After weighing arguments for two months, a federal judge in Fort Myers has issued an opinion in the Alligator Alcatraz civil rights case.
Judge Sheri Polster Chappell ordered the facility, which is run by the Florida Division of Emergency Management, to publish its policy allowing attorneys to show up without scheduling a visit and see their client.
Alligator Alcatraz officials testified in January that the policy allowing unscheduled legal visits had been in place since November, but the policy had never been published and was not widely known to most detainees and their attorneys, who sued the state and federal government last summer, arguing that the lack of access violated their First Amendment rights.
RELATED STORY | 'Alligator Alcatraz' 2.0: Second migrant detention center planned in Florida Everglades
She also ruled that the facility must provide detainees “with access to timely, free, confidential, unmonitored, unrecorded outgoing legal calls.” They must have one operable phone for every 25 detainees at Alligator Alcatraz. Immigration attorneys and families of detainees have previously told me that detainees can only make outgoing calls on the monitored phones that are in their sleeping area. They’ve said there are typically 2-4 of these phones available inside a cage where dozens of men are held together, and calls are sometimes cut off.
Polster Chappell wrote that the facility must post and publish these policy changes regarding attorney-client communication in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole.
"Defendants may continue operating alligator Alcatraz, and ICE may continue to deport illegal aliens," the judge wrote. "But they must do so by respecting the most basic constitutional rights."
This article was produced by Jamie Ostroff for the Scripps News Group in West Palm Beach.
