A Message to Alligator Alcatraz Detainees from A Guantánamo Survivor

Edited by Spencer Ackerman

SPENCER HERE. Just as I was reading about detainees inside Alligator Alcatraz engaging in what my former newspaper called an "alleged uprising," our friend Mansoor Adayfi reached out with a piece he had written about the Florida migrant-detention center from his perspective as a former Guantánamo detainee. Alligator Alcatraz may or may not soon close, per a federal judge's order last month, one that Florida is appealing. Since the Trump administration seeks to expand the Alligator Alcatraz model, I think Mansoor's warnings are worth heeding. "Fight. They only understand force," he writes in the piece you'll read below. 

Before we get there, a few things. First, at noon on September 13, I'll be at Red Emma's in Baltimore  talking with Cullen Enn about REIGN OF TERROR and IRON MAN as part of the Baltimore Book Festival. Tickets are available here. Second, I am staring at a Zeteo deadline on top of back-to-school for both my kids, so this may be the only edition we publish this week—although paid subscribers will get an unpaywalled version of that Zeteo column in their inboxes.  

More importantly, over the weekend, the Washington Post reported that a plan for the full ethnic cleansing of Gaza is circulating inside the Trump administration, even though the paper, to its enduring shame, could not summon the integrity to call it what it is. Brought to you by the same ghouls behind the "Gaza Humanitarian Foundation," the plan would redevelop Gaza without Palestinians, and provide "the United States access to energy resources and critical minerals." Alongside Israeli maneuvers to annex some as-yet-unknown but substantial parts of the West Bank, the genocide is reaching a critical stage. We cannot and must not lose sight of Palestine. Just like what happened at Guantánamo has spread to Florida, what is done to the Palestinians will be done to disfavored populations worldwide. Solidarity is and always has been self-preservation. And with that, here's Mansoor.

I SPENT OVER 15 YEARS detained in U.S. detention camps in Afghanistan and Guantánamo without trial or charge. Torture. Isolation. Hunger strikes. Humiliation. Fifteen years ripped from my life because I was Muslim, Arab, Yemeni. Disappeared into CIA black sites. I was 18 when they took me. Hooded, gagged, blindfolded in an orange suit. The U.S. government branded me the worst of the worst. My family did not know if I was alive or dead. I have seen America’s darkest prisons up close. I know the smell of them.

In 2023, I told The Independent that I saw Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, then a Navy lawyer at Guantánamo, while the staff forced tubes down my throat to break my hunger strike. He replied: "Do you honestly think they would’ve remembered me?”

We remember. I remember DeSantis' smirk as I sat shackled in the force-feeding chair. Pepper spray burning my skin. Tubes shoved down my throat. Blood running from my nose and mouth. I remember the cruelty that happened while DeSantis was there. So did another detainee, Fayez al-Kandari, who tweeted in 2022: "Ron DeSantis… participated in the torture of hunger strikers. Known among detainees and soldiers for deceit, lying, cunning, and opportunism… Some detainees threw urine in his face and spat on him because of his malice and hatred." 

If you let cruelty go unchecked, it will swallow us all. 

Now, under DeSantis' leadership, Florida built and operates a large migrant detention camp in the Everglades known as Alligator Alcatraz. My stomach went into knots when I watched DeSantis, U.S. President Donald Trump, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem celebrate its opening in June. What they unveiled was little more than  the grotesque spectacle of Guantánamo repackaged. Trump mocked the migrants like they were nothing, stripping away their humanity. His laughter sent my mind reeling back to the cages. Back to the hunger strikes. Back to the cold. Back to the Force-feeding chair.

The same venom they spat at us after 9/11 now drenches migrants and refugees. At Guantánamo, we were "enemy combatants," "hardened terrorists," "the worst of the worst." At Alligator Alcatraz, they are "illegal aliens," "criminals," "invaders." The labels change. The purpose does not. Strip away humanity so cruelty can rule unchecked. These cages are lawless zones where justice dies. How many times must we watch the same script before we call it what it is?

Alligator Alcatraz's days may be numbered, thanks to a federal judge. But the judge's injunction had to do with the prison's environmental impact, not its injustice. Noem's DHS seeks to build Alligator Alcatraz-like migrant detention centers in other, Republican-governed states. Whether or not Alligator Alcatraz shuts down by mid-October, last week, the Spanish-language Noticias 23 reported that the detainees have engaged in what one detainee called "unrest" to demand their freedom and their dignity. The guards have reportedly responded with beatings and tear gas. Other reports have claimed detainees at Alligator Alcatraz and elsewhere have gone on hunger strike, just like we did. The authorities are denying it all, just like they did in our case. 

Whatever the future of Alligator Alcatraz is, the same playbook I endured at Guantánamo—deprivation, dehumanization, denial—is now in use inside the United States. I survived it. Others did not.

STARTING IN 2005, NEARLY 400 OF US AT GUANTÁNAMO began a hunger strike to protest torture, religious abuse, indefinite detention, and the denial of justice. After more than 45 days without food, I was taken to the detainees’ hospital. It was a temporary set-up. I was shackled 24 hours a day to a military bed—both hands, both legs. The only time my handcuffs were removed was during toilet breaks. My legs stayed chained.

Some medical staff showed basic decency. Others hated us. We all weighed less than 100 pounds. Some were under 90.

Months later, I met DeSantis. Military uniform. Small notebook in hand. He introduced himself as a Judge Advocate General (JAG) officer, a military lawyer. He said he was there to ensure humane treatment. He asked why we were on strike and promised our concerns would be taken seriously. Some believed him. We thought someone might finally listen.

Some medical staff wouldn't participate in the forced feeding. DeSantis' team replaced them. The new crew included a special team tasked with ending the hunger strike. One night, guards dragged us from the hospital to November Block. No warning. Interrogators ran that block. It was one of the worst places in the camp. We were stripped, thrown into freezing metal cages, blasted with noise from industrial vacuums, fans, generators. No sleep. No water. No prayer. No silence. Lights that never went off. Guards who hammered the doors all night. Cold air poured in mercilessly. I thought I would die in that cage.

Around 3 a.m., a guard tossed orange shorts through the bean hole, the slot in a prison door to receive trays of food. I put the shorts on. Then I heard the Extreme Reaction Force (ERF) team approaching. They were six soldiers in riot gear, a shield, a dog, an MK-46 pepper spray canister, a camera, a medic, an interpreter, officers, all in armor. An entire squad against detainee 441—me—who weighed about 94 pounds.

Let your pain shatter their cages.

The pepper spray hit my naked body through the slot. The dog lunged. The shield slammed me to the wall. A knee pressed into my neck. My face shoved into the toilet. They dragged me across the steel floor to the block yard and strapped me into the force-feeding chair.

I couldn’t move. My body shook. Blood ran from my nose and mouth. Thin shorts. Skin on fire. Breathing sand.

An interpreter shouted for the officers and medical team. "This is your last chance to eat. Otherwise, we will make you."

I looked at them and said, "Eat what? I don’t see any food here. Maybe take me to your restaurant. We can talk there, be civil."

They stacked boxes of the liquid-nutrient drink Ensure in front of me. There were five, maybe six cans. A soldier said, "This is your first meal. Enjoy it." A corpsman raised a thick tube with a metal tip. "I’ll enjoy this," he said. A guard asked to do it. The corpsman handed him the tube.

They shoved it into my nose. Blood spilled. I screamed—not from fear or surrender, but from defiance. That angered them. A slap to my face. A boot to my chest. They added another tube. They did it for fun.There was no time limit in the chair. No rules. No oversight. Only pain.

Can after can poured into my stomach. At the hospital, it had been two small cans in the morning and two in the evening. Here, there was no end. My stomach couldn’t hold it. I vomited. They laughed. They had mixed laxatives into the liquid. I lost control of my bowels in the chair. They laughed again. Hours passed. No rest. No sleep. Just pain. Just cans.

Then came the third round. This time I had an audience. Behind a chain-link fence stood officers and civilians, some in uniform, some not. Watching. Laughing. Silent. That’s when I saw him again. Ron DeSantis. Military uniform. Sunglasses. That same smirk.

They kept pouring cans into me. I vomited toward the crowd. They jumped back like I had fired a weapon. DeSantis took off his cap and sunglasses, disgusted. For a second, they looked afraid. I smiled through the pain.

They punished me with solitary. I spent more than 18 months in isolation. They said I had assaulted officers and guests.

That was the same man who had stood at my bedside and promised dignity. The same man who said he was there to protect our rights.

One detainee was taken to the intensive care unit from force-feeding injuries. A few months later, three men died, all on hunger strike, all force-fed. These were not suicides. They were killed while DeSantis was there. He went home. They never did.

Salah Ahmed Al-Salami. Mani’a. Yassir, a boy of 16 when they brought him to Guantánamo. They endured beatings, humiliation, and psychological torture meant to break them. Then they died.

LIKE GUANTÁNAMO, ALLIGATOR ALCATRAZ  is a machine built to break people. Remote. Hard to reach. Hard to see. Hard to scrutinize. No cameras. No names.

Guantánamo had stifling heat, constant lights, freezing cells. Florida has swamp heat by day, mosquitoes by night, floodlights that erase darkness. The swamp stinks, thick with rot. The environment becomes a weapon. 

At Guantánamo, hunger strikes were denied and dismissed. At Alligator Alcatraz, protests and hunger strikes meet the same silence. The same briefing lines. The same denial of suffering while it continues behind the fence, far from prying eyes. This isn’t mismanagement. It's design. 

At Guantánamo, men vanished into a system without charges or trial. At Alligator Alcatraz, migrants disappear into bureaucracy designed to erase them. If they can vanish you without trial, strap you down, shove tubes through your nose and call it care, who is next?

Let your suffering be a weapon aimed at their cruelty. 

Guantánamo was never an isolated incident. It was and is a blueprint. Now that blueprint has come to Florida, and not only there. Last month, a federal judge ruled that Alligator Alcatraz must cease operations by mid-October, and Florida, even as it fights the closure in court, appears to be taking steps to shut the place down. But whatever happens in Florida, Noem is pushing the Alligator-Alcatraz model across the United States. She talks about working with right-wing-governed states like Arizona, Nebraska, and Louisiana, to build more such cages. These aren't prisons, they're torture machines, designed to break people’s bodies and spirits, the same hell we lived through in Guantánamo.

The Trump administration is throwing more than $600 million to build these camps. Guantánamo’s cruelty repackaged, wrapped in bureaucracy and claiming lawfulness, shoved down Americans’ throats as "security" from desperate migrants. This is a war on humanity. The nightmare once hidden behind fences in Cuba is now here. Indefinite detention. Dehumanization. Silence. They are coming to your backyard. The same lies. The same violence disguised as "care" The same abuse, covered up as "protection." This is DeSantis and Noem’s blueprint.

Migrants, protesters, journalists, anyone who challenges power. No one is safe from this system.Guantánamo, long forgotten by Americans, is spreading. If we don’t fight now, it will swallow everything.

TO EVERYONE TRAPPED IN ICE'S DETENTION CENTERS, Alligator Alcatraz and the rest of this monstrous U.S. detention apparatus—especially those starving in hunger strikes—listen up.

You are not trash. You are not numbers on a cold spreadsheet. You are human. Do not let them erase you. Do not let them turn your life into data. Make them remember what it means to be human.

Fight. They only understand force. Weaponize your pain. Starve. Let your suffering be a weapon aimed at their cruelty. 

This is war. They built those cages to break bodies and spirits. Do not let them win.

Stand tall. Every empty stomach. Every cracked lip. Every burning throat. A bullet fired at their lies.They forget one truth. Bodies break. Spirits burn systems down.

And to every American watching, this is your warning. If you do not rise, if you stay silent, you are next. Today it is migrants. Tomorrow it could be you, your family, your neighbors.

Tyranny feeds on fear and silence. Do not feed it. Starve it with fury. Fight it with everything you have. Protect hunger strikers. Lift their voices. Expose their lies.

If you let cruelty go unchecked, it will swallow us all. 

They use fear to control you. Give them rage.

They want silence. Shout louder.

They want obedience. Give them rebellion.

You are not alone. We stand with you.

Let your pain shatter their cages.

Let your resistance roar until the whole world hears.

Mansoor Adayfi is a former Guantánamo prisoner, writer, activist, and CAGE International’s Guantánamo Project Coordinator.