#immigrant-detention

#immigrant-detention

Detainees at Deportation Depot (as it was dubbed by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis) have complained of limited access to medical care, including emergencies, poor and insufficient food, lack of drinking water, and no privacy to speak with their lawyers, according to testimonies collected by the legal network Sanctuary of the South (SOS). They have also reported having no mechanisms to file complaints or store legal documents or religious items, that staff threaten them with solitary confinement as retaliation,

No fewer than a dozen elected officials people chosen by the voters to seats in government to represent their interests came to 26 Federal Plaza on Thursday seeking answers about ICE's treatment of immigrant detainees being held there. They were not only denied entry to the 10th-floor holding area, where many detainees are supposedly being held despite ICE's continued denials, but the lawmakers also staged a protest over the federal agency's continued obfuscation about the fate of the immigrants in its custody.

Until his monumental new film, Paul Thomas Anderson had only made a single narrative feature set in the 21st century, and that movie - a love story about a plunger salesman who hoards pudding cups, gets extorted by the owner of a phone sex line, and shares an iconic kiss to the sound of a Shelley Duvall song from 1980 - was less of its time than out of it.

Two judges appointed to the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit by President Donald Trump issued a Thursday decision that allows a newly established but already notorious immigrant detention center in Florida, dubbed Alligator Alcatraz, to stay open. Friends of the Everglades, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida sought "to halt the unlawful construction" of the site. Last month, Judge Kathleen Williams - appointed by former President Barack Obama to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida - ordered the closure of the facility within 60 days. However, on Thursday, Circuit Judges Elizabeth Branch and Barbara Lagoa blocked Williams' decision, concluding that "the balance of the harms and our consideration of the public interest favor a stay of the preliminary injunction."

"Alligator Alcatraz"

Mattresses on the floor, next to bunk beds, in meeting rooms and gymnasiums. No access to a bathroom or drinking water. Hourlong lines to buy food at the commissary or to make a phone call. These are some of the conditions described by lawyers and the people held at immigrant detention facilities around the country over the last few months. The number of detained immigrants surpassed a record 60,000 this month.

The report documents conditions for detained immigrants at Florida's Krome North Service Processing Center, Broward Transitional Center, and Federal Detention Center, alleging flagrant violations of international human rights.