Fast-tracking due process at Alligator Alcatraz

Gonzalo Almanza immigrated to Florida from Cuba with his parents when he was 6 years old. A lawful permanent resident, he grew up in the Orlando area and settled there with his long-time girlfriend, Aschly Valdez, and their child. Now, at age 31, he is an inmate in the immigration detention center known as Alligator Alcatraz.

A criminal conviction related to a gasoline theft scheme might have put Almanza on the federal government’s radar for possible deportation. But his attorney, Anna Weiser, doesn’t know that for sure because she can’t get anyone at Alligator Alcatraz to talk to her about her client.

“He has to be given proper notice” of a change to his immigration status, Weiser said. “The judge has to oversee his case. He has a right to at least a bond hearing. .… He’s been in ICE custody since on or about July 11. We’ve yet to receive any type of charging document. He doesn’t know why he’s being held against his will.”

Attorneys for detainees at Alligator Alcatraz accuse the government of trampling on their clients’ due process rights. Those rights and the procedures that protect them vary because the government has different obligations to detainees depending on their criminal histories and their immigration status. Amid that confusion, deportation flights are already underway. Some say the Trump administration is skirting proper procedures to deport more people, while others say the government is acting well within its authority.

“We know anecdotally that it’s happening, but being able to exhaustively answer, ‘How many people are not getting access to due process?’ It’s very hard for our community right now because we don’t have the same access as we would have in previous administrations,” said Jennie Murray, president and CEO of the National Immigration Forum. “We know [due process is] not, across the board, being observed.”

During a recent news conference at the detention facility, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said that the Department of Homeland Security has various processes for deciding whom to deport and how. Already, hundreds of people have been deported from the state on flights taking off from Alligator Alcatraz, DeSantis said.

DeSantis did not elaborate on those procedures, but he said that President Donald Trump had approved using state officials and National Guard judge advocates as immigration judges. Those officials would then be located on-site and be able to speed up the process of removing the illegal aliens. That system was not yet up and running, though, even though flights had commenced, DeSantis said.

I asked DHS if federal or state authorities obtained deportation orders for the individuals who were put aboard the flights that had already left Alligator Alcatraz. I also asked DHS where those flights were going and if there would be more flights like them. I received an email response with a single quote attributed to Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. “Fire up the deportation planes,” it said. The Florida Division of Emergency Management, DeSantis’ office, and the Florida attorney general’s office did not respond to my request for comment on the matter.

While he said he couldn’t speak on behalf of the administration, Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said he assumed that most of the individuals detained at Alligator Alcatraz were individuals whom immigration judges had already issued deportation orders for and simply needed to be rounded up by authorities and removed from the country. That, or they were convicted criminals who were eligible for deportation as a result of those convictions, he said. DeSantis has also claimed every individual at the facility has deportation orders.

“Removing aliens who are in the country illegally is completely and fully within the authority given to the federal government by federal immigration statutes,” von Spakovsky said. “There’s nothing extraordinary or out of the ordinary or illegal or unlawful about the deportation flights that are removing aliens who’ve been detained down in Florida.”

The Trump administration has sweeping authority to detain illegal immigrants and fast-track their removal proceedings, Murray said. Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office declaring illegal immigration to be an invasion and expanding the government’s ability to use expedited removal to deport immigrants. A Federal Register notice dated a day after the executive order was signed said that DHS would utilize expedited removal proceedings to the fullest extent authorized by Congress in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1996.

Expedited removal applies to many people who enter or attempt to enter the United States without approval, as opposed to those who overstay valid visas. It allows an immigration official to order someone’s deportation without a hearing before an immigration judge.

“That actually gives the federal government quite a lot of power when a presidential power is enacted to say, ‘We’re being invaded, and I have the right to protect our country from invasion,’” Murray said. “When you ask the question about the nation’s power to do this expedited removal, that’s where some of those powers are coming from.”

The U.S. Department of Justice explains that even during expedited removal proceedings, illegal immigrants must be given a chance to explain whether they are eligible for asylum.

Hans von Spakovsky argued that such deportations are the proper response to a massive influx of illegal immigrants. “If you’re an alien who illegally entered the United States and have no right to be in the United States, you shouldn’t be surprised if you are then removed from the United States,” he said.

But some individuals detained at Alligator Alcatraz, such as Almanza, aren’t illegal immigrants. Almanza has legal status but also has at least two criminal convictions related to thefts in 2013 and 2024. On the morning of July 11, he called his partner, Aschly Valdez, on his way to meet with his probation officer. When he got there, he texted Valdez that the officer was taking longer than normal.

“And then I didn’t hear from him for like, 30 minutes,” Valdez said. “I texted him. I was like, ‘Are you OK? Hello?’ And then I started calling him, calling him, calling him, saying, ‘Gonzalo, answer.’ And then after that, I didn’t hear from him. He was taken during that time that I was trying to reach out to him.” She later found out that he was taken to a room where two immigration officers were waiting to take him to Alligator Alcatraz.

Almanza’s prior convictions make him eligible for deportation but not expedited removal. That means, according to the law, he is entitled to a hearing before an immigration judge. His attorney, Weiser, has not yet been able to meet with him or have a confidential phone call with him.When she tried to set up a bond hearing so she could ask for her client to be released from ICE custody, the hearing was canceled the day of. Other lawyers representing clients in the facility have also reported similar rejections.

“The system was designed—that’s my personal interpretation—to wear out, to torture, torment, so that people give up and leave. And it’s working,” Weiser said. “We’ve had a client that’s also [a] lawful permanent resident—again, don’t have consent to share specific details—but we were hired for a day or two and just barely started work. And they said to us that they’re ready to leave. They don’t want any further work being done. They will sign papers to leave and give up voluntarily their status and their rights to stay here.”

But Almanza isn’t going to give in, Aschly Valdez said. “He will never give up this fight. This is his home—his whole life has been right here in Orlando, Fla.,” she said. “He moved here when he was 6 years old. He has no knowledge of life in Cuba anymore. Faint childhood memories of places that probably no longer exist. He is and will continue to fight this detention.”