The men are packed in cages, with nearly three dozen of them sharing a bank of toilets and a sink. For the lucky, the three toilets behind a small privacy wall are functioning.
Multiple accounts relayed to the press or to the lawmakers say backed-up toilets are the norm – not functioning ones at the detention facility that hasn’t even been open for two weeks.
This is at the new and quickly-built immigrant detention center in the middle of the Everglades named Alligator Alcatraz by the state — and supposedly air-conditioned.
But Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said her hand-thermostat record a temperature of 85 degrees at the medical in-take area and 83 degree near the men's caged dormitories.
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“This is inside the so-called air-conditioned tent area,” she said.
Officials would not let Wasserman Shultz and other U.S. and state lawmakers near the some 900 detainees held in Alligator Alcatraz on Saturday, during a state-guided tour of the facility – the first such tour since immigrants arrived in early July.
“They wouldn’t let us step past the threshold,” she said of the area to the men's caged-dormitories. “It was 83 degree and that was without being all the way in with all the bodies living inside.”
In spite of being kept a distance away, Wasserman Schultz and others said the men’s screams could be heard including from one person who cried out that he was a U.S. citizen.
“What we saw -- the conditions that we saw inside this internment camp -- which it is nothing less than that description -- were really appalling,” she said.
She said no specific reasons were given for denying lawmakers from speaking with detainees.
“They refused us access and wouldn’t even allow us to go into the dormitory where they were being encaged,” she said. “This is an appalling, outrageous environment to detain anyone.”
These startling pictures painted by Wasserman Schultz and other Democratic lawmakers were in stark contrast to images portrayed by state lawmaker Blaise Ingoglia.
“The idea that the detainees are in there and they're in squalid conditions is just not accurate,” he said. “I will tell you, I was in one of the one of the areas where I actually laid down in the bed, the bed was actually probably more comfortable than my bed at home. I'm not I'm not kidding.”
He said the big take-away should be that the federal government has screwed up immigration for decades resulting in what’s happening now at Alligator Alcatraz.
“It’s just a sad state of affairs that we are at this position right now,” he said.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many Republicans joined Democrats on Saturday’s tours.
The state offered the tours after five Democratic lawmakers were chased away from the detention camp when they showed up for an unannounced visit shortly after the first of the detainees arrived.
The state invited them back Saturday — but with conditions and restrictions such as no cell phones.
Congressman Maxwell Alajandro Frost, representing Central Florida, expressed concern about what he saw – staged or not.
“A clean cage, is still a cage,” he said.
Frost said asked to see if the toilets were functioning in the men’s dormitories but was denied access.
“They said, ‘We’ll show you the toilets of a new unit that no one is in yet,’” he said. “….Which means even with an invitation, so much was kept from us.”
Frost vowed to take up the fight on Capitol Hill and to come back to the facility at another time and demand a visit – this time unannounced.
“Every Floridian should be ashamed that our taxpayer money is being used to put people in cages.”
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