The Chapter of the American Union of Civil Liberties in Puerto Rico is denouncing the transfer of immigrants arrested in the territory of the United States to “Aligator Alcatraz”, the new immigration detention installation built in Florida in just one week on an abandoned landing track surrounded by Swambland.
People who are taken in immigration custody in Puerto Rico, many of them from the Dominican Republic, are sent to the continental United States, since the island lacks permanent detention centers that can be detained for prolonged periods.
Puerto Rico Aclu said Friday in a press release that they had received reports this week of detainees from the island that are transferred to the installation in Florida, as well as the accusations of “violations of rights and dehumanizing treatment.”
Annette Martínez, executive director of the non -profit organization of civil rights, condemned the plan of President Donald Trump to build more detention centers, as well as the construction of the Alcatraz crocodile during an interview with NBC News earlier this month.
“This is not even a detention center. We are talking about an installation that looks more like a torture center,” Martínez said in Spanish. “It has even been described as a place where you enter and you can’t go.”
In a lawsuit filed by ACLU this week against the Department of National Security, four people arrested in the Alcatraz Crocodile and its lawyers alleged that the federal government has interfered with its ability to access the detainees and provide advice for those who have stopped there.
Michael Borrego Fernández, a Cuban citizen who is in the Florida detention center and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, supposedly “hard and inhuman conditions” in the installation.
“He informed that detained people were told that they are only allowed one meal per day (and they are only given minutes to eat), they are not allowed daily showers and that otherwise they are maintained throughout the day in a cage inside a tent,” says the complaint. “Mr. Borrego also reported that there have been physical assaults and excessive use of force by people who work as guards, and lack of medical care and care.”
The deputy secretary of the DHS, Tricia McLaughlin, denied the accusations of inhuman conditions, telling NBC News in a statement: “Foreigners have not been treated better who have not treated illegal foreigners better in the United States.”
It is estimated that 700 detainees in Cocodrilo Alcatraz are arrested in cage -style units covered by white tent structures erected in the middle of a wetland prone to hurricanes surrounded by snakes and crocodiles.
Since its construction, immigrants and their loved ones have alleged terrible conditions in the facilities, including lack of water, problems with electricity and copious mosquitoes.
A Dominican immigrant who was arrested in Puerto Rico last month has spent two weeks arrested in Aligator Alcatraz. In an interview with the new day, a Puerto Rican newspaper, the immigrant alleged that detainees with medical conditions cannot access the treatment and described having little access to food and showers.
“We are concerned that the United States government, which tries to present itself internationally as a lighthouse of democracy and justice, is developing an immigration policy in this way,” Martínez said.
Trump’s efforts to carry out mass deportations are to remodel the application of immigration in Puerto Rico, which for a long time had been perceived as a sanctuary for immigrants.
