ORLANDO, Fla. — Guards severely beat and pepper-sprayed detainees at a state-run immigration detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Florida Everglades this month, according to a lawyer for two detainees.
The guards targeted Katherine Blankenship’s clients and other detainees at the facility after they complained about not having phone access on April 2, Blankenship said in a court declaration.
The phones, which weren’t functioning, are the primary way for detainees to communicate with family and their attorneys while in the detention center. The guards began taunting the detainees, who were in a cell, then became “more aggressive and were yelling and threatening to enter the cage,” Blankenship wrote.
When one detainee approached a guard, he was punched in the face. The guards then started beating other detainees in the cell. One of Blankenship’s clients was punched in the right eye, thrown to the floor and beaten by several guards. He was kicked in the head and his shoulder and arm were injured. A guard put his knee on the detainee’s neck while restraining him, according to the attorney’s declaration, which included a photo made during a video call almost a week later showing the detainee with a bruised eye.
“The officers beat several people during this incident and broke another detained individual’s wrist,” Blankenship wrote. The detainee whose wrist was broken is not one of her clients.
Phone service was restored the next day without any explanation for why it was cut off.
The Florida Department of Emergency Management didn’t respond to questions emailed Wednesday about the incident.
Blankenship’s declaration was included in a court filing accusing state and federal officials of failing to comply with a federal judge’s preliminary injunction last month ordering detention center officials to provide access to timely, free, confidential, unmonitored and unrecorded outgoing legal calls. U.S. District Judge Sheri Polster Chappell in Fort Myers, Florida also said facility officials must provide at least one operable telephone for every 25 people held in the facility.
The judge’s order came in a response to a lawsuit that claimed detainees’ First Amendment rights were being violated.
State officials have denied restricting detainees’ access to their attorneys and cited security and staffing reasons for any challenges. Federal officials who also are defendants denied that detainees’ First Amendment rights were violated. State officials last week filed a notice that they plan to appeal the judge’s order.
The Everglades facility was built last summer at a remote airstrip by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration to support President Trump’s immigration policies. Florida also has built a second immigration detention center in north Florida.
During a visit last week to the detention center, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida Democrat, said she wasn’t given the chance to talk to detainees. She described conditions at the detention center as “inhumane.”
“The way the detainees are housed is cruel and unnecessary,” she said.
Schneider writes for the Associated Press. AP journalist Gisela Salomon in Miami contributed to this report.
ORLANDO, Fla. — Environmental groups on Tuesday asked a federal appellate court panel to drop its temporary halt of a lower court’s order instructing state officials to close an immigration detention center in the heart of the Florida Everglades known as “Alligator Alcatraz.”
The Everglades facility remains open, still holding detainees, because the appellate court in early September relied on arguments by Florida and the Trump administration that the state had not yet applied for federal reimbursement, and therefore wasn’t required to follow federal environmental law. State officials opened the detention center last summer to support President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Questions by the three appellate judges during oral arguments in a Miami courtroom focused on how much control the federal government had over the state-built facility and under what circumstances an environmental review was required to be in compliance with federal law. The judges did not indicate when they would rule.
Jesse Panuccio, an attorney for the Florida Department of Emergency Management, told the judges federal funding and federal control of the facility were the two criteria for determining if the federal environmental law would apply and the federal agencies had no control over the state-run detention center.
Florida was notified in late September that FEMA had approved $608 million in federal funding to support the center’s construction and operation.
“You need both,” Panuccio said. “Even with funding, I don’t think that would follow because they don’t have federal control.”
An attorney for the environmental groups said the law requiring a review applied to the facility because the Department of Homeland Security had authorized the funding and immigration was a responsibility of the federal government, not the state.
“What is different about this property is that immigration is constitutionally a federal function,” said Paul Schwiep,” an attorney representing the Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity. “The state has no role.”
The federal district judge in Miami in mid-August ordered the facility to wind down operations over two months because officials had failed to do a review of the detention center’s environmental impact according to federal law. That judge concluded that a reimbursement decision already had been made. The appellate court halted the order on an appeal.
The environmental lawsuit was one of three federal court challenges to the Everglades facility since it opened. In the others, a detainee said Florida agencies and private contractors hired by the state had no authority to operate the center under federal law. The challenge ended after the immigrant detainee who filed the lawsuit agreed to be removed from the United States.
