MIAMI — The use of small cages to punish immigration detainees in the Florida Everglades may have violated international law on humane treatment, experts told the Miami Herald.

At the state-run facility known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” officers and detainees called the cages “the box,” “punishment boxes” or “sun cages.” They measured roughly 4 feet by 4 feet by 9 feet, and former detainees told the Herald that men were put inside for up to 15 hours shackled with no food or water. The facility closed on June 25.

“Placing somebody inside a sort of closet or a telephone booth for any number of hours is generally used in really dictatorial regimes to break the resistance of an inmate, to make them confess to crimes or just for punishment, for sheer cruelty,” said Juan E. Méndez, a former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, who survived torture in Argentina.

“But you don’t expect them to be used in countries that have reasonable rule of law standards.”

Though not legally binding, the United States is expected to adhere to the U.N.’s Nelson Mandela Rules governing the treatment of prisoners, and has trained correctional officers from other countries in how to follow the code.

The U.S. has also signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, an international human rights treaty which prohibits and seeks to prevent torture and other inhumane treatment. It defined torture as any act by an official in which “severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted” as punishment, coercion, discrimination or for the purpose of eliciting a confession. It also created the U.N. Committee Against Torture, which reviews individual cases and countries.

Experts differed on whether the “sun cages” would amount to torture, but agreed that they constitute inhumane and degrading treatment.

“If this conduct is carried out as a form of punishment because someone has misbehaved, as I remember seeing one of the examples, that could amount to torture under international law,” said Jorge Contesse, a professor at Rutgers Law School and a member of the Committee Against Torture.

While state and federal officials long denied that small cages were being used as a punishment at the facility, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office confirmed their use after the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General published a photo of the cages in a Sept. 11 report based on a January inspection.

“While it adheres to all federal standards for criminal confinement, we’d make it even smaller if we could,” said Alex Lanfranconi, the governor’s director of communications, in an emailed statement.

Asked what standards were followed in their implementation, Lanfranconi sent the Herald a list of five “steps” that would land someone in one of the “confinement areas.”

“While detained at Alligator Alcatraz and awaiting deportation, you failed to conduct yourself peacefully by harming yourself or by attacking either a law enforcement officer or a fellow illegal immigrant,” Lanfranconi wrote as step five.

However, men who told the Herald they were left in the “sun cages” in shackles said that they were punished for non-violent reasons — one said he was erroneously accused of having unauthorized boxers, another that officers were mad at him for not finishing his breakfast on time. The Herald also obtained a list of detainees shortly after the facility opened in July 2025, showing hundreds had no criminal charges or convictions.

All the men who describe the “sun cages” at Alligator Alcatraz were in civil detention at the time. Immigration detention centers are designed to hold individuals awaiting decisions in their civil immigration cases, not as punishment for a crime.

“There is no rational reason why a facility would have cages of this small size. They do not conform with basic international standards on the treatment of detainees,” said Alice Edwards, who served as the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture from 2022 to July.

“Additionally, persons who are held for immigration reasons shall not be subjected to criminal standards of imprisonment, but to standards suitable to their civil status,” she said.

No enforcement mechanism exists for the treaty or the standards. The consequences tend to be diplomatic — a fall in moral standing on the world stage. Any potential legal ramifications would be domestic, Contesse said.

“In the international arena the U.S. has always historically placed itself as a champion of multilateralism, of human rights, of international rule of law,” Contesse said. “And if you have situations like this, well, they challenge that position.”

Sam Lester, an immigrants’ rights attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, said that the use of the box could constitute inhumane treatment under the law and violate the U.S. Constitution.

“These things are akin to medieval torture devices,” he said. “They’re torture chambers.”

“It’s unprecedented in ICE detention,” he said.

The Box

Braydon Cash Brown, 23, was among the first group of men sent to Alligator Alcatraz in July 2025. Officials had given it that title — it’s otherwise known as the Florida Soft-Sided Facility — because the camp was surrounded for miles by the Florida Everglades, alligators and snakes, which they insisted were waiting for anyone who tried to escape.

A few weeks into his time there, officers accused the Nicaraguan man of having snuck in unauthorized boxers, which he denied.

First, officers chained him to the floor of a processing room at 10 a.m., he said. Then they brought him outside, to a cage the size of a telephone booth.

When the sun stopped hitting the small cage where Cash Brown was shackled by the waist, feet and hands, he says officers chained him to a chair outside for several more hours.

