TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — One week after the first detainees began arriving at the Florida-run detention center for migrants in the Everglades, Katie Blankenship, a Miami immigration attorney, showed up at the gates of Alligator Alcatraz with a list of five names and a demand: Let me in to see them.

She waited two and a half hours, only to be told to put her name on a list and to wait between 24 and 48 hours for a call back.

“These folks have due process and the right to counsel,” Blankenship told the employee manning the gate on July 10. “They cannot be denied counsel for this long and we cannot have a black hole of information where we do not know how to contact clients.”

That call has yet to come.

Nearly two weeks since the site opened, lawyers say Florida’s pop-up detention facility has been something of a black box, with detainees going in and little information coming out, except for outgoing calls from the facility.

Detainees taken to the seized county property in the Big Cypress National Preserve fall out of a federal immigration database created to help families and lawyers locate migrants who are in custody. Attorneys have struggled to schedule legal visitations with their clients, despite the state’s public assurances that they can be set up. Lawyers say it’s not even clear where to file legal briefs due to muddiness about whether detainees are in the custody of the state or federal government, which has claimed the DeSantis administration has final say on who is brought to the site.

The Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times spoke with seven attorneys who have clients at the facility. They said the need for transparency and legal access is urgent, as the state says detainees are sent to the site to be processed and be quickly deported from an on-site airstrip. But so far, lawyers are having trouble finding phone numbers and emails associated with the site — at least ones that lead to responses.

“I’ve called, I’ve emailed everybody and their grandmother and their grandmother’s sister. Nobody emails you back and nobody calls you back,” Atara Eig, a seasoned immigration attorney based in Miami, said in an interview Monday.

Stephanie Hartman, a spokeswoman with the Florida Division of Emergency Management, which is overseeing operations at Alligator Alcatraz, said in an email that detainees have “regular access to phone and video calls with their attorneys and family members upon request.”

“These are federal detainees held in a state facility, and therefore, attorneys should follow their normal representation procedures as they have full access to their clients,” Hartman said. “The purpose of the facility is to stage illegal immigrants for deportation, as has been repeatedly stated.”

Attorneys of detainees can email legal@privacy6.com, to schedule appointments, Hartman said.

On Sunday afternoon – a week and a half after the first detainees arrived – one attorney emailed that address and an automated reply said, in part: “Your message wasn’t delivered because the recipient’s email provider rejected it.” A few hours later, the attorney sent another email to the same address, and received a response Monday with a form to fill out to set up a legal visitation. The visit hasn’t happened yet. She was scheduled to have a bond hearing for her client Tuesday afternoon and had not been able to prepare him as of Tuesday morning.

The Herald/Times emailed the address on Monday afternoon and about two hours later received the following message:

“As we continue to develop and expand direct legal access resources at the facility, please be assured that we are working diligently to ensure timely, secure, and reliable attorney-client communication. We recognize the importance of these interactions and are committed to continuously improving the systems that support them. We sincerely appreciate your patience and understanding as we enhance our processes to better serve both legal counsel and the individuals in our care.”

To date, it is unclear whether any family members or attorneys have been able to visit detainees in person.

When asked how many visitations had been approved as of Monday, Hartman did not respond.

Scrambling to locate and represent

Some attorneys said that while they experienced delays, they have seen some progress, at least when it comes to scheduling bond hearings to try to get their clients out of the detention center in the Everglades.

Magdalena Cuprys says she has three clients at the state facility. In the case of one of her clients – a Honduran man with a pending asylum application as a victim of human trafficking — Cuprys said she was able to land a bond hearing. But she remains puzzled by his detention.

She said her client was originally held at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection building in Dania Beach for about a week after he was stopped at a truck weigh station by Florida Highway Patrol officers on June 25. He has a valid drivers’ license, Cuprys said. She still doesn’t know why he was detained that day. The Honduran man called her when he was stopped and an FHP officer took the phone and told her that anyone who “appears Hispanic” needs to be sent to CBP to have their license verified, she said. Cuprys didn’t name her client publicly, but the Herald/Times was able to independently confirm he is a detainee at the facility.

