping and illegal human trafficking performed by ICE agents at the President’s behest.
The prospect of losing your healthcare is horrific, but the visceral fear of being snatched off the street and taken away in chains is far more immediate.
Now that law enforcement has been given carte blanche to commit racial profiling, there’s no longer any need to pretend. They’re targeting people of colour who don’t ‘look American enough.’
We knew they were. But now they don’t even need to pay lip service to anti-discrimination laws.
With greater funding, more hiring power and a rapidly escalating degree of pressure coming from above, ICE is getting more and more brazen. They aren’t afraid of being brutal and violent, either.
They are an armed, masked group of anonymous thugs who have been empowered to carry out acts of hatred against vulnerable communities. They exist to abduct and disappear the people othered by Trump and his cronies.
And I do mean disappear. Not only do they have a bad habit of moving people around between detention centers without informing friends and lawyers, but they seem incapable of keeping accurate records about the people they steal.
Not only have people been lost in the system because the records are incomplete, but a staggering number of them have seemingly gone missing from government holding sites.
Hundreds of people who are —or were — known to be detained at the infamous Alligator Alcatraz facility have vanished.
We don’t know where they are.
Some family members have found out weeks after the fact about their relatives being deported — sometimes illegally, as in the case of Abrego Garcia, and sometimes without any court orders.
Due process is no longer a right guaranteed to people on U.S. soil.
Some have spent weeks trying to get in touch with loved ones only to find out they’re in facilities on the other side of the country, and nobody bothered to inform them of the change.
This makes it difficult for lawyers and representatives to offer aid to those in custody, to say nothing of the heartache it causes family at home to not know where their loved ones are or if they’re okay.
Especially with the gut-wrenching stories of substandard or non-existent medical care for people with health emergencies in lockup. I would be terrified if my spouse was taken and I had no way to confirm his whereabouts; I would worry something had happened to him and I might never learn the truth.
If he died in custody, would they tell me? Or would he simply ‘get lost in the system’ and never surface? Would they bury him in a ‘John Doe’ grave and go on with their day?
It sounds like a nightmare, but there is genuine reason to be afraid.
Hundreds of people who were formerly held at Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz have vanished off of the record. They might still be there and just not recorded, they might have been moved, or they might have been deported without fanfare.
All we know is that hundreds of people held at Alligator Alcatraz are apparently no longer recorded as prisoners at that facility. They’re not on the list of detainees anywhere. Their lawyers, their friends, their loved ones and the media — they can’t find them.
They’re just gone.
Where are they? Have they been deported? Moved to other holding facilities? Have they been released into another state without a phone or means of getting home? Are they dead?
We don’t know. And the fact that we don’t know is what’s so terrifying about this situation.
When people can simply vanish off the face of the Earth with no accountability or record, then anything could be happening to them and we would never know. This does not happen in functioning democracies because it would be fundamentally at odds with the concept of liberty.
If you can be disappeared by the government without due process or a trial, then you are not free.
Period.
Law enforcement and government need to be accountable to the people. If you are taken by the state, then you must be held in full view. It must be easy to find you so that you can be represented and defended, and those who have you in custody must be available for consequences to be applied if they fuck up.
They shouldn’t be able to do whatever the want behind closed doors without any public inquiry. That’s not freedom, that’s dictator shit.
Hopefully the people who have gone missing are simply being moved elsewhere and will eventually surface. Hopefully their families get answers soon.
But either way, what’s happening isn’t acceptable. This is not democracy.
This is what fascism looks like.
I simply cannot imagine the horror and the fear and, and. I recently lost my husband, but nothing like that.
There's no more doubt after this weekend. The United States is now a fascist country. Trump has come right out and said as much over the last few days. between the blatant statements about the media, the firing/forced resignation of a federal attorney, his retribution statements at the Kirk funeral, and so on. It's obvious now, he's done trying to hide it anymore.
I don't see a good future for the U.S. anymore. Even if they manage to claw back some semblance of a democracy from Trump, things will never be the same again.
As the rest of the world steps away from the rabid dog that Trump has become, the isolation will become even more acute and the American people will end up suffering the most with a failing economy and authoritarian rule.
As for the immigrants being rounded up an put in the concentration camps, the disappeared ones are either in other camps or deported without records to other countries, not necessarily the one of their birth. There are more African countries now reporting of deportee flights arriving now.
I also have no doubt that these people in the camps and detention centers are being horribly abused by the careless attitude of the jailors and the government. Once these human rights abuses come to light someday soon, like the CIA overseas black sites from George W.'s time, the reputation of the United States will become even worse. They will be labeled as no better than the Israelis and other tin pot dictator countries that the worlds knows and shuns.
I truly think that very black days are ahead for the United States. It's too bad that the American people will have to bear the brunt of all that.