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The Office of Inspector General (OIG) for the Department of Homeland Security released a scathing report last Friday about the shuttered Florida concentration camp built on an abandoned airstrip known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” concluding the camp failed to meet numerous health and safety standards, and that the use of “small metal enclosures” was “unprecedented” and posed “significant risks to detainee health and safety.”
The report included photos, taken by OIG inspectors during an “unannounced” visit in January to the camp, showing a phone booth–sized cage set up outdoors under a temporary awning. Staff at the camp euphemistically described the cages as “calming areas” where detainees could “reflect on their behavior choices, manage their emotions,” and, they claimed, leave whenever they wanted. Staff records indicated 79 detainees had spent time in the cages in a two-day period, none for more than two hours, which the OIG could neither confirm nor refute, the report said.
The cage images are appalling and, at first blush, seem to confirm an Amnesty International report from last December that first alleged the use of cages at the tent prison. But a closer comparison of the two shows not agreement but evidence of a cover-up: a Potemkin Village carefully positioned to fool inspectors and hide a truth that was much, much worse.
Amnesty spoke to four people who were detained at the Everglades site in the summer of 2025 for periods of between two weeks and a month, and to local groups that had worked with former detainees there. All of them spoke of “the box”—an outdoor cage where they said they were sent as punishment for alleged infractions. They described being handcuffed in a 2′ × 2′ cage, with their ankles shackled to the floor, preventing them from sitting down or shifting positions. There was “hardly” any protection from the hot sun and sometimes no protection at all, they said. All of them told Amnesty that detainees were left in the box for hours at a time, attacked by insects and provided with little water.
“People ended up in the ‘box’ just for asking the guards for anything. I saw a guy who was put in it for an entire day,” one detainee was quoted as saying in the Amnesty report. An illustration based on detainees’ descriptions shows a man in ICE’s standard gray sweatsuit in a cage too small to stand up in.
In other interviews, former detainees have described it as a 4′ × 4′ cage, which would be consistent with the illustration, but everything else is the same: no protection from the sun, chained to the ground, left there for hours.
Now look at the OIG photos again. The cage is larger than the one detainees described to Amnesty. A piece of wood covers the bottom, which would prevent shackling. It sits under a thick awning and atop a piece of plastic turf, surrounded by another fence with barbed wire, seeming to suggest the cage’s occupants had the option to walk out.
There are two possible explanations for the discrepancies: Either all of the detainees’ memories were flawed in the exact same way, or sometime between the Amnesty report’s release on December 4 and the “unannounced” inspection on January 21, staff at the camp fixed up the cages.
Incredibly, the OIG made no effort to speak with previous detainees, according to a spokesperson, who asked not to be identified by name. That was not within the scope of the “unannounced” inspection, the spokesperson said, which was confined to evaluating conditions at the camp on that day only.
Now, you may have noticed that I keep putting “unannounced” in quotes. I am not suggesting the inspectors were in on the cover-up. But I do call into question whether officials at the camp found out about the pending inspection ahead of time.
Deep in the report, the inspectors note: “We were unable to independently confirm or refute ICE officials’ assertions regarding their use of the enclosures … as none of the detainees we interviewed reported experiencing these conditions during our unannounced inspection.”
The report also says the officials’ records logged 79 people spending time inside the cages on January 17 and 18. Seventy-nine people, two cages, with the average time spent inside being 59 minutes. That sums to 79 out of an available 96 cage-hours. The math doesn’t add up unless detainees were going into the “calming areas” almost around the clock, including in the middle of the night.
And only three days later, when inspectors showed up, all of those people were conveniently gone, transferred somewhere else and unavailable for interviews.
Was the high flow of traffic in and out of the camp normal? It’s impossible to say definitively without the camp’s bus records, but I did take a look at flight records for about 80 planes in ICE’s vast charter plane network, and found that U.S. Coast Guard aircraft landed at the facility every day between January 18 and January 20, the only three-day streak between the release of the Amnesty report in early December and the end of January. (The Coast Guard, which is administered by DHS, used search-and-rescue planes to do ICE flights between June 2025 and March 2026, news of which I first reported for Rolling Stone.)
When told about the Coast Guard flights, the spokesperson seemed surprised but declined to respond on the record.
Andrea Pitzer, a concentration camp expert and author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, was not surprised to hear any of this. In extrajudicial camps, which is how she classifies Alligator Alcatraz, “the box” is an almost universal occurrence.
“You almost always see this kind of solitary punishment. Typically, it is three to five feet across but not tall enough for somebody to stand. They are typically fastened in some way. They are isolated, they are exposed to extreme cold or the sun,” she said in a phone interview. Contrary to camp staff’s claims, Pitzer said that “this is not done as a kind of timed time-out, but very much to punish troublemakers, whoever the authorities see as insubordinate.”
Notably, one of the detainees who spoke to Amnesty compared the box he was held in to another recent example, a place Pitzer visited for book research.
“It’s a copy of Guantanamo. The conditions are inhuman. We’re kidnapped there; it’s inhuman,” he said.
Attempting to create a Potemkin Village to fool outsiders is also bog standard for concentration camp governments, Pitzer said. Throughout the Holocaust, and as late as 1944, Nazi Germany fixed up concentration camps like Dachau and Theresienstadt to fool the Red Cross and international media—who were then allowed in to inspect the camps—with varying degrees of success. The last step in those “beautification” efforts, Pitzer said, was to move large numbers of prisoners somewhere else, to reduce overcrowding and to remove witnesses who might have shared damning information with the visitors.
It also isn’t unusual for these efforts to not go far enough, because concentration camp governments “simultaneously want to terrorize the target population while somehow convincing the general population that what is being done is being done for the people’s good,” Pitzer said. “They both want to show off what they’re doing, and they hide what they’re doing.”
What you often ended up with from the visitors’ reports was an uncanny “middle ground,” she said, where there is an attempt at accountability with some “finessing” of the full truth.
“Sometimes it’s because by the time anybody was allowed to go in and see a place, it’s been cleaned up. And sometimes it’s the people who are doing the reports who are trying to do the finessing themselves,” Pitzer said. Speaking about the OIG report, she added, “I have no doubt that some things in it are absolutely true, [but] everything I have read from interviews with people who were there, from a number of sources, those issues are not reflected in that report.”
Pitzer said that inspectors could clean up their reports to avoid punishment or appease the powerful. As to which category the OIG might fall under, let me be clear: I don’t think they are in on the cover-up, for one simple reason. In Trumpworld, any criticism whatsoever—even feckless or defanged criticism—is tantamount to treason. It took some amount of courage to release the report, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Inspector General Joseph Cuffari or his entire office were imminently sacked.
They may not be conspirators, but they are in over their heads. The OIG report based on the January inspection took eight months to come out, a delay the spokesperson attributed to the DHS shutdown and the “normal review and clearance process” that gave ICE 30 days to respond. By then, the camp had already been closed for nearly three months, making its recommendations largely moot.
Who exactly was running the camp—ICE or the state of Florida—was unclear for the entirety of Alligator Alcatraz’s existence. And that may have led to some of the abuses, the OIG said, because none of the staff knew which regulations they were supposed to follow.
But according to Pitzer, these gray areas are part of the concentration camp design, the opening of a black hole in which both laws and the targeted people can disappear.
ICE responded to the report by continuing to claim it was not responsible for the camp. But a spokesperson for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—a former Navy lawyer stationed at Guantanamo—said of the cage photo, “We’d make it even smaller if we could.”
According to people placed inside of it, they did.
