Iced Out
An Indigenous nation of fewer than 1,000 people in South Florida, the Miccosukee Tribe doesn’t often get involved in local politics. But then private contractors showed up to an abandoned airport and started erecting a detention center in the middle of the Everglades. The Miccosukee leapt into action, realizing that the behemoth structure would drastically change the fragile wetlands that they call home.
It didn’t take long for the so-called Alligator Alcatraz to also develop a reputation for egregious human rights abuses. Billed as an immigration detention center for the “most dangerous criminals,” reports started quickly circulating that detainees were experiencing medical neglect and didn’t have access to basic hygiene. More than thirty men were detained in a single cage, with only three toilets to share. Immigration lawyers reported that they could not communicate with their clients, with some detainees even disappearing within the system.
“We found out that Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity were putting together a lawsuit,” says Curtis Esteban Osceola, an attorney and senior policy adviser to the chair of the Miccosukee Tribe. The tribe joined this environmentally focused suit a few weeks later.
While the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had organized a lawsuit that outlined civil rights abuses at Alligator Alcatraz, the environmental lawsuit focused on the ecological impact of the detention center. The groups pointed out that the private contractors that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) hired to build the facility had started construction without the necessary environmental reviews mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and could jeopardize already endangered species. When the Miccosukee Tribe joined, they added that the barbed wire fences around the facility cut them off from ancient burial grounds, and that the construction had gone ahead without consultation with tribal leaders.
Faced with this evidence, U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams issued a temporary restraining order and then a ruling, which halted construction on the facility, including an immediate shutdown of the sewage and waste management system, which was deemed unfit for use.
“It effectively shuts the facility down because without sewage management and waste receptacles, the facility can’t operate,” Osceola explains.
Since then, Alligator Alcatraz has been steadily dismantled, marking a major blow to one of the Trump Administration’s most hostile experiments in immigration detention. However, Trump’s assault on immigrant communities has continued with an unprecedented number of ICE raids sweeping cities across the nation, forcing families to stay home out of fear of being picked up and becoming a part of the record number of 61,226 people currently in immigration detention across the country.
“People aren’t going to doctors’ appointments,” says Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an attorney and policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. “When immigration raids happen, they aren’t sending their kids to school.”
Already, communities like the heavily immigrant-populated Boyle Heights in Los Angeles are experiencing the economic fallout of Trump’s raids as shoppers stay home and street vendors and other local businesses lose customers. Even the Las Vegas Strip has experienced a downturn as hospitality workers stay home, citing fears of similar raids.
If Alligator Alcatraz is any indication, local communities and interest groups can come together to challenge Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement agenda, bringing together environmental, economic, and local interests to chip away at his deportation machine.
“Local advocates have spent a lot of time preparing for the second Trump Administration, even before he took office,” Bush-Joseph says. In some cases, she explains, this means understanding decision-making hierarchies in local politics and forging relationships with key decision-makers, such as sheriffs and local politicians.
One of the ways that this federal crackdown is being carried out on a local level is through 287(g) agreements, which enable ICE to train and deputize local police forces to carry out immigration enforcement. While these agreements have technically been around since the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has capitalized on them as a means to supercharge immigration enforcement, pressuring jurisdictions across the country to enter into them. Under Trump, the number of these agreements has ballooned from just 135 at the beginning of 2025 to almost 900 by mid-August, with states like Florida and Texas leading the nation in approving such partnerships.
“In the past, these agreements have meant that there are fewer resources for local public safety efforts and that communities will be afraid of reporting crimes to the police,” Bush-Joseph says, citing a 2018 study from the libertarian Cato Institute that found these agreements had no impact on crime statistics. Conversely, they might hinder local law enforcement’s ability to fight crime.
“Opportunity costs might be one of the most important,” Bush-Joseph continues, explaining that along with eroding trust with immigrant communities, a lot of time will be spent on immigration enforcement when it could be spent on other law enforcement needs.
While there are three kinds of 287(g) agreements, the most prominent is the Task Force Model, which enables local police officers to inquire about someone’s immigration status and call ICE during routine enforcement duties.
Since the passage of H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, in July—which earmarks more than $170 billion for immigration and border control—and the DHS announcement in August of generous signing bonuses for new ICE recruits, a number of sheriffs have spoken out against these agreements, accusing immigration enforcement of betraying partnerships and now poaching their best officers.
