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Capitalists are getting richer off the internment of immigrants in the Everglades

www.democracynow.org

“Gator Grift”: Hundreds Caged in Inhumane Conditions with No Due Process at Florida Immigrant Jail

Democracy Now! interviews Florida Congressmember Maxwell Frost and Miami Herald reporter Claire Healy about the wildly inhumane prison-like conditions at the immigrant internment camp recently opened in the Everglades.

Frost, who was part of a congressional delegation to tour the facility, reports “these people are being caged,” 32 people per cage with three toilets—though often the toilets don’t work. The private contractors staffing the facility, which Frost characterizes as part of a situation where “people are getting rich off the internment of immigrants in the Everglades,” prevented Frost from talking to any of the people being held there, and have been doing their best to prevent detainees from getting in touch with their lawyers or family members.

Frost described his experience: “[I was]… hearing from hundreds of people, ‘Help me! Help me!’ — one guy was yelling, ‘Call my family! Tell my wife I’m OK!’ He started yelling a phone number. I couldn’t necessarily make it out because it was too loud.”

Frost said, “I saw myself in those cages. It was a lot of people my age that look like me. And when I was walking out of the facility — and I don’t like to call it the name that they’ve given it. They’re doing it to make light of it and sell merch. I’m not going to be part of that. As I was walking out, though, it hit me that I’m one of — you know, I’m the first Afro-Cubano in Congress. I’m walking out of there, thinking to myself, ‘I’m going to be one of the only people that looks like me, that is Latino, that will walk into this facility and walk out on my own accord.’”

At the same time, the Miami Herald has published a list of what they believe to be the names of all the people being held at the facility, because ICE and the [bourgeois] state have refused to do so.

(Taken from an email sent to me by Never Again Action.)

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