The Ugly Truth About ICE’s Abusive Detention Centers
Individuals described prolonged confinement in frigid, overcrowded processing cells without bedding, adequate clothing, or access to hygiene. Women were also detained there for processing despite its being a male-only facility. They had no showers or privacy, and some were exposed to voyeurism by male detainees. This processing took place over a matter of days, not hours. Overcrowding persisted beyond intake, with cells holding more than double their intended capacity.
Those interviewed by HRW described punishing days and nights in ice-cold cells, sleeping on the floor without bedding or proper clothes. At times, ICE crammed 30 people into one small cell. The lights were always on. There would be a single toilet in a cell, without any privacy. One woman said she and her cellmates asked for cleaning supplies to clean their single filthy toilet for themselves, to which officers responded sarcastically, “Housekeeping will come soon.”
Despite ICE’s efforts to stop them, people inside Krome and numerous other detention sites have been able to get documentation of conditions and rights abuses out to the public. In New York, videos shared with the press by the New York Immigration Coalition show an emerging pattern: Here too, ICE is using cells that were meant to hold people for a matter of hours to keep them detained for days or more. People are forced to sleep next to toilets, without adequate clothing or bedding. (ICE claims that there is no detention center in this building, and denies charges of inhumane conditions.) In Massachusetts, at an ICE office in Burlington that is now similarly serving as a detention facility, one woman who was recently released from there described a similar situation: a freezing room where women had to sleep on the floor, a single toilet. “We slept close and huddled together—the line of women reaching all the way to the bathroom,” she told WBUR this month.
In light of these very similar stories, along with the questionable new contract for a concentration camp in Texas, it is not difficult to conclude that the current conditions in ICE detention centers are an intentional part of Trump’s promised “mass deportations,” even as they show how weak those plans are. Unable to fully deliver on mass deportation, ICE is ramping up its precursor: mass detention. Perhaps the administration still lacks the coordination and capacity to carry out mass deportations, which were always meant to be punitive, always intended in part—if not primarily—as a cause for Trump’s supporters to rally around. Each detention center’s abuses exposed, each shoddy new camp toured, fulfills Trump’s promise to scapegoat and punish immigrants. This fact does not undermine the importance of recording the brutal realities people face in these jails, “processing centers,” and camps, especially when the stories are told from their own point of view. The accounts may help reveal something more: that there is no “humane” solution to