On the morning of May 1, 2026, more than thirty people stood under blue canopies on the edge of the Florida Everglades, holding signs that read "Humans are tortured here" and "Save the Glades." They were not there by accident. They had been there, in some form, every week for forty consecutive Sundays. The facility they were protesting — officially the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport detention center, nicknamed "Alligator Alcatraz" — is the first state-run immigration detention center in the country. Governor Ron DeSantis opened it last summer on an airstrip deep in the Big Cypress National Preserve. Since then, it has become one of the most polarizing pieces of infrastructure in South Florida. The May Day rally, organized by Debbie Clark Wehking, a 75-year-old retiree who works at the Episcopal Church Center on the University of Miami campus, was framed around a specific argument: that this facility is not an isolated experiment. "They're all modeled on this one," Wehking said, "which means they're all places of deliberate cruelty." The DeSantis and Trump administrations have denied allegations of cruelty, calling them a hoax. But the community showing up outside those gates every Sunday is not a fringe group. It includes faith leaders, veterans, Native American tribal members, and families of detainees — people whose presence is harder to dismiss than a political talking point. Arianne Betancourt, 33, a community advocate with Workers Circle, has been coming since her father was detained in October 2025. She receives at least one call a day from a family member of a detainee who says they are ready to give up. She tells them not to. The environmental dimension is equally significant. Conny Randolph, who works in the area and regularly hikes the Everglades trails, held a sign reading "Justice for All, including our wetlands." Her husband Scott oversees habitat recovery at Clyde Butcher's Big Cypress property a few miles away. He described the facility's bright lights as actively disturbing the nocturnal ecosystem of one of the most protected wetlands in North America. This is the part of the story that gets lost when it becomes a cable news segment. Alligator Alcatraz sits on Miccosukee tribal land, in an ecosystem that took decades of legal battles to protect. The question of what it means to build a detention network in that specific place — and what it says about how Florida values its own land and its own people — is a Miami question before it is a national one.