When we talk about justice, dignity , and the rule of law we imagine that once a person is detained , they will at least be safe, treated humanely, and afforded basic protections. But a news report from Amnesty International (AI), published in December 2025, reveals that for many immigrants held in two Florida detention centers, that promise has been brutally broken.
The report, based on a research mission carried out in September 2025, focuses on two facilities: Alligator Alcatraz (officially the Everglades Detention Facility) and Krome North Service Processing Center (often called “Korme“) near Miami. What Amnesty documents reads less like a detention center report and more like a catalog of human suffering: unsanitary conditions, cruel punishments, medical neglect, and systemic dehumanization.
Inside Alligator Alcatraz “a state-run human right disaster”
Alligator Alcatraz opened in July 2025, and according to the report within months it became a site of alarming abuse. Detainees describe living in filthy, unsafe, and degrading conditions: toilets overflowing with waste, sewage seeping into sleeping areas, limited access to showers, insect infestations, exposure to extreme weather, constant blaring lights, poor quality food and water and cameras even above toilets.
People recounted being shackled all the time even when outside cages and being forced intop so called “boxes” or “the box”: tiny 2*2-foot cage like structures used as punishment. Detainees said they were left in such boxes for hours, exposed to the elements, shackled by their hands and feet, with minimal or no water. Some described these punishments as tantamount to torture.
Perhaps most chilling: Alligator Alcatraz reportedly runs “outside federal oversight.” The facility lacks basic inmate tracking and registration systems used in federal immigration centers, which means detainees can be held incommunicado their families might not even know where they are. To many human rights observers, this effectively amounts to enforced disappearances.
Krome overcrowded, chaotic, and neglected
The conditions at krome, through run by a different entity, are similarly horrifying. Amnesty’s investigators documented overcrowding so extreme that detainees are often crammed into tiny spaces, sharing inadequate facilities; toilets overflow, shower are scarce, and many report broken air conditioning. Despite having medical facilities on-site, many detainees say they were denied proper care. Some reported chronic illnesses left untreated; others described delays or denials of basic medical assistance.
Multiple former detainees told of being subjected to prolonged solitary confinement and violent mistreatment from guards including being struck, physically abused. One Amnesty observer allegedly saw a guard violently slam a metal cell door flap on man’s injured hand. Others described repeated beatings, intimidation, and fear.
Beyond the physical abuse, detainees often face several legal neglect: many have no clear information about why they are detained, how long they will remain, or wheather they will get legal counsel. Several said they had no meaningful access to lawyers or translators, making due process nearly impossible.
Systemic, not accidental a deliberate structure of cruelty
Whet emerges from Amnesty’s report isn’t a set of isolated failures or the result of a few rogue guards but a deliberate, systematic design. Officials describe these detention centers as built, at least in part, to punish, dehumanize, and control vulnerable people with minimal oversight. As one Amnesty director put it: “A system built to punish, dehumanize, and hide the suffering of people in detention.”
The reports raises deep questions about accountability, transparency, and the rule of law. When a facility operates outside federal oversight; when detainess can vanish without trace; when basic needs like hygiene, medical care, privacy, and safety are denied this shifts detention from a matter of enforcement into a question of human rights abuse.
Amnesty’s demands: The immediate closure of Alligator Alcatraz, A halt to the use of any state run detention centers for immigration custody, full, independent investigations into all reported abuses, deaths, and mistreatment, meaningful oversight, transparency, legal access, medical care, and humane conditions for all detainees.
The human face behind the statistics
It’s easy to talk about “detainees” as data but behind these numbers are human beings: individuals with hopes, fears, families, and aspirations. People who fled violence or persecution, seeking refuge; people seeking a future for themselves or their loved ones many only to be met with cages, deprivation, isolation, and despair.
For every report, every statistic, there are people who miss birthdays, worry about loved ones who don’t know where are, or simply wonder if humanity still exists behind those barred fences. This report forces us to pause and ask: When the machinery of immigration enforcement becomes a machine of suffering, who stands for justice? Who stands for dignity?
A call to conscience and to action
The revelations by Amnesty International are not just another story in the endless churn of global headlines. They are a stark and urgent warning. A reminder that detention, even when legally sanctioned, must never equate to cruelty. That immigrants, regardless of status, are entitled to basic human rights. That justice without humanity becomes tyranny.
Now, with these finding exposed, the power lies with us citizens, advocates, lawmakers, communities to demand accountability, to uphold dignity, to stop cruelty. The world is watching. The detainees are waiting. Beacuse behind every locked gate, behind every barbed wire fence, there is a face, a story, a life, and none of them deserve to be erased.
Detainees means people who are offically held or kept in custody
