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ICED OUT  
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Anna Lekas Miller
October 6, 2025
The Progressive
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_ Communities across the United States are shutting down detention
facilities and refusing to cooperate with immigration enforcement. _

Protesters line highway in Florida Everglades to oppose 'Alligator
Alcatraz', image: screen grab

 

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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed].] 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
[[link removed]] civil
rights abuses at Alligator Alcatraz, the environmental lawsuit focused
on the ecological impact
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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
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temporary restraining order and then a ruling
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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just 135 at the beginning of 2025 to almost 900 by mid-August, with
states like Florida and Texas leading
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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
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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
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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
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new ICE recruits, a number of sheriffs have spoken out against these
agreements, accusing immigration enforcement of betraying partnerships
and now poaching
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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
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the state considers legislation to ban these kinds of contracts.
Camden’s police department in Delaware rescinded
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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
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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
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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”
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it prepares to allocate one-third of its beds to immigrant detainees.
A similar facility in Nebraska has been named
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“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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed].] 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.” 

_Anna Lekas Miller [[link removed]]
is an award-winning writer and journalist who covers how conflict and
migration shape lives around the world. Her first book, Love Across
Borders, recently won a 2024 Arab American Book Award. _

_The Progressive [[link removed]] is a voice for peace,
social justice, and the common good. Since 1909, The Progressive
magazine has aimed to amplify voices of dissent and voices
under-represented in the mainstream, with a goal of championing
grassroots progressive politics. Subscribe
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journalism._

* Immigration and Customs Enforcement
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* Alligator Alcatraz
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* immigrant detention
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