Alcatraz is the brand known around the world for being effective at housing people that are in incarceration,” Burgum said of the island facility in the San Francisco Bay.

But data and news reports about the first month’s arrivals show the majority of Alligator Alcatraz’s detainees do not have U.S. criminal convictions.  President Donald Trump, federal officials and Florida Republicans touted the remote Everglades immigration detention centers — dubbed Alligator Alcatraz — as a place to detain people deemed the "worst of the worst.

A class-action lawsuit alleges that people being held at the immigrant detention center in the Everglades "effectively have no way to contest their detention."

“In most respects, ICE facilities operate with less consistent oversight and legal accountability than state or federal prisons or local jails,” Brinkley-Rubinstein said. “ICE detention facilities and people that run them tend to be much less transparent about their operations.”