‘It feels like a mockery’: Justo Betancourt, a former detainee at Alligator Alcatraz who received a congratulations note from Trump

When Justo Betancourt, 55, was released from Alligator Alcatraz on May 14, after nearly six months in detention, he had lost 22 kilograms (48.5 lb) and could barely walk. Two days later he was admitted to hospital, on the verge of a diabetic coma. While in detention, he did not receive the insulin doses he needed, suffered strokes, and during one episode, he fell and lost a tooth. He has been left with neurological after-effects: his right hand trembles, and to climb a step, he lifts his leg from behind the thigh. “Sometimes I have to grab it and push, because it doesn’t respond,” he says on the ground floor of the apartment building where he lives, in Miami’s Little Havana. This week, President Donald Trump dedicated a message to him on Truth Social: “Welcome home to Justo Betancourt, whose Daughter, Arianne, fought very hard to free her father from Alligator Alcatraz. Enjoy your Freedom together!!!”

“It feels like a mockery. I think that’s what it is, more than anything else—a mockery,” says Betancourt, adding that the mention of his daughter has given him “a lot to think about.”

The president’s post marks the culmination of the public campaign waged for months by Arianne Betancourt, 33. Through it, she turned her father’s detention into a symbol of the resistance against Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and became the face of allegations of human rights violations at Alligator Alcatraz.

The spotlight is not her father’s natural habitat. Justo Betancourt is a man of few words, with graying hair, a tanned complexion, and a taciturn gaze. He arrived in Miami in 1990 from Matanzas, in western Cuba, and for years he worked as a carpenter building kitchen cabinets. In 2016, he was sentenced to six years in prison for conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine, and was held in a federal prison in Nebraska until 2020. Upon his release, he was issued a deportation order and was subject to periodic check-ins with ICE. During one of those check-ins, in October, he was detained at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office in Miramar, north of Miami.

The campaign to secure her father’s release consumed Arianne’s life. After attending one of the vigils held every Sunday in front of Alligator Alcatraz, she quit her job as a tour guide in Miami and began volunteering with The Workers Circle, the organization that organizes the vigils. She has helped families contact their detained loved ones, publicly denounced her father’s health issues and the conditions at the detention center in Chicago, Minneapolis and Washington, and during former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s congressional hearing, and is now gathering information on detainees who lack legal representation in order to connect them with pro bono attorneys.

“I saw that there was a need for someone to represent families like mine—someone who would speak out and not be afraid. And when I saw that no one else was doing it, I stepped up. I didn’t do it so that people would tell me I’d done something good, but because it was the right thing to do,” she says. “Freedom comes at a price, and staying silent is the same as being an accomplice.”

Justo Betancourt says the federal prison where he was held in Nebraska was like “a five-star hotel compared to Alligator Alcatraz.” In the heart of the Everglades, he says, 32 people share spaces measuring about six by six meters, which he describes as metal cages with three aluminum toilets. “There are 32 people, each with different thoughts, in their own world, in their own despair. And the question we all ask ourselves: Why me? What are we doing here?” he says.

Betancourt doesn’t try to hide his past. “I made a mistake, but that’s in the past. And I paid for it. I followed the law. I live a quiet life, I don’t mess with anyone, I don’t hang out with anyone. I took the advice to heart,” he adds, shrugging.

When he arrived at Alligator Alcatraz, he had to be admitted to the facility’s clinic due to a hypoglycemic episode caused by his diabetes. He spent several days handcuffed to a bed and dependent on the guards, even to go to the bathroom or drink water. For any movement, no matter how brief, detainees are handcuffed and shackled, he explains.

When his condition improved and he was transferred with the rest of the detainees, he stopped receiving the insulin he needed. “They told me, ‘It’s not in the system. You have to wait three days.’ But 90 days went by,” he recalls. His health deteriorated. “I almost went into a diabetic coma. They took me to the hospital with cardiac arrest and the early signs of a stroke.” He remained hospitalized for three days before being returned to the center. “They took me back, and my family wasn’t notified at all,” he adds.

Months later a series of transfers began, taking him to various detention centers. First he was sent to Krome, southwest of Miami, and then to Texas, where authorities attempted to deport him to Mexico. At the border, he claims to have seen people being beaten for refusing to get off the bus. Mexican authorities refused to accept him due to his health issues—heart disease and schizophrenia, in addition to diabetes—and sent him back. A second attempt to deport him via Arizona had the same result. Finally, he was sent back to Alligator Alcatraz.

Betancourt was released after a federal judge granted his petition for habeas corpus, a legal tool rarely used in immigration cases that has become one of the few avenues of recourse for detainees who challenge the legality of their detention.

Recalling those months in detention, he asserts that nowhere else did he suffer treatment comparable to that at Alligator Alcatraz, which seems to have been created on purpose “to traumatize people, with a lack of humanity,” he says thoughtfully, as he watches the roosters and hens scurrying around the building’s yard.

“At four in the morning, they turn on the lights and don’t turn them off again until midnight. You know it’s five in the morning because it’s breakfast time. You know it’s eleven because it’s lunch time, and five because it’s dinner time. Other than that, you have no sense of time.” The food arrived in boxes that sat out in the open for hours. Sometimes it went bad before he could eat it, he says.

On top of the hunger and the conditions was the uncertainty of not knowing what would happen to him. “I asked an immigration guard what was going to happen to me, and he said, ‘You’re going to die here. You’ll leave here in a box or in a box. You won’t leave here on your own two feet. By order of the president.’” Another guard told him, “Didn’t you see the movies about the Nazis?” he recalls. “They completely destroy you, they break you.”

He says the degrading treatment continued right up until he was told he would be released. The guard told him he had five minutes to make his bed and stand by the door: “Otherwise, I’d have to stay. So I quickly scrambled to gather up the sheet—since I was on the bottom bunk—and when I turned around, he was gone. Four hours later, he came to get me. Just to be mean. If he knew he had to pick me up later, why did he make me go through that?”

During those months, he says that thinking about his family was the only thing that gave him the strength to keep going. “When I got out, imagine, I couldn’t believe it. I was with Arianne, my kids, and their mom in the car, and I was looking all around, saying: Is this real, is this real? Because I’d dreamed so much about that moment, about giving them a hug, and I’d open my eyes and see the bottom of the iron bunk bed, and I’d say: Oh!”

His son, Eddy Oney Betancourt, says it broke his heart to hear his father on the phone and sense that he was trying to stay upbeat. Sometimes weeks would go by without them being able to speak, and they knew that calls could bring good or bad news. They spent Christmas and their first Thanksgiving without him. Arianne had her birthday in February. His daughter said her first words. “I prayed every day that I was in there so I could see him one more time. Because you never know what’s going to happen in those places, and I heard stories of people who lost family members [in immigration custody].”

Arianne found Trump’s message counterproductive. “If he hadn’t created these immigration policies, I wouldn’t have had to leave behind everything I’d achieved, the life I’d built, to start fighting the government. This never should have happened.” She says she’s not sure of Trump’s intentions behind his post, but points to two possible scenarios: “I wouldn’t be doing what I do if I were easily intimidated.” So if the president is trying to use her case for his election campaign, she asserts, “he picked the wrong Cuban-American family”: “because he’s not going to use my story and the work I’ve put in to help him with the Cuban vote.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Last Sunday, Arianne and Justo Betancourt returned to the Everglades for the Sunday vigil, and they plan to go again next Sunday. Arianne says that what happened “cannot go unpunished,” and they are calling for an investigation that treats the site as a “crime scene.” “Someone has to be held accountable. There has to be justice.”

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