Freezing temperatures, soiled clothing and scarce medical attention are among the daily realities reported by detainees inside the Baker County Detention Center.
The U.S. Immigration and Enforcement detention center in Macclenny, about 50 minutes north of Gainesville, is one of four facilities in Florida that houses undocumented immigrants. Yet according to advocates and filed complaints, the Baker facility is also the site of abuse and neglect.
The Baker facility has received 259 complaints since 2017, comprising over half of the 470 total across the state’s four detention centers.
Alice Gridley leads Baker Interfaith Friends, a group that visits the detention center and offers support to the people taken into detention and their families who are left behind. Much of Gridley’s work involves speaking with detainees, offering support and momentary relief from the alleged ongoing abuse at the detention center.
She and other volunteers try to bridge the gap for detainees, making phone calls to detainees’ loved ones. Most of the time, all detainees asked for was for someone to let their family know where and how they were.
“The first time I went, I have to admit, I was kind of in shock, because I had no idea what was going on in detention centers,” Gridley said.
Still, after six years of volunteering and meeting with detainees at Baker, Gridley said she’s stunned by what she hears and sees.
Visitors at the Baker facility are only allowed to speak with detainees through a video monitor at the detention center for 15 minutes at a time. After the COVID-19 pandemic, visits were relegated to at-home virtual meetings through HomeWAV, an inmate communication platform. The center has not returned to in-house communication since the pandemic.
Often, she said, detainees disappear after a visit. Someone they spoke with on one visit might be in the process or deported by the time the volunteers returned.
Many immigrants being held at the Baker facility are transferred from regions hours away, Gridley said, limiting access to friends and family. A lot of the detainees Gridley spoke with are from south Florida, Macclenny being a three to six hour drive for their family and lawyers to visit, she said.
“They got very few visitors. And that was deliberate. They tried to make it difficult for people to visit them,” Gridley said.
She described “inhuman” conditions inside the center: soiled clothes handed out to new arrivals, inadequate medical care and, in her view, an atmosphere of fear.
The Baker County Detention Center didn’t respond to The Alligator’s three requests for comment.
“Most of the people that I talked with were very grateful to be in the U.S. at that point in time, but scared, very scared,” Gridley said. “Detention center was kind of a polite name for really what I considered the torture chamber.”
Over time, Gridley said she’s listened to countless stories of what she calls “disturbing” incidents.
She recalled one man from Scotland, who was married to a U.S. citizen and had serious medical conditions, was deported by plane despite being medically unfit to fly, according to his wife’s pleas.
She also cited the story of a detainee she called Ana, a woman picked up in Florida who didn’t speak English.
“They ruled her uncooperative, so they put her in detention,” Gridley said. “Keep in mind that it’s 53 degrees. They stripped her down to her underwear initially, and then at a later point, they stripped her underwear, and so she had nothing in that solitary cell. They would go by the door and look in the window and laugh at her.”
The ACLU of Florida filed a civil rights complaint on Ana’s behalf last year.
Another detainee Gridley spoke with suffered broken ribs when he was assaulted by another detainee on his first day. He received no medical attention, Gridley said, and was reassigned to an upper bunk he could not climb. The man slept on the floor.
When volunteers from Baker Interfaith Friends discovered the facility lacked a law library, they donated law books, she said. Soon after, Gridley said, the sheriff decided to stop accepting book donations.
A firsthand perspective
Robin Poynor, a tenured UF visual arts professor, became deeply involved with Baker Interfaith Friends after hearing a talk about immigration at a retired faculty luncheon nearly a decade ago. When someone mentioned volunteers regularly visiting Baker County Detention Center, he was intrigued.
He joined Baker Interfaith Friends in its early years. Poynor recalled traveling to the center on Mondays, when volunteers still spoke to detainees through video monitors installed in concrete-block cubicles. Because of a hearing difficulty, he was eventually granted permission to meet detainees in a room typically reserved for attorneys, a setup that allowed face-to-face conversation through glass.
“They would bring them in one by one, shackled arms and feet,” Poynor said. “They would take the shackles off their arms when they put them into the little room, lock them in … so we could communicate.”
Many people he met had lived in Florida for most of their lives. Some were married to U.S. citizens and had U.S.-born children. Others arrived only recently. Regardless of personal history, Poynor said he found one constant theme: detainees were isolated and unsure of what the future held.
Although COVID-19 forced the facility to switch to remote visits via the HomeWAV platform, Poynor remains committed to connecting with detainees and preserving a sense of human contact.
“We don’t want to direct the conversation,” he said. “We want them to take advantage of having somebody to talk to.”
ACLU of Florida alleges legal violations
The ACLU of Florida, a civil rights law advocacy organization, has filed a lawsuit alleging Baker County Detention Center has violated detainees’ rights to counsel and due process. The facility canceled legal visits after the ACLU and partner organizations became outspoken about conditions there, ACLU Florida attorney Amy Godshall said.
“This is civil detention, not criminal detention,” she said. “People are not being held on criminal charges… the standard should be higher for this detention facility.”
A central concern is the center’s policy requiring attorneys to call ahead before mailing legal documents, Godshall said. If the center is not notified in advance, the mail is returned. According to Godshall, this policy is not published on Baker County’s website or in other public resources, putting attorneys and their clients at a significant disadvantage.
Godshall also alleged when legal mail does arrive, it is opened outside the detainee’s presence, a violation of attorney-client privilege. The lawsuit, filed in fall 2022, remains in the discovery phase, she said.
“Baker is responsible for providing food and medical care and clothing and housing, and all of those needs,” Godshall said. “Access to counsel is a big need for people in ICE detention, and they’re failing in all of those regards.”
From alleged spoiled food and moldy showers to shared dirty uniforms and underwear, the stories Godshall has heard paint a grim picture.
“People always talk about how they find bugs in it,” she said of the food. “It’s really bad. Every aspect of life in ICE detention is horrific.”
Godshall said officers at Baker have used pepper spray in response to detainees’ refusal to eat what they believed was spoiled food and have directed racial slurs and demeaning behavior toward those in custody.
“No one should, regardless of how you feel about ICE detention, be subjected to this,” she said. “I think it’s a waste of our government resources, and I think it’s led to unnecessary and avoidable abuse.”
Contact Vera Lucia Pappaterra at vpappaterra@alligator.org. Follow her on X @veralupap.
Vera Lucia Pappaterra is the enterprise race and equity reporter and a second-year journalism major. She has previously worked on the university desk as the university general assignment reporter. In her free time, she enjoys deadlifting 155 lbs. and telling everyone about it.
