MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said on Tuesday that 14 Mexican nationals were being held at the U.S. “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center and that her government was seeking their repatriation.
“All arrangements are being made to ensure they are repatriated immediately to Mexico,” Sheinbaum said in her daily news conference.
The facility sits some 37 miles (60 km) from Miami in a vast subtropical wetland teeming with alligators, crocodiles and pythons, fearsome imagery the White House has leveraged to show its determination to purge migrants it says were wrongly allowed to stay in the U.S. under former President Joe Biden.
Since President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, a total of 73,533 people have been returned to Mexico, mostly by air, including 67,008 Mexican nationals, Sheinbaum said in another daily briefing this month.
Mexican father Martin Gonzalez told local radio station W that his sons, Carlos and Alejandro, were currently detained in the detention center.
“It’s really bad. The facility is completely closed, not even sunlight gets in. The lights are on 24-7, so they don’t even know if it’s day or night,” Gonzalez said.
He said his two sons were sent to the facility after Carlos, 26, was stopped by a state trooper while driving. He was visiting the U.S. as a tourist and had a valid visa, his father added.
The trooper asked for the car’s registration, which was missing. When his brother, Alejandro, arrived to provide the document, he was detained too, and both were sent to the facility, their father said.
“Obviously my sons are desperate to get out of this situation,” he said.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not respond immediately to a request for comment about the brothers’ case.
Mexico’s consul in Orlando, Juan Sabines, said in a video shared Monday alongside the men’s father that the two were in “legal limbo,” because a lawyer appointed to their case did not have access to their file, nor had a judge been assigned to the case.
(Reporting by Natalia Siniawski, Ana Isabel Martinez and Adriana Barrera; Editing by David Gregorio)
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