Rep. Maxwell Frost Shares Ominous Findings From ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Visit

Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) is sounding the alarm over what he calls the “horrible” conditions at Florida’s new immigrant detention center, which members of President Donald Trump’s administration have callously promoted and dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.”

Frost and other state lawmakers were given a guided tour Saturday. Last week, they were denied access to the facility, leading them to sue Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis for what they called in a joint statement “deliberate obstruction meant to hide what’s really happening.”

Frost shared his findings on social media Sunday and on “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

“I don’t need Ron DeSantis’ permission,” he told the MSNBC host Monday. “I don’t need anybody’s permission to pull up to an immigration detention center and do my job, which is to go and conduct oversight — and tell the public about what’s going on.”

Frost confirmed on Instagram after his visit that the facility holds 32 people per “cage” and that they’re forced to drink water from spigots attached to the only three toilets in each cell. He called the conditions “horrible.”

“These people are being caged,” he said.

“You know, when I went in and we were standing at that door, looking at the cages, looking at the hundreds of men in there, I saw myself in those cages. I saw people were my age, people who looked exactly like me,” the Florida congressman told Maddow.

“I thought when we were walking out of those doors of the internment camp, I thought, ‘I’m one of the only people that looks like me, and that’s my age, that’s going to actually walk out of this place without being deported or without being a staff member,’” he added.

The Miami Herald reported Sunday that over 250 people held in the Everglades facility are listed as having no criminal convictions or pending charges in the U.S., and were only detained on immigration violations. On Monday, Frost firmly called it an “internment camp.”

Maddow played an excerpt of his social media video in which Frost said the detainees were sweating, in cramped conditions — and yelling, “Help me, help me.” He doubled down Monday and said: “The conditions were horrible, and it’s nothing less than what I called it.”

“And I’d like to be very clear about things, because we have too much BS in this world and this politics, where people want to sanitize stuff,” he continued. “We can’t sanitize what’s going on in the Everglades because it’s going on around the country.”

ICE reportedly announced Monday that it’s declared millions of undocumented immigrants ineligible for bond hearings, meaning anyone who ever entered the U.S. illegally can now be held for the duration of their immigration proceedings — which could take years.

Frost called it “a complete perversion of the law,” as immigrants detained in the U.S. used to be legally allowed to bond out, return to their families and continue to work while the legal process pertaining to their potential deportation continued.

He noted that 1996 laws changed this by introducing “mandatory detention” for those who committed a crime or are considered a flight risk, but that the Trump administration is now arguing it applies to everyone. Frost said “it doesn’t,” and that “they’re completely wrong.”

“But this points to something bigger,” he added. “They want more people behind bars.”

“They want to incarcerate more people, and they want to ethnically cleanse this country of certain types of immigrants, because, here’s the thing — they’re not going for every person here that’s undocumented,” Frost continued. “Because when I was in that internment camp in the Everglades, I didn’t see any Europeans who overstayed their visa. I saw nothing but Latino and Haitian men … that look like me.”

Watch the full interview here: