The answer could play a key role in a legal battle over the facility’s fate. And it has bigger implications, too.

A group of congressional Democrats is pushing officials at the DHS for more information about the use of the immigration detention facility dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz."

A federal judge handed down a split decision Aug. 18 in a lawsuit brought by detainees at Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz.”

Putting people in tents in the middle of the Everglades is a great tool to make them give up their cases,” said one immigration attorney

Gov. Ron DeSantis has said the location in the rugged and remote Everglades was meant as a deterrent against escape, much like the island prison in California that Republicans named it after. The detention center has an estimated annual cost of $450 million, according to a public database.

Records analyzed by the Times/Herald found that nearly two out of every five immigrants listed in early July as being detained at Alligator Alcatraz or headed there were still recorded as detainees at the site at the end of the month.

As thunder boomed on an ominous Sunday evening just outside of Alligator Alcatraz, over 200 people — most of them reverends, rabbis, pastors and people of assorted faiths — chanted in unison, “Shut it down” and “This is a preserve,

Although a federal judge in Miami ordered their case be moved to another Florida district, the ACLU and other plaintiffs suing the controversial migrant detention facility over access to attorneys insist they'll win the litigation - and that they have already been handed "an important victory.