For around 15 hours, immigration detention officers kept Raúl Suárez Herrero confined in a cage slightly larger than a phone booth, where he feared snakes and endured mosquitoes in the middle of Florida swampland, the former detainee alleged.Suárez, 59, told José Díaz-Balart in an interview for Noticias Telemundo’s “Ahora 360” that he was forced into the cage, measuring 7 feet, 9 inches high and 4 feet, 3 inches square, for praying out loud for an ill young man at “Alligator Alcatraz,” an ICE detention site.“I feel like I was in hell,” Suárez later told NBC News in a phone interview from Mexico, where he was deported.Suárez spoke days after a Department of Homeland Security watchdog confirmed the use of the phone booth-sized cages at the now-shuttered Florida detention camp in a Sept.11 report.“The use of such restrictive spaces is highly unconventional and does not align with standards for humane treatment,” the report said.The DHS Office of Inspector General report documented its inspectors’ findings during an unannounced January visit to the Ochopee, Florida, site.Add to GoogleDHS watchdog report finds detainees were held in outdoor cages at 'Alligator Alcatraz'02:59In December, Amnesty International issued its own report on conditions at the detention site based on interviews with detainees and its own tour of the facility.
The organization detailed the use of the small cages and said it amounted to torture.The facility staff told inspectors that the cages were “calming areas” where immigrants could de-escalate and have time alone and that no one spent more than two hours inside them.But Suárez told Noticias Telemundo that “they took me there and I spent more than 15 hours inside in that little hole,” referring to the small cage.He said he was forced in around 1 p.m.
and taken out at about 5 a.m.“when morning was breaking.” According to Suarez, the cage was in a recreation area where detainees took exercise time.
Suarez...