The Florida Highway Patrol could not immediately be reached for comment.

Officers told Cuprys her client would eventually be transferred to Krome detention center, so she prepped to file for his bond there. Then she found out from his family that he ended up at Alligator Alcatraz.

She filed at Krome Immigration Court anyway, since there was no process to file a motion at Alligator Alcatraz. She could not find a phone number or an email. When she asked an immigration court clerk what she should do, the clerk told her they had no information about Alligator Alcatraz or any of the detainees at the site. So she called back on July 8.

“And she [the clerk] said that their instructions are to reject those motions because they’re not in ICE custody,” Cuprys said.

The motion for a bond hearing was stuck in processing for days. Then, late last week it was scheduled for Tuesday.

Cuprys said she’s not optimistic. She’s unsure whether her client will be able to attend. She’s also expecting the judge to determine the court doesn’t have jurisdiction, because she’s been repeatedly told that her client is not in ICE custody.

The question about legal jurisdiction is critical for attorneys navigating their clients’ cases. But since the detention center opened to detainees on July 2, attorneys say they have had trouble discerning whether their clients are in the custody of the federal government or the state.

The Trump administration has insisted in court that it does not have control over the facility where ICE detainees are being held. Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said Saturday that the state of Florida — not ICE — is in charge of managing the facility. And while Gov. Ron DeSantis has said the site has on-site legal services for detainees, it is unclear how that is working two weeks into the facility’s opening.

Trump has also expressed support for Florida’s plan to expedite deportations by having qualified National Guard members act as immigration judges at the site, but as of Monday those plans were not yet in motion, as guardsmen had yet to receive any “formal tasking,” according to a spokesperson for the National Guard.

Falling off the grid

A DHS official, who asked to remain anonymous because he does not have authority to speak publicly, said there have been a lot of bumps in the rollout, including incorporating the new Alligator Alcatraz detainees into ICE’s database system that tracks them.

“Because it’s so new, it’s going to take a while for them to be added to the ICE locator system,” the official said.

The Herald/Times searched 747 names of people who are held or scheduled to be sent to Alligator Alcatraz on the ICE database. Only 40 appeared on the public-facing website, most of them listed as being located at nearby facilities, and three marked with a note to “call field office.”

Eig, the Miami immigration attorney, said one of her clients — a man with no criminal record who was detained by federal immigration agents during a routine check-in at an ICE field office — showed up on the ICE locator last week.

But on Monday, she checked again, and his name was no longer there.

“He’s completely gone, but he was there,” she said.

While detainees are not showing up on the ICE database, officials at the Krome detention center in Miami are regularly interacting with their state counterparts at Alligator Alcatraz. But attorneys interviewed by the Herald/Times have had to figure this all out on their own.

As Cuprys tried to represent her clients at Alligator Alcatraz, she started making calls.

She said the clerk at Krome suggested she reach out to federal Enforcement and Removal officers. An officer there told her that Alligator Alcatraz wasn’t set up yet for hearings and that the state was working on a memorandum of understanding, but it wasn’t “notched out” yet.

When Cuprys emailed a legal visit request to the Department of Homeland Security, she was told her client was “under the custody of the State of Florida,” not the federal government.

As the question of legal custody lingers, attorneys are still trying to meet with their clients – but it has not been easy.

Victor Martinez, Cuprys’ law partner, said staff at the facility told him when he visited Alligator Alcatraz on July 7 that he was one of the first attorneys to try and conduct a legal visitation at the site. So, they had him park and wait for almost five hours outside.

“What they said is that they are not ready to receive attorneys,” Martinez said. “Maybe they didn’t think attorneys were going to go visit their clients. They never set up for that.”

Martinez was not allowed inside, and he wasn’t able to contact his clients. Neither he nor Cuprys have been able to get their clients on the phone since then.

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