The Human Rights Crisis in ICE Detention Centers

Reports of human rights abuses are piling up as the number of people in immigrant detention reaches all-time highs.

In early August, the number of people in immigration detention in the U.S. surged to an all-time high of more than 60,000. Behind that number is an incipient human rights crisis.

While the Trump administration waited for massive new detention centers to open, it turned to federal prisons and jails, hastily constructed state facilities, and temporary holding cells that were never meant to house people for any extended amount of time.

The overcrowding, combined with negligence and malevolence, has led to inevitable abuses that are too large to ignore or deny.

On August 12, a federal judge ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to drastically improve conditions in migrant holding cells in its New York City offices, where detainees were kept in overcrowded, squalid cells for days and even weeks at a time.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered officials to provide more spacious cells, bedding for each detainee, adequate hygiene supplies, three meals a day and water on request, and access to calls with lawyers. The order was in response to a lawsuit filed by an ICE detainee, who alleged he and other detainees were not given access to medical care or showers and were kept in cells so crowded that they didn't have space to lie down.

Another federal judge found similar deficiencies in a temporary ICE holding facility in Los Angeles, ruling in July that plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the government were likely to succeed on their claims that detainees there were being unconstitutionally denied legal access.

A report published July 30 by the office of Sen. Jon Ossoff (D–Ga.) identified 510 "credible reports" of human rights abuses against individuals held in the archipelago of federal lockups, county jails, and military bases that comprise the Trump administration's mass deportation program.

"Among these reports are 41 credible reports of physical and sexual abuse of individuals in U.S. immigration detention, 14 credible reports of mistreatment of pregnant women, and 18 credible reports of mistreatment of children," Ossoff's office wrote.

In one case reported to the senator's office, a woman in ICE custody "was pregnant and bled for days before facility staff would take her to a hospital. Once she was there, she was reportedly left in a room, alone, to miscarry without water or medical assistance, for over 24 hours."

The Ossoff report also mentions poor conditions at Federal Detention Center (FDC) Miami, a jail operated by the Bureau of Prisons that holds immigration detainees.

Investigations earlier this year by Reason and the Miami Herald uncovered overcrowding, lack of access to lawyers and phone calls, and major dysfunction inside the facility. A separate July report by several human rights and legal aid groups on abuses inside South Florida detention centers included an incident at a Miami center where 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 ICE this spring, told the researchers.

These conditions prevail in detention facilities across Florida. A former detainee at the Krome Detention Center in Miami-Dade County, whose lawyer requested that he only be identified as "A.S.," told Reason he spent four days in an overcrowded holding cell with 50 to 60 other people.

"There was a dude, he passed out. He was crying for his medicine for like two or three days," A.S. says. "They didn't give him his medicine until he finally passed out, right before they were gonna put him on the plane."

Likewise, stories of lack of legal access, horrid living conditions, medical neglect, and brutality have been flooding out of "Alligator Alcatraz," the Everglades detention camp built by the State of Florida.

These sorts of abuses aren't exclusive to the Trump administration; they're a feature of mass detention. During the Biden administration, Reason obtained whistleblower audio recordings from a tent camp for migrant youths inside the Fort Bliss Army base in Texas. In the recordings, officials frankly discussed filthy conditions, lack of medical care, and inappropriate staff contact with minors.

The Trump administration's reaction, though, has not been to slow down its deportation efforts, but to supercharge them. The administration awarded a $238 million contract in July to build and operate the largest immigrant detention center in the country at Fort Bliss.