New report examines the failures of a Florida immigrant jail born of a federal–county partnership

With immigration enforcement ramifications making daily headlines, a new report led by a Stanford researcher looks at the environmental dimensions of immigrant detention.

The report, Sweet Land, Bitter Deal: Immigrant Detention and Unbreathable Air in Florida’s Sugarcane Heartland, describes harmful conditions at the Glades County Detention Center (Glades) in rural southern Florida. A county jail built specifically to house federally detained immigrants, the facility frequently subjected detained people to toxic, unbreathable air. In addition, the report reveals Glades never delivered promised economic benefits to the impoverished region.

Altogether, the report demonstrates the intersection of contentious policies, such as prison profiteering and immigrant criminalization, resulting in pervasive harms. From a social sciences perspective, the report shows how academic researchers can collaborate with advocates in pursuing positive change. 

“This jail, built by Glades County officials, exposed detained people to environmental harm while devouring public funds that could otherwise have supported the local community,” said Emma Shaw Crane, assistant professor of anthropology in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. “We hope that through this report and applied policy work that we can support alternatives to detention that respect the basic rights and dignity of all people.”

Crane served as the lead investigator and author of the report, released in December by Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law association, and a coalition of migrant justice organizations.

‘Harrowing experiences’

Crane interviewed people who had been detained at Glades; county sheriffs and corporate executives who have run the facility; and members of the Glades County Board of County Commissioners. 

Detained people recounted their “harrowing experiences,” Crane said, which included beatings and solitary confinement. But what proved especially harmful to the health of many were airborne hazards. Staff routinely pepper-sprayed prisoners as “punishment, retaliation, and revenge for asking for necessities like water and toilet paper,” according to the report. Due to crowding at Glades, this action served as collective punishment for all detained people.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, facility staff sprayed antimicrobial products on surfaces three times a day without properly diluting the solutions or first removing people from rooms. Detained people reported painful, strained breathing as a result. An even more acute situation involved a carbon monoxide leak that sent multiple detained people and staff to the hospital. The facility did not have a carbon monoxide detector installed. 

Bad economics

Based on these accumulating reports of abuse, which environmental and immigration advocates helped obtain and publicize over the years, Glades stopped receiving federally detained immigrants in 2022. However, as part of the current federal administration’s agenda, Glades reopened last April. A goal of the new report is to renew focus on the facility and others like it as the federally detained immigrant population continues surging nationwide. 

Crane’s broader work explores the delegation of federal immigration enforcement powers to state and local authorities throughout Florida—a phenomenon whereby the Sunshine State is acting as a “laboratory,” Crane said, for the diversion of public money toward criminalizing immigrants. A similar approach supports the better-known “Alligator Alcatraz,” a state-run immigrant detention center that opened last year.

A $33 million facility, Glades opened in 2008 with a capacity of 440 beds, or nearly ten times the average population of the Glades County jail. It later expanded to 626, creating capacity to handle overflow from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) centers nationally. Because of shifting political and economic winds, the number of federally detained immigrants at Glades has fluctuated dramatically over the years, often leading to hiring, firing, and re-hiring of guards and other staff and contributing to economic instability and community frustration.

The report delves into the finances behind Glades, finding that the facility had collected more than $42 million in revenue since opening. Proponents of building the jail hoped that money would eventually go to Glades County, but all funds went to out-of-state bondholders. The county continued subsidizing the facility when the number of detained people waned while basic services for local residents could not be sustained. For example, the report indicates that over several months in 2021, the county paid a consultant $20,000 to try to obtain more immigration enforcement contracts though the county lacked a working ambulance because it could not afford to fix its lone vehicle. 

“The county has not made a single cent from Glades,” Crane said. “The facility has instead siphoned money out of the region while egregiously harming detained people in the process.” 

Crane said that Glades officials spoke to her about the negative impacts they, too, have felt. “They hoped this facility would bring durable economic development, but those hopes have been betrayed,” she said. “It’s important that we show what has happened at Glades because these federal–municipal arrangements are increasingly a model.”

A role for social sciences

Beyond the primary intention of countering injustices generated by policies that culminate in facilities like Glades, Crane hopes her work offers an example for anthropology students curious about applied and public work. 

“A lot of students in my anthropology classes wonder what they can do with an anthropology major or other social science degrees,” Crane said. “Anthropology is fundamentally concerned with human experience, and we hope that this kind of work can be one example of the role of social science research in the world.”   

Acknowledgments

Other key contributors to the report include Carol Iglesias Otero, a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago; Dominique Burkhardt, a senior attorney at Earthjustice; Guadalupe de la Cruz, program director for Florida at the American Friends Service Committee; Devra Gelman, formerly of Americans for Immigrant Justice; and Rebecca Talbot, a writer and organizer formerly of the Immigrant Action Alliance. Important analysis of Glades was provided by Jack Norton and Jacob Kang-Brown of the In Our Backyards (IOB) project by the Vera Institute for Justice.