‘Alligator Alcatraz’ detainees say guards deny them food and clean water until they sign English documents

Detainees at Florida’s notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration jail said guards were denying them food and fresh water on Thursday until they signed documents presented to them in English that they did not understand.

In an audio recording of a telephone call to an immigration advocacy group heard by the Guardian, more than half a dozen detainees alleged that the water given to them over the last three days was “rotten” and containing mosquito larvae, in an apparent attempt to pressure them to sign.

During the call, all the detainees identified themselves by name and the section and cage number they are being held in. The Guardian is withholding those details because of the men’s stated fear of reprisals.

“They took all the water, and they don’t want to give us water,” one detainee said in the call to a representative of the Workers Circle, an advocacy group that has acted as a liaison between detainees and their families.

“They haven’t given us lunch, and they are mistreating us here. Right now, at this very moment, half past one in the afternoon, we haven’t had lunch here in Alcatraz, and they wanted to make us sign a paper in English that we don’t know what that paper says.

“They’ve taken reprisals with us for not taking that paper, not signing that paper. They took away the water and medicine to people who need medication. Today the medicine came very late, but here we have people here who are diabetic, one here with high blood pressure.”

An ambulance pulls in to the front entrance of the ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades on 1 June 2026. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The detainee said he and others had been complaining for several days about the quality of the water they had been given, and on Thursday morning chants of “agua, agua” broke out when it was withheld altogether.

“The water has pests, the water has a bad taste, [you] open the water tubs and they have mosquito larvae,” he said.

Another detainee said the water was “stinky and rotten”, and that he saw mosquitoes emerging from a substance contained within it.

He said nobody in his cell had yet signed any document.

Reports last month said “Alligator Alcatraz”, operated by the state of Florida as an immigration jail on behalf of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, would wind down operations in June, leading to its .