In the third lawsuit, a federal judge in Fort Myers, Fla., ruled the Everglades facility must provide detainees there with better access to their attorneys, as well as confidential, unmonitored, unrecorded outgoing legal calls.
Billionaire hedge fund founder turned environmental warrior Tom Steyer, a leading Democratic candidate for California governor, is facing mounting questions about how he earned his wealth — notably investments in private prisons that are now being used to house undocumented immigrants facing deportation.
Some of the most vicious political attacks come from his Democratic rivals and Sacramento special interest groups as the June 2 primary election fast approaches, but Steyer has been dogged for years about his past, controversial business ventures and how they help fund his unbridled campaign spending.
Steyer, 68, faced that ire during a town hall event in San Diego last week.
“Tom, you’re not going to come to San Diego and ignore this detention center,” Holly Taylor, a 37-year-old Democrat screamed at Steyer, holding signs with QR codes to help detainees at an Otay Mesa private prison that Steyer’s hedge fund backed. “It’s a concentration camp. They’re drinking water out of a toilet.”
Taylor, a crime scene cleaner from Pacific Beach, is among scores of people who gather weekly at the facility to raise money for detained immigrants to provide them some comfort amid the Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.
In 1986, Steyer, co-founded Farallon Capital, which had shares valued at $89.1 million in the Corrections Corp. of America in 2005, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission. That company, now known as CoreCivic, operates private prisons around the nation that are housing people picked up by federal immigration agents, including the one in Otay Mesa.
It is not the first time Steyer has faced criticism about the connection with private detention facilities. At the California Democratic Party convention in February, protesters dressed in orange prison jumpsuits sought to draw attention to the controversy.
“Before he was a progressive, he made millions off of companies that operate ICE detention centers, that operate private prisons that incarcerated young children,” state Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said during a recent interview with a political influencer known as Mrs. Frazzled.
“His entire campaign is built on the backs of kids in cages,” Rep. Eric Swalwell, (D-Dublin) wrote Tuesday in a post on X.
People protest outside of a lunch held by California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer at the 2026 California Democratic Party State Convention in San Francisco on Feb. 21.
(Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)
Several years earlier, Yale University’s graduate teachers union called upon the school — Steyer’s alma mater — to divest from Farallon because of concerns about how the private prison company treated detainees, notably minorities.
Steyer has repeatedly expressed remorse about his former firm’s ties with the detention company. In 2012, he sold his stake in Farallon, which was named in reference to islands off the coast of San Francisco and was once one of the largest hedge funds in the world.
“I deeply regret that Farallon made that investment, and I personally ordered the investment in CCA to be sold because it did not accord with my values then or now,” Steyer told The Times in 2019 after he launched a short-lived presidential campaign.
Asked to comment about the latest iteration of the controversy, Steyer’s campaign pointed to comments he made in March at a town hall in San Francisco about how among the hundreds of thousands of companies his hedge fund invested in, the private prison company changed the course of his life.
“It was a mistake, and I sold it over 20 years ago, thinking, not that it won’t be profitable, it’s just a mistake. I don’t want to be in that business. But let me say this, it wasn’t just a mistake,” Steyer said. “It was also a big wake-up call that I was in the wrong place, that I was in a business that was taking me to places I absolutely didn’t want to go. And there’s a reason I walked away from that business and walked away from a ton of money, because I felt like that is not the life I want.”
He added that he and his wife, Kat Taylor, have spent the past two decades pushing for rehabilitative justice — treatment instead of mass incarceration except for violent felons.
“Am I a perfect person? No, have I made mistakes? Yes,” Steyer said. “But for those of you who like to read the Bible, there is a moment on the road to Damascus when someone makes a change, and I have made a big change, and I did it a long time ago, and I’ve been pushing very, very hard the other way.”
Farallon also invested in fossil fuel projects, including an Australian coal mine that denuded thousands of acres of koala habitat and generated an enormous amount of carbon emissions.
Steyer, who has a net worth of $2.4 billion according to Forbes, has painted himself as a reformed billionaire who walked away from Farallon because of angst about how he earned his fortune. He has spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting Democratic causes, notably efforts to fight climate change.
“The truth is that is not where I think there is value, and that is not what I’m seeking in my life,” he said at a Sacramento town hall in March when retired state employee Gina Coates asked how, as a woman of color, she could believe his promises given his privilege as a wealthy white man.
