Report Alleges Degrading Treatment and Medical Neglect at South Florida ICE Detention Centers

One former ICE detainee says he and a group of men were forced to kneel with their hands tied behind their backs and eat "like dogs."

Detainees at three federal immigration detention centers in South Florida are regularly subjected to medical neglect, overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, and mental and physical abuse, according to a new report by three human rights and legal aid groups.

In one incident, officers allegedly made men wait hours for lunch and then forced them to eat with their hands shackled behind their backs.

"We had to bend over and eat off the chairs with our mouths, like dogs," Harpinder Chauhan, a British entrepreneur who was detained by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) this spring and eventually deported, told the report's researchers.

The report, released Monday by Human Rights Watch, Americans for Immigrant Justice, and Sanctuary of the South, compiled interviews with 11 current and recent detainees at the Krome Detention Center, Federal Detention Center (FDC) Miami, and the Broward Transition Center (BTC), as well as family members of detainees and immigration attorneys.

The report found that staff at the three facilities "subjected detained individuals to dangerously substandard medical care, overcrowding, abusive treatment, and restrictions on access to legal and psychosocial support." 

Numerous interviewees in the report described being put in frigid holding cells without proper bedding or clothes for days at a time, being given inadequate food and water, and facing retaliation for seeking medical treatment.

"People in immigration detention are being treated as less than human," Belkis Wille, associate crisis and conflict director at Human Rights Watch, said in a press release. "These are not isolated incidents, but rather the result of a fundamentally broken detention system that is rife with serious abuses."

The report's findings echo media investigations and other recent reports on conditions at the detention centers—the populations of which have swelled far past their operating capacities in the months since President Donald Trump's mass deportation initiative began. In May, Reason reported on widespread dysfunction and lack of legal access at FDC Miami, a federal jail operated by the Bureau of Prisons that is currently being used to house hundreds of immigration detainees. Multiple news stories have similarly reported overcrowding, filth, and negligence at the Krome Detention Center, an ICE facility on the western edge of Miami-Dade County.

Chauhan, who entered the U.S. on an investor visa in 2016, was detained by ICE agents in February and spent time in all three facilities in the report. He said he was kept in overcrowded, freezing cells with broken toilets.

At FDC Miami, he said he endured particularly demeaning and dehumanizing treatment one day in mid-April. He said dozens of detainees were put into a single holding cell early in the morning, with their feet shackled and hands tied behind their backs, and then left for hours without food:

By then it was 5 p.m. and no one had had lunch. Some had not even had breakfast. We could see the food through the bars of our holding cell in styrofoam containers on a cart. The food was in front of us, but the guards refused to give it to us. At 7 p.m., they finally gave us lunch, but only after another guard protested on our behalf. We were chained though, so we could not reach the plates with our hands. We had to put the plates on chairs and then bend down and eat with our mouths, like dogs.

Although Chauhan is diabetic, he told researchers that staff regularly refused to give him his insulin. Chauhan eventually collapsed while standing in the dinner line at BTC, leading to him being hospitalized for three days. Chauhan's son said that hospital and ICE staff would not give him any information on his father's condition.

BTC is the same facility where Marie Ange Blaise, a 44-year-old Haitian woman, died on April 25. An ICE detainee death report attributed her death to issues related to chronic hypertension and kidney disease, and it stated that Blaise refused to take her blood pressure medication.

"We started yelling for help, but the guards ignored us," one detainee told researchers about Blaise's death. "Finally, one officer approached slowly, looked at her without intervening, and then walked away. After that, it took eight minutes for the medical provider to arrive, and then another 15 or 20 before the rescue team came. By then, she was not moving."

Medical neglect and denial of medication is a continual theme of the report. Interviewees described being refused treatment until they began coughing up blood, or worse.

One man detained at Krome said that the only way he could get guards to believe he was suffering from an excruciating hernia was to throw himself on the floor. Prison staff eventually wheeled him to the medical team, where the doctor on duty told him he "likely just had gas" and offered him "a Pepto-Bismol and two Tylenols." The detainee refused to leave until the doctor eventually agreed to send him to a hospital, where he received a CAT scan that found he had a strangulated abdominal wall hernia. "The doctor [at the hospital] told me that if I had not come in then, my intestines would have likely ruptured," the man said.

"The rapid, chaotic, and cruel approach to arresting and locking people up is literally deadly," Katie Blankenship, immigration attorney and co-founder of Sanctuary of the South, said in a press release, "and causing a human rights crisis that will plague this state and the entire country for years to come."

ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.