Given that these agreements are made on a local level, community members are able to push back at town hall meetings and with local decision-makers—including sheriffs and city council members. While the Trump Administration has made an aggressive push for counties to adopt these agreements, some communities have successfully stopped them from going forward. In Maine, the town of Wells paused its agreement with ICE while the state considers legislation to ban these kinds of contracts. Camden’s police department in Delaware rescinded its agreement with ICE after backlash from residents. Even in Florida’s Key West, residents were able to suspend the program, although it was recently reinstated following pressure from the state attorney general.
“There are so many resources being poured into immigration that we have to ask about inertia,” Bush-Joseph says. “What happens when this ramp-up occurs and we have so much more funding going toward immigration detention that it becomes harder to roll back?”
This inertia can be seen in the sheer number of immigration detention centers being built—or in some cases, repurposed. When Alligator Alcatraz became a legal target, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis turned his attention to another shuttered facility with plans to reopen as an immigrant detention center outside of Jacksonville, a former state prison now dubbed “Deportation Depot.” An Indiana state complex near the venue for the Indianapolis 500 has been nicknamed the “Speedway Slammer” as it prepares to allocate one-third of its beds to immigrant detainees. A similar facility in Nebraska has been named the “Cornhusker Clink.” Most recently, the Trump Administration opened a tent camp for immigrant detainees at the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso, Texas, which Trump hopes will someday be the largest immigration detention center in the country.
Some cities—such as Elizabeth, New Jersey—have successfully resisted ICE building prisons in their neighborhoods.
“You have to organize with people,” says Nedia Morsy, the executive director of Make the Road New Jersey, who helped mobilize a local push to keep Elizabeth’s Union County Jail from contracting with ICE and other private prisons.
“It’s not like county officials came to us and told us that they were thinking about [contracting with ICE],” she laughs. “We found out because we have a strong base that feels confident in our leadership and shared what they heard swirling around the city.”
By the time Morsy and her team were able to confirm the rumors, the vote to put up a bid for the jail was happening within the next ninety-six hours. Still, the community was able to organize a mass mobilization of more than 200 people that turned out to protest the vote, with thirty people offering testimony at the meeting.
Even then, the vote passed, which allowed the county to advance to the next stage and put the jail up for auction. Instead of backing down, Morsy and her team continued mobilizing to keep the pressure on by organizing meetings and op-eds in the local newspapers, coupled with calls to the county commissioner’s office. “We had an election coming up, so we wanted to make a connection about how important the jail was to the voters,” she says, explaining that the jail is right in the middle of Elizabeth’s downtown. “We also wrote up a legal memo to explain to the county how it was totally feasible for them to edit their bid so that ICE or a federal prison could not be considered.”
One of the most compelling pieces of evidence was the ongoing abuses of detainees being documented at Delaney Hall, another federal immigration detention facility in nearby Newark. During a Congressional visit to Delaney Hall in May, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested and charged with trespassing. While the charges were eventually dropped, the arrest showed just how brazen ICE could be.
“We leveraged this moment to draw attention to the fact that there are no rules or regulations when it comes to working with ICE,” Morsy explains. The outrage generated support for the mayor and solidarity across the city.
Many local officials started to testify alongside other community members at the monthly meetings, and the tide started to turn. By the time of the next vote, there was broad support for refusing to contract with ICE or any other private prison.
For anyone trying to organize against ICE building or repurposing an existing prison as an immigration detention center, Morsy recommends becoming very clear about the objective.
“Our goal is not just to shut down the Union County Jail or shut down detentions,” she explains. “Our goal is to make it untenable for ICE detentions and ICE jails and ICE camps to operate here.”
That requires understanding the various ways different community members can participate.
“Everybody has a role to play, right?” she says. Some of the more affluent members of the community, for example, have personal relationships with the commissioner.
“For the working class, we have to recognize the power of our testimonies and think about the ways that local communities are impacted by these decisions,” she continues. “We need to get these people in a room with elected officials.”
If there is a structure being built, “you have to look at the land that you’re on,” Osceola suggests, explaining that depending on where you are, there might be different state, federal, or environmental laws that can help make the case. In the case of Alligator Alcatraz, contractors started constructing fences without permits in a fragile ecosystem with no review of the environmental impact.
“Everything was on the record,” he says, noting that these violations were what ultimately swayed the judge in their favor. “The state didn’t do anything. The feds didn’t do anything. They just decided that they were going to build a detention center in the middle of this fragile ecosystem.”
Meanwhile, Morsy recommends keeping an eye on buildings that could be repurposed.
“If you know of any abandoned buildings, you should contact your local elected officials to understand what is happening with them,” she adds. “I can guarantee you that the administration is looking at buildings that can easily be converted into a jail.”
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