“In terms of trusting me, let me say this, I left my business 14 years ago, and anybody who cared about money would not have done it,” Steyer said.
Steyer later said at the town hall that he left Farallon because he realized that he didn’t want to remain on that path.
“I want to have a meaningful life,” he said. “I want to stand with the people of this state and have actual prosperity. Twelve trillionaires and 40 million people who can’t make rent is not success.”
But Steyer and his wife continue to receive significant income from the hedge fund, including millions of dollars in investments, holdings and various complicated transactions in 2024, according to a statement of economic interest and tax returns he was required to file with the California Secretary of State’s office because of his gubernatorial run.
A Steyer campaign spokesman said Steyer created guardrails to ensure that he does not profit off companies he morally disagrees with.
“Tom has put in place an investment policy to ensure that he does not directly invest in fossil fuels, payday lending, or private prisons,” spokesman Anthony York said. “To the extent he inadvertently incurs exposure to those industries through third-party managers or liquid legacy investments, Tom will donate all profits to charity.”
After leaving Farallon, Steyer became one of the nation’s top Democratic donors. And he has used his wealth to fund his political ambitions. Steyer contributed nearly $342 million of his own money to his short-lived 2020 presidential campaign, according to the Federal Election Commission.
In the 2026 governor’s race, Steyer has donated nearly $112 million to his campaign as of Thursday, according to the California secretary of state’s office. He has been an ubiquitous presence on the airwaves, including local news programs and campaign ads that aired during the “Puppy Bowl” on the Animal Planet channel on Super Bowl Sunday. In the past month, Steyer has aired more than 5,000 ads, according to iSpot, which tracks television commercials.
California, home to 23.1 million registered voters, is home to some of the nation’s most expensive media markets. And candidates, particularly those who are not well known, need to spend heavily on television advertising if they hope to have a successful campaign.
But money is no guarantee of success. Billionaire Meg Whitman, the former eBay chief and formerly a longtime Republican donor, spent $144 million of her money on her 2010 gubernatorial bid. That set a record for a candidate’s contribution in a state race at the time, but Whitman lost to Jerry Brown by nearly 13 percentage points.
In 1998, Democratic multimillionaire Al Checchi who had been the co-chair of Northwest Airlines spent $40 million of his wealth on an unsuccessful run for governor, also a record at the time.
Steyer is one of the top three Democrats in the sprawling field to replace termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom. And his liberal positions are drawing the ire of powerful forces in Sacramento. On Tuesday , the state’s Realtors donated $5 million to an independent expenditure committee opposing Steyer’s bid.
Taylor, who confronted Steyer at the San Diego town hall, said she had not planned to be so vocal. But as the event unfolded, she decided she had to speak, not only to Steyer but to the attendees. She and her compatriots gather every Sunday outside the Otay Mesa facility to raise money to help detainees buy food in the prison commissary and call their families.
“My main issue is that he has gotten financial gain off of these people suffering,” she said.
WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security is pausing the purchase of new warehouses intended to house immigrants as it scrutinizes all contracts signed under former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, according to a senior Homeland Security official.
The development comes just days after the new Homeland Security Secretary, Markwayne Mullin, was sworn in last week to lead a department that was steeped in controversy during Noem’s tenure but also central to President Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. News of the pause was first reported by NBC News.
The official also said that warehouse purchases that were already made are also being scrutinized.
When asked about reports of the pause, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that “as with any transition, we are reviewing agency policies and proposals.”
The Department also noted that Mullin said during his confirmation hearing that he wanted to “work with community leaders” and “be good partners.”
Mullin inherited a $38.3 billion plan to boost detention capacity to 92,000 beds by acquiring eight large-scale detention centers, capable of housing 7,000 to 10,000 detainees each, and 16 smaller regional processing centers.
The plan was hatched during Noem’ s tenure but immediately ran into intense opposition around the country by residents and communities opposed to such large Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities in their neighborhoods.
Many objected on moral grounds to ICE’s presence in their neighborhoods, while others questioned whether the facilities would be a drain on local resources, such as sewer and water systems.
So far, 11 warehouses have been purchased in Arizona, Georgia, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas and Utah, with the federal government spending a combined $1.074 billion.