He says he asked for water, and an officer poured it out in front of him. A separate officer who saw him cried.

“Don’t cry, it’s okay,” he told her.

“I just hate seeing the way y’all are treated,” she said.

The cage, made of wire, was too sharp to lean against without risk of injury, he said. He was unchained from the chair around 7 p.m., after spending the day in the scorching heat of the Everglades in July.

His lawyer, Rebecca Sharpless, met with him shortly after last summer. Sharpless is the founding director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Miami. She recalls him describing the box, pointing to a vending machine in the corner of the room where they were sitting, and telling her it was about the same size.

Tommy Lam Rodriguez, a 50-year-old Cuban man, said he was placed in the box for two hours for not finishing his breakfast on time.

He told the Herald he has low blood sugar, and is missing teeth, so he needs to finish his meals, but struggles to do so in the short period allotted at the facility.

One day, as officers were forcing detainees to leave after mealtime, he asked for more time to finish. A lieutenant came over, he said.

“I’m telling you that I cannot rush,” he told her. “I cannot eat, and you’re asking me to leave half of my food on the plate. I can’t do that. I suffer from low blood sugar.”

When he continued eating, she ordered officers to bring him to the sun cage, he said. It was shortly after he arrived at the center, in winter 2025, when temperatures dropped in Florida to around 40 or 50 degrees.

After two hours, he said another officer came to check on him, and wanted to hear his perspective on the confrontation. The officer said it wasn’t a good enough reason to put him in the cage, Rodriguez said, and took him out.

Prior torture cases

Whether something constitutes torture depends on a variety of factors in individual cases, including the severity and intention of the treatment.

In ratifying the Convention Against Torture, the U.S. included its own qualification — that its government “reserves the right to communicate, upon ratification, such reservations, interpretive understandings, or declarations as are deemed necessary.”

Edwards said in an emailed statement that “holding people in the cages referred to and the length of time mentioned would amount to inhuman or degrading conditions of detention.”

“For torture it must be severe pain or suffering inflicted for one of the prohibited purposes listed in the definition in article 1 of the Convention against torture,” she said. “I don’t think this amounts to torture based on the information provided. But it is nonetheless prohibited.”

The United States has previously faced accusations of violating international laws on torture and humane treatment. At a U.S. military base in Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay, and in “black sites” around the world, men were water-boarded (subjected to simulated drowning) and physically assaulted, according to a report from the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2014.

One man was locked in two “confinement boxes” in 2002, the report found, one the size of a coffin for the equivalent of 11 days, and an even smaller box for 29 hours total.

The U.N. Committee Against Torture issued a report sharply criticizing reported torture in 2006 and calling for the sites to close. The prison in Guantanamo remains open. Immigrant detainees were sent briefly to the military base there in early 2025.

Reports also describe people in prisons and jails around the country being routinely beaten, among other abuse. In Mississippi, for two decades, sheriff’s deputies routinely water-boarded and beat people in order to elicit a confession, according to a 2023 investigation by Mississippi Today.

During a press conference last week, when asked about Alligator Alcatraz, DeSantis said that staff were concerned they’d be accused of mistreatment. He told them they would be “accused of that no matter what you do.”

“When it was set up, they did all this stuff to exceed the federal guidelines that quite frankly, I thought was excessive,” DeSantis said.

The governor was stationed 20 years ago at Guantanamo Bay, where he was tasked as a junior attorney on a team with ensuring the facility and its conditions complied with U.S. law. He had minimal responsibilities in that role, according to reported conversations with his former colleagues.

“I remember as a naval officer being down in Gitmo when they used to say the same thing. And I was there and I’m looking and I’m like, ‘I don’t know where they’re getting this from,’” DeSantis said at the Sept. 24 press conference.

The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general has said the facility did not comply with either federal or state detention standards. In January, the Inspector General’s office conducted a surprise inspection, in which staff photographed and noted two small cages on the premises. Staff said they were “calming areas.”

Inspectors documented 79 men held in the cage for periods ranging from minutes to two hours. While staff said men asked to be in there, one man was recorded as having “failed to comply with a lawful command,” according to the report.

Use of the boxes was “unprecedented” among detention facilities inspected by the office, the report noted, and presented “significant risks to detainee health and safety.”

“The use of such restrictive spaces is highly unconventional and does not align with standards for humane treatment,” investigators wrote.

—Miami Herald reporter Churchill Ndonwie and Herald/Times Tallahassee Bureau reporter Claire Heddles contributed to this report.

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