Activists will hold a rally on Saturday in Depot Park and feature “The Cage Project” to protest immigrant detention prisons.

Starting at 9:30 a.m., a dozen people, representing imprisoned immigrants, will be caged and placed inside a traffic circle in downtown Gainesville.

 “The project will be a silent testimony to the cruelty our country is inflicting on our immigrant population,” said Glenn Terry, the project’s manager, in a press release. “As Florida’s governor is planning to build an ‘Alligator Alcatraz’-type prison near Gainesville — inside Camp Blanding — we are calling our facility, ‘Camp Cruelty.’”

Protestors will stand outside “Camp Cruelty” with signs calling for an end to the arrest, those rounded up by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and put in cages in the Everglades and in 200 other prisons throughout the U.S. The performance will last from 10 to 11 a.m. and, every 10 minutes, those outside will be asked to be silent to reflect on what the 59,000 people locked up are going through.

A protest will take place at 9:30 a.m. at Depot Park Circle, at the corner of South Main Street and SW 7 Avenue. The Immigration prison protest.  At 10 a.m., activists posing as black-clad guards, will lead the prisoners into their cell, where they will stand for an hour.

“The Cage Project” is slated to appear in other public places around Gainesville once a month. 

“We intend to do this as long as there is a need to protest the needless suffering going on inside these prisons,” said Terry in the release.