Detainees held in Donald Trumpf's new jungle gulag in Florida are finding worms in their food. Toilets don't flush, flooding floors with fecal waste, and mosquitoes and other insects are everywhere. Prisoners began arriving at this torture chamber on 2 July. Inside the compound's large white tents, rows of bunk beds are surrounded by chain-link cages. Detainees go days without showering or getting prescription medicine, and they are only able to speak by phone to lawyers and loved ones. At times the air conditioners abruptly shut off in the sweltering heat. Insider accounts paint a picture of the place as unsanitary and lacking in adequate medical care, pushing some into a state of extreme distress. "The conditions in which we are living are inhuman," a Venezuelan detainee said by phone from the facility. "My main concern is the psychological pressure they are putting on people to sign their self-deportation."

The ACLU describes the facility as state-sponsored cruelty and an attack on indigenous people's sovereignty. In a strongly worded statement posted to the Archdiocese of Miami's website, Archbishop Thomas Wenski condemned the conditions at the remote detention site in the Everglades: "It is unbecoming of public officials and corrosive of the common good to speak of the deterrence value of alligators and pythons' at the Collier-Dade facility." Democratic lawmakers filed a lawsuit to gain access to this torture chamber. Conservation groups warned government agencies in a legal filing that they're breaking the law by failing to protect the Big Cypress National Preserve from the increasingly destructive effects of this horrible Bastille in the swamp. Sources:

Miami Archbishop

Worms and Sewage

Environmental Damage