MIAMI — For the hundreds of men who were detained at Alligator Alcatraz, entering the gates of the makeshift migrant detention center in the Everglades meant exiting the labyrinthine but familiar federal immigration process and entering what several immigration attorneys described as an alternate system where the normal rules don’t apply.

One Guatemalan man detained at the tent site was accidentally deported to Guatemala before a scheduled bond hearing, his attorney said, reminiscent of the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador.

A 35-year-old Cuban man could not be located at the California detention facility where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said they had sent him, leaving his family and attorney frantically trying to determine where he was for more than a week, they said.

As of the end of August, the whereabouts of two-thirds of more than 1,800 men detained at Alligator Alcatraz during the month of July could not be determined by the Miami Herald. The Herald had obtained the names from two detainee rosters.

Around 800 detainees showed no record on ICE’s online database. More than 450 listed no location and only instructed the user to “Call ICE for details” — a vague notation that attorneys said could mean that a detainee is still being processed, in the middle of a transfer between two sites or about to be deported.

It’s possible that some of the men who couldn’t be located were still at Alligator Alcatraz. Unlike most immigration detention centers, Alligator Alcatraz is state-run and detainees often do not appear in the database run by the federal agency. Florida does not maintain a system to look up those detained at the site either.

But that wouldn’t have accounted for all the detainees with no record in the federal database, because the facility’s population had declined dramatically by late August, falling below 400 people as an Aug. 21 court ruling effectively halted operations at the site.

The outcomes for detainees who have been housed at the facility have taken on new significance after an appeals court overturned that earlier ruling, allowing the facility to resume operations.

Some Alligator Alcatraz detainees who couldn’t be located in the ICE database might have been deported — even though the internal data obtained by the Herald show the vast majority of detainees didn’t have final orders of removal from a judge before entering the facility.

Some of those deportations occurred as a result of detainees deciding to abandon their ongoing immigration cases to put an end to their detention at the facility and its harsh conditions, which included being held in chain-link cages in tents with little protection from the elements.

“It became a game of chicken to see who’s going to blink first, to see if the client’s going to say ‘I don’t want to be detained in these conditions just send me back,’” said Miami immigration attorney Alex Solomiany.

But some immigrants who didn’t want to leave were also deported, even if they still had a legal right to remain.

One of Solomiany’s clients is a 53-year-old man from Guatemala who had been in the United States since 2001.

He was sent to Alligator Alcatraz soon after it opened in July after being stopped by the Florida Highway Patrol in Palm Beach County.

Solomiany filed a motion to be released on bond for the Guatemalan man, who worked as a house painter and is married with children. The attorney showed up for a scheduled hearing at the Krome Detention Center in Miami on Aug. 1 expecting to see his client.

That’s when an attorney for the government told him that his client had been accidentally sent to Guatemala instead of being transferred to Krome ahead of the hearing, Solomiany said.

Solomiany is now working with ICE to have his client returned to the US. The man’s family asked that his name not be used for fear of retribution.

John Sandweg, the former director of ICE during the Obama administration, said the facility’s hasty construction in just over a week made errors inevitable.

“The way that this was rolled out, that it was stood up overnight … all of that lends itself to mistakes,” he said.

A spokesperson for the office of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis referred the Herald to ICE when asked for comment. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

‘The Alligator Alcatraz label’

Now, more than two months after the site first opened, attorneys say that the chaos that marked the facility’s early days has followed their clients even after they have left.

“They’ve all suffered some pretty bad results just from being tagged with the Alligator Alcatraz label,” said immigration attorney Zachary Perez, talking about the nearly half-dozen detainees at the facility that his firm has represented.

One former detainee at the facility went missing for more than a week after he was removed from the facility, according to his family.

Michael Borrego Fernandez, a 35-year-old Cuban national, was detained at Alligator Alcatraz for nearly all of July. He was one of several detainees who sued the Trump and DeSantis administrations over legal access at the facility.

Borrego was moved to Krome at midnight on Aug. 2 and according to ICE’s detainee locator was transferred around Labor Day to Otay Mesa Detention Center, a privately-run migrant detention site in San Diego.

While at Krome, Borrego called his mother, wife and three-year-old daughter at least once a day, said his mother, Yaneisy Fernandez. But after his transfer, his family didn’t hear from him for more than a week.

Borrego’s attorney Mich Gonzalez said he called the California facility repeatedly but was told each time that no one by that name was detained there.

Borrego’s family was worried about his health.

While at Alligator Alcatraz, he needed an emergency surgery for stage 4 hemorrhoids. His mother said that he was in great pain after the surgery and did not get proper medical care during his recovery period, most of which he spent shackled to a bed.

Borrego’s family were at their wits end trying to find him, Fernandez said.

“This is like psychological torture,” she said. “Where’s the humanity?”

Finally, after more than a week, they heard from Borrego again.

But he wasn’t in California.

He was 2,000 miles away from where ICE said he would be.

Borrego had abruptly been deported to the Mexican state of Tabasco.

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—McClatchy’s Tyler Dukes contributed to this story.

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