At 3 p.m. on a Tuesday in July, a man from Georgia contacted the Collier County Sheriff’s Office to report a woman with purple hair sitting in a car on the south side of Route 41, across from the gates of Alligator Alcatraz. She was live on TikTok, recording the license plates of vehicles entering and leaving the facility.
The woman they complained about was Andrea Scherben, a 35-year-old grad student and social-media influencer who’d traveled across the country from California to see Florida’s Everglades detention center for herself — and share what she was watching with her 100,000 followers.
Long after the intense media attention on the first-of-its-kind state-run detention center faded, and the politicians and television crews moved on, Scherben is part of a small but diverse group of activists who still gather outside Alligator Alcatraz almost every day to raise awareness about the site’s continuing operations and pressure the government and its contractors to shut it down.
Read more at Miami Herald.
