Florida and the Trump administration built a torture camp in the Everglades, shackled human beings inside metal cages, and now they are making the victims disappear.
ICE announced this week that all detainees have been transferred out of the detention center Florida built in the remote swamp — the facility Trump celebrated, the facility that cost Florida taxpayers $1.2 million a day, the facility where people were given rotten water and coerced into signing documents they could not read. ICE will not say how many people were held there. ICE will not say where they have been taken. The people are gone, and the agency that moved them refuses to account for where they went.
Amnesty International documented what happened inside: detainees were shackled inside a two-foot-high metal cage and left without water as punishment. When two men in his cell called for his medication, ten guards rushed in, threw them to the ground, and caged them for trying to help. Detainees reported the water itself was infested with mosquito larvae — and that guards used the spoiled water as leverage to force signatures on English-language documents. This was not accidental overcrowding. It was a design. When investigations and legal challenges made the evidence impossible to ignore, the state moved the people out of sight.
The transfers were presented as hurricane-season preparation. The alibi collapses under its own timeline: Florida had already told vendors the transfers were coming in early June, weeks before any storm formed, as reported. This is what erasure looks like — not a policy correction, but a vanishing.
We paid for this. Our taxes — $1.2 million a day of Florida’s money, plus federal reimbursements — built the cage and staffed it. We who call ourselves a nation of laws and a Christian people have done what tyrants do: build a secret place of pain, fill it with human beings, then vanish them when the world starts paying attention. When the state’s spokesperson insisted that medical facilities were available 24/7, she was speaking the language of every functionary who has ever papered over a dungeon with a press release.
We walked out of Mitzrayim with the taste of Pharaoh’s brutality still on our tongues, and we built Pharaoh’s cage in a Florida swamp. The Torah commands, thirty-six times, that you shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Exodus. “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself.” There is no footnote in that text. There is no asterisk for those who crossed the border without papers. There is no exclusion for those the governor calls illegal. You love the stranger as yourself, or you have broken the commandment that God repeats more than any other.
Jesus looked at the comfortable and asked: when I was thirsty, did you give me drink? When the detainee begged for water and received mosquito larvae, Jesus was the one whose lips cracked in that cage. The men who built Alligator Alcatraz answered the question of Matthew 25 in concrete and razor wire. They gave the stranger contaminated water. They caged the stranger in metal. And when the witness became inconvenient, they made the stranger vanish. When we lock a sick man in a box and then vanish him, we are locking Christ in that box. Whatever you did to the least of these, Jesus said, you did to me. Florida answered: we shackled him in a swamp and moved him in the dark.
We who call ourselves people of faith must say what we have done. We allowed this facility to be built and operated in our name. We paid for it with our taxes. The climate that made Alligator Alcatraz possible is a climate our own communities helped to build. We have no right to innocence when people were caged in the Everglades on our watch. The door of repentance is open to every one of us — but it begins with the confession that we allowed this.
I call it what it is: torture, evil, sin. Not a regrettable operational necessity. Not an unfortunate incident. The deliberate use of a metal crate as punishment, the withholding of lifesaving medication to make a point, the administration of spoiled water to break human will — this is what evil looks like when state power paints it as security. The Hebrew prophets thundered against rulers who trampled the poor and crushed the needy. Amos called them cows of Bashan. Isaiah pronounced woe on those who call evil good and good evil. The facility in the swamp was evil; calling it “immigration enforcement” is the lie the prophet condemned.
To the governor who said the camp was always temporary, to the former president who boasted of its harshness, to the officials who signed the contracts and the guards who forced the documents: you know what you built. You know what you did. You are not anonymous. The swamp is not thick enough to hide what happened there. The God who hears the cry of the oppressed heard the cries from that cage.
But the door is not closed. You can tell us where they are. You can open the records. You can refuse to be what this facility tried to make you become. Repentance is still possible, even for those who built a torture cage in the Everglades. The same God who hates oppression loves the oppressor enough to hold out a better way.
Romero did not issue a statement. He stood in front of the guns and commanded. On March 23, 1980, he told the soldiers of El Salvador: in the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose laments rise to heaven each day more tumultuous, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you: stop the repression. He told them they were killing their own brothers and sisters. He told them that God’s law commands you not to kill, and that no order from a man overrides the law of God. That is the posture. Not a press release. Not a transfer announcement. A command to cease. That is the word the church must speak now, plainly, without equivocation: you built a cage in a swamp where human beings were shackled and denied water in the name of public safety, and when the evidence could no longer be hidden, you moved them into the dark and called it a transfer.
The answer is not merely to close one camp and scatter its victims into a dozen others. It is to dismantle a deportation machine that converts human beings into inventory for private prison companies and state budgets. It is to rebuild an immigration system that treats migrants as neighbors, not enemies — one that remembers, as the U.S. bishops have declared: “The human dignity and human rights of undocumented migrants should be respected.”
The camp in the swamp is shut. Its captives are gone, moved to unnamed facilities by officials who hope we will forget. But the God of the Exodus keeps the names. The God who sees every cage remembers. And a country that built a torture camp, named it after a tourist attraction, and now acts like it never happened has forfeited the right to call itself just until it brings every one of those human beings back into the light and answers for what it did.
The door is open. Romero’s hand is extended. The question is whether we will walk through it.