ICE detention is supposed to be ‘administrative, not a punishment.’
ICE detention is meant to assure immigration compliance only, but detainees describe desperation, and punitive measures that resemble prisons.
Hannah Gaber, USA TODAY
(This story has been updated to reflect a post-publication response from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.)
Immigrant women say they were held “like animals” in ICE detention and subjected to conditions so extreme they feared for their lives.
Chained for hours on a prison bus without access to food, water or a toilet. Told by guards to urinate on the floor. Held “like sardines in a jar,” as many as 27 women in a small holding cell. Sleeping on a concrete floor. Getting one three-minute shower over three or four days in custody.
“We smelled worse than animals,” one detainee said. “More girls were coming every day. We were screaming, begging them, ‘You can’t let them come.’ They didn’t have space.”
Four women were held in February at the Krome North Processing Center in Miami – a detention center reserved for men. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took the women into custody on alleged immigration violations, but none has a criminal background, according to a review of law enforcement records. They shared their experiences with USA TODAY on condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation by the government because they are still detained.
The allegations come after two men at Krome died in custody on Jan. 23 and Feb. 20.
USA TODAY provided ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, with a detailed list of the allegations on March 11. A day after publication, on March 24, an ICE spokesperson responded with an emailed statement saying the agency can’t substantiate specific allegations without the names of the individuals.
“ICE takes its commitment to promoting safe, secure, humane environments for those in our custody very seriously,” the statement said. “These allegations are not in keeping with ICE policies, practices and standards of care.”
The government’s own investigators have repeatedly found serious problems in immigration detention centers around the country. The problems have persisted through Democrat and Republican administrations and range from fatal medical neglect to improper use of force.
Last year, a report on unannounced inspections at 17 detention centers from 2020 to 2023 – bridging the Trump and Biden administrations – found that “regardless of time, location, detainee population and facility type, ICE and facility staff have struggled to comply with aspects of detention standards.”
But the women’s allegations at Krome, which was one of the 17 centers reviewed in the report, suggest detention conditions have deteriorated rapidly as the new Trump administration works to deliver on the president’s promises for tougher immigration enforcement.
ICE reported holding 46,269 people in custody in mid-March, well above the agency’s detention capacity of 41,500 beds. Immigration detention is “non-punitive,” according to ICE policy, in recognition that most immigration violations are civil, not criminal.
Mich González, an immigration attorney representing the family of the Ukrainian man who died Feb. 20 in Krome custody, visits the facility regularly to meet with clients. The guards there “are overwhelmed,” he said.
“Guards themselves have made those comments to us: ‘It shouldn’t be like this,'” said González, founding partner of Sanctuary of the South.
The shift from a “flexible” immigration policy to a “very aggressive” one means “the system simply can’t process all of these people,” said Miami-based immigration attorney Nenad Milosevic.
Krome is overwhelmed and understaffed, he said. “I know the conditions are extremely bad, and they’re not supposed to be that way.”
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“They chained my chest”
An immigrant woman held at the Krome North Processing Center in Miami speaks about the conditions she faced in February. File photos from 2020.
‘He didn’t want to scare me more’
One of the four women wanted to explain what she went through to her fiance. She wrote what she remembered on paper and titled it “Hell on Earth.”
She dialed out on a scratchy phone line and asked him to record her as she read from her notes.
“The officer only say that I am going to spend the night in Miami,” she said, using the English she learned during nearly two decades in the United States. “Now remembering his face, like I knew he knew that I am going to go through hell and he didn’t want to scare me more.”
This account is based on that 15-minute audio recording detailing the alleged mistreatment, as well as numerous telephone and video interviews with the woman and her fiance and with three other detained women, their family members and attorneys, as well as the two attorneys who independently witnessed the deteriorating conditions.
All four women described being chained at the wrist, waist and chest and loaded onto a prison bus, where they were held, in one case, for six hours; in another, for 11 or 12 hours.
“They took us to a bigger bus,” the woman said in the audio recording. “They checked us, and then they put like chains on us, hands to waist, connected. It was very scary because they chained my chest super-tight and I couldn’t breathe properly. I was really scared because I thought, ‘I’m not going to be able to breathe.'”
“It’s a men’s facility”
An immigrant woman held at the Krome North Processing Center in Miami speaks about the conditions she faced in February. File photos from 2020.
There was no access to a toilet, so guards told the women – whose accounts in some cases occurred on different days or different buses – to urinate or defecate on the floor. They watched, helpless, as some did.
“A man in the back of the bus – we were separated with a door – he was screaming, ‘Somebody wants a bathroom,'” the woman said in the audio. “And somebody peed there. It stank so badly.”
She described her first impression of Krome as “a really chaotic-looking place.” Guards rushed the women through a corridor, past the male dormitories where men pressed their faces to the glass, “wildly staring … like they had never seen women before.”
“We were pushed in a room, filled with women, like sardines in a jar,” she said. “I will never forget those first seconds when I heard the door behind me locked.”
Expanding immigrant detention
Krome is one of 130 ICE detention centers nationwide. Many of the facilities are privately run, including Krome, which is managed by Akima Infrastructure Protection under a $685 million contract. The company didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In mid-February, when the four women were taken to Krome, ICE and its private contractor were holding 561 men, more than two-thirds of them with criminal records, according to government data. By mid-March, that number had increased to 604 men, again, most with criminal records.
Past administrations, Democrat and Republican alike, have often opted to deport or release immigrants without criminal histories, in part because ICE isn’t equipped to detain millions, or even hundreds of thousands, of people.
The Trump administration is taking steps to change that.
In February, the administration tried to scale up detention capacity with a 30,000-bed site at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, but the plan has faced legal, financial and logistical challenges. The U.S. Army also plans to build detention space for another 30,000 immigrants on mainland military bases.
ICE may enlist local jails, too.
Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, recently told the National Association of Sheriffs conference that the administration plans to lower detention standards, allowing local law enforcement to detain immigrants using state standards instead of more rigorous federal guidelines.
“We’re looking at a lot of different avenues to get beds,” Homan told the sheriffs, including private contractors, Guantanamo, the Defense Department and counties outside the sheriffs’ jurisdictions.
“We’re rehashing detention standards,” he said. “As long as you follow your own state standards, if that’s good enough for a U.S. citizen in your county, it’s good enough for an illegal immigrant detained for us.”
To support Trump’s priorities, Congress recently voted to increase spending on immigration detention. The budget resolution enacted this month provides an additional $430 million to ICE for detention and deportation, according to the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit that tracks spending on immigration.
The council estimates it would cost $88 billion a year to deport 1 million immigrants.
“They clearly have plans to reopen facilities or build new ones,” Gonzalez, the Louisiana attorney, said, “but in the meantime they are overcrowding the existing facilities.”
No privacy, bedding, limited food
The women spent three or four days at Krome in what they described as cramped holding cells, with concrete benches and two toilets with no stall. They saw a camera pointed at the cell, with no privacy.
The women say they were given a single jacket or blanket. They had to decide whether to sleep on it or under it.
“I will never forget his face”
An immigrant woman held at the Krome North Processing Center in Miami speaks about the conditions she faced in February. File photos from 2020.
One woman said she was fed nothing for 36 hours. All four women said they had no easy access to potable water; they had to bang on the window to be given a paper cone of water from a jug in the hallway.
They experienced or observed women being denied timely medical and sanitary care. One witnessed a cellmate wait 12 hours to receive two sanitary napkins while on her period. In the audio recording, the woman describes how she developed a “very bad” rash after not bathing for days. When she asked for Benadryl, guards told her to fake a serious illness.
“I was told by guards that if I wanted anything I needed to pretend I had a seizure and fall down,” she said in the audio recording.
The treatment made her feel like “nobody cares,” she said. “Everyone acts like we’re animals or something.”
She said she witnessed another woman suffer a seizure, a real one, that left her collapsed on the floor, foaming at the mouth and nose. That time, the guards came.
Contributing: Dinah Voyles Pulver
Lauren Villagran can be reached at [email protected].
