Inside ICE
“They feel like both sides fucking hate them,” says independent journalist Karl Loftus
Inside Alligator Alcatraz — the controversial, recently shuttered immigration detention camp in Everglades — there was a small chain-link cage roughly the size of a coffin in the middle of the rec yard, underneath the baking Florida sun. The guards called it “the box.” Detainees would be placed inside at any time of day, fed their meals through the bars — turkey sandwiches, a granola bar, and little else. The mosquitos would eat them alive.
“If you’re out there in the box, then you’re fucked,” one guard said.
The guard’s quote, and the anecdotes and details in the paragraph above, weren’t revealed to Rolling Stone, or 60 Minutes, or The New York Times. Instead, we know them because both a guard and an inmate detained at Alligator Alcatraz spoke to independent journalist Karl Loftus, who for the past six months has been publishing unfiltered, raw interviews with the people at the heart of Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown: ICE Agents, private prison guards, Homeland Security Investigators, and other cops. Members of these groups are often incredibly reluctant to talk to the mainstream press, but Loftus’ position as a neutral party, who is already plugged into the world of cops and military veterans, has given him a unique window into the lives and opinions of the other side of the war on immigration. What they’ve revealed has been shocking, frustrating, and also deeply humanizing to the many officials who have been tasked with enforcing a policy agenda that they did not set, and often disagree with.
