By Aeneas Leviné
The Everglades Detention Facility, nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz,” has been built and operated as a place where the U.S. regime can disappear people into heat, concrete, and paperwork in the middle of the wetland in Florida. Amnesty International has documented cruel, inhuman, and torturous treatment there, in addition to sites such as the Krome North Service Processing Center, where overcrowding and starving conditions caused imprisoned neighbors to spell out “SOS” with their bodies on the grounds of the facility in south Miami. This is not the case of a few bad sites. It is a networked architecture of abuse, a system that treats captivity as policy and suffering as procedure.
At “Alligator Alcatraz,” people have described being shackled and left in a tiny outdoor metal cage, exposed to sweltering temperatures and insects. When imprisoned neighbors sought counsel, they testified they were punished for it, that monitored calls dropped when they mentioned lawyers, that they were denied writing materials, and had to improvise with soap to write attorney’s numbers.
However, Florida is not the whole story, it is one window into a system of horrors.
Chicago’s Broadview ICE facility is a “black box” where people are held for long-periods in inhumane conditions and denied access to counsel, food, medical care, and basic necessities, alongside overflowing toilets and infestations of cockroaches and centipedes. Santos Altamirano described trying to alert guards that an old man was not feeling well, and was verbally abused and ignored until the old man began foaming at the mouth, at which point the old man was removed from the cell. Fredy Gonzalez reported beatings he and his cell mates endured from guards which resulted in wounds that festered without care in the overcrowded cells.
Tacoma’s Northwest ICE Processing Center, operated through a for-profit contractor, where imprisoned neighbors drink brown, Clorox-like water from sinks, has seen deaths that open directly onto the medical neglect question, in particular José Manuel Sánchez-Castro, who was murdered via medical isolation and denied treatment while detained in 2024. This mirrors the case of Paraday La in Philadelphia, who died during a drug withdrawal in ICE custody. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request into the death was denied by ICE.
On January 3, in El Paso, Texas, at Camp East Montana, Geraldo Lunas Campos, who suffered from depression and bi-polar disorder, was murdered by guards who asphyxiated and crushed the life out of a him while denying any wrongdoing, attempting to frame the killing as a suicide. Neither the family of Campos, nor fellow imprisoned neighbors who overheard the killing accept the ICE narrative. Víctor Manuel Díaz died there as well on January 14, which ICE also reported as suicide, his family similarly doubt the state narrative.
In the South Texas “Family Residential Center” concentration camp in Dilley, Texas, children, infants, elderly, and entire families are detained in harrowing conditions. On January 24, hundreds inside protested conditions and treatment, chanting for freedom, while Eric Lee, an attorney representing many inside, was on the scene outside the camp and reported hearing hundreds of children with urgent, high pitched voices, and recorded shouting, “Let us out,” and “Liberty for the kids!” This center was built under the Obama regime in 2014 and operated by both his successors, Trump and Biden. It is the same for-profit facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was being held prior to his recent release back to Minneapolis. It is also the site of a measles outbreak that has begun to tear through the facility. Lee described conditions inside Dilley, noting that baby formula is mixed with contaminated water, the food is infested, and guards are abusive.
The Department of Homeland Security’s response to the measles outbreak at Dilley has been to issue abject falsehoods through Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, who erroneously claimed that ICE “immediately took steps to quarantine and control further spread” and that “all detainees are being provided with proper medical care.” Instead, the lockdown is a control measure designed to keep out journalists, independent doctors, and attorneys, while giving ICE full discretion to obscure the outbreak and continue the neglect.
Torture and Imperialism
The US’ torture story did not begin in Florida, and it did not begin with ICE. In fact, it is a theme permeating throughout the history of the country: from the genocide of the Indigenous, the mass enslavement of the New Afrikan people, Japanese concentration or “internment” camps of the 1940s, to more recently in Abu Ghraib under Bush, where torture and humiliation were treated as operational tools and even outsourced through private contractors. It runs through the Guantánamo prison camp, which remained open through the Obama years despite promises to close it. The theme is present today through the detention and deportation machine operated and expanded by Trump after his predecessors, Biden and Obama. It is the same logic in a different uniform: counterinsurgency methods brought home, aimed at a population made vulnerable by design.
To name it correctly, precision about the accepted definition of torture is required. The United Nations Convention Against Torture defines torture as:
“an act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.”
International humanitarian law prohibits torture and humiliating and degrading treatment as a basic rule, not a suggestion. Torture does not come only in the form of the electric wire and waterboarding. Torture is solitary confinement used to break the mind. Torture is medical neglect used to break the body. Torture is disappearance inside “processing,” retaliation for grievances, detention of children, and the suppression of communication, all of it wrapped in administrative euphemisms so the regime can pretend the suffering is an oversight. Physicians for Human Rights document a systemwide surge in solitary confinement in immigration detention: over 10,500 people were confined in solitary over a 14 month period from July 2024 to September 2025, with the publicly available data likely understating the scale. In a similar escalation, the number of children in ICE detention on a given day has sextupled since the start of the second Trump term to 170 children on average, with a peak of 400.
The illegal US prison camp in Cuba, the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp, world symbol of torture, is a blueprint the U.S. regime perfected for how to torture people while claiming legality through exception. There, torture is practiced as routine technique and as environment: prolonged sleep deprivation, stress positions, sensory and temperature manipulation, shackling, and humiliation, all paired with isolation meant to break the mind. ICE alone has held 730 men at Guantánamo.
El Salvador is the offshore extension of that same architecture, the outsourcing of the cage when the regime wants distance and deniability. When the U.S. regime sent migrants to Bukele’s CECOT mega prison, investigations described beatings, severe sleep deprivation, starvation or inadequate food, denial of medical care, and psychological torture, with accounts including sexual violence. Hundreds of Venezuelans sent by the U.S. regime in March and April 2025 have been tortured and subjected to other abuses there prior to being permanently disappeared.
The Democrats’ retreat into legalism will offer no salvation for the masses, as if the right lawsuit or the inspector memo could cure a machine built for coercion, exploitation, and repression by the same big capitalists that lead both Parties. Torture under a capitalist regime is not an accident that happens to an otherwise neutral system. As the ruling class fans up hatred against the immigrant working class in the face of a deepening economic struggle, torture, as a side product all too familiar to the enforcers of US imperialism, becomes both a natural byproduct by the bloodthirsty reactionaries and a necessary ingredient to strike fear into the hearts of the people.
After all, violence against the people is very familiar to US imperialism: from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, torture, abuse, and indiscriminate killings by the genocidal US army have been a common occurrence. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military procured over 20,000,000 gallons of Agent Orange – an extremely toxic chemical herbicide and defoliant – on Vietnamese soil to starve out the revolutionaries hidden in the jungle, destroying entire ecosystems and disabling more than 1 million people. In Guatemala, the US backed death squads murdered 400 thousand people, mostly indigenous Mayans, in an attempt to defeat the People’s War.
The State does not call it a cage, but a “detention center,” a “processing” site, a “service” facility, a “family residential center,” or a place governed by “standards” and “oversight;” when it needs to hide the worst of it, it calls isolation “administrative segregation.” These euphemisms aim to cover up the attacks against the people.
Violence against detainees and the lack of medical resources in ICE concentration camps are a part of the daily enforcement of hierarchy. Deaths in custody are the predictable output of a system built to warehouse and break human beings, not an unfortunate malfunction. The question of power is paramount here: who rules, by what methods, and for whose benefit. ICE exists to enforce the imperialist order that requires a terrorized, divided working class and a permanently deportable layer of labor. Torture is not a failure of policy. It is a method of rule.
The Path Forward
The torture regime will not be shamed into reform, because it is not an embarrassment inside the system. It is one of the system’s operating modes. The same regime that builds concentration camps builds its alibis and has experience laundering terror through “oversight” and elections. What breaks that cycle is not another round of begging, but the construction of organs of defense that can deny the kidnappers the conditions they require: isolation, surprise, fragmentation, and fear.
Organized and militant organs of class struggle and community defense must be formed on the block, complex, neighborhood, street, workplace, school, and city level, involving the broadest masses in the defense of themselves and, in particular, the migrant masses.