But lawsuits are pending in three of the states. Meanwhile, the capacity of at least one warehouse has been scaled back. Plans initially called for a warehouse in the Phoenix suburb of Surprise to be used as a 1,500-bed processing site, but Homeland Security now plans to cap occupied beds at 542, Surprise Mayor Kevin Sartor said during a news conference on Monday.
In many cases, mayors, county commissioners, governors and members of Congress learned about ICE’s ambitions only after the agency bought or leased space for detainees, leading to shock and frustration even in areas that have backed Trump.
The warehouse plan ran into challenges from the start. Eight deals were scuttled in places like Kansas City, Missouri, when owners decided not to sell.
Pressed on the lack of information during his confirmation hearing, Mullin acknowledged there had been issues.
“We’ve got to protect the homeland and we’re going to do that,” Mullin said. “But obviously we want to work with community leaders.”
Mullin, who took over and expanded his family’s plumbing business before representing Oklahoma in the U.S House and Senate, said that “one thing I do know is construction.”
He noted that most municipalities don’t have the capacity in their infrastructure for waste and water.
“So, it’s important that we’re talking to the communities and if we’re having additional needs, we can work with the cities,” he said at his confirmation hearing earlier this month.
Santana and Hollingsworth write for the Associated Press. Hollingsworth reported from Kansas City, Mo.
Rights groups in Bahrain say a 32-year-old man, arrested for opposing the war on Iran, was killed in police custody. Bahraini authorities dispute the account, but activists say the incident is part of a widening crackdown on opposition to the war.
Nearly 600 immigrant children were held in a Texas family detention center in recent months without enough food, medical care or mental health services, as their time inside stretched beyond court-mandated limits, according to court documents.
Children and families held at the detention facility in Dilley, where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father were sent this year, also faced virus outbreaks and lasting lockdowns in December and January, although the total number of children held there has fallen in recent weeks, according to the attorney reports and site visits.
The case of Liam, a preschooler who was wearing a blue bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack when he was picked up in Minnesota by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, stoked protests over the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, including among detainees who gathered and held up signs in the yard behind the Dilley facility’s chain-link fences.
Last week about 85 children remained detained at the Dilley facility, but concerning conditions continued, said Mishan Wroe, directing attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, who visited in mid-March. In early February, a legal advocate for the children observed about 280 children.
The filings Friday cited numerous poignant cases, including that of a 13-year-old girl held at Dilley who tried to take her own life after staff withheld prescribed antidepressants and denied her request to join her mother, as reported by the Associated Press. The government reported there had been “no placements on suicide watch,” according to the filing. The AP obtained Dilley facility discharge documents that described a “suicide attempt by cutting of wrist” and “self-harm.”
The filings were submitted in a lawsuit launched in 1985 that led to the creation in 1997 of court-ordered supervision of standards and eventually established a 20-day limit in custody. The Trump administration seeks to end the Flores settlement, as it is known.
“For years, the Flores consent decree has been a tool of the left that is antithetical to the law and wastes valuable U.S. taxpayer funded resources,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement. “Being in detention is a choice.”
Attorneys for detainees highlighted the government’s data showing longer custody times for immigrant children, and also cited worms in food and poor access to medical care or sufficient legal counsel as reported by families and monitors at federal facilities.
“Dilley remains a hellhole,” said Leecia Welch, the chief legal director at Children’s Rights, who visits the center regularly to ensure compliance. “Although the number of children has decreased, the suffering remains the same.”
The Homeland Security spokesperson said the Dilley facility is retrofitted for families, who receive basic necessities including adequate food and water while in detention, and the Trump administration is working to quickly deport detainees.
A report from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed that about 595 immigrant children were held in custody for more than the 20-day limit in December and January, with some stretching into months, per the court filings.
“Approximately 265 of these children were detained for more than 50 days and a shocking 55 children were detained more than 100 days,” the filings state.
That is up from a previous government disclosure late last year that showed that from August to September, 400 children had been held at the Dilley facility beyond the 20-day limit. Homeland Security did not respond to questions seeking comment on the data.
Chief U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee of the Central District of California is scheduled to hold a hearing on the case later this month.
The latest episode of Season 2 of ‘The Pitt’ shows ICE agents at the ER, dramatizing what has happened at hospitals across the country, including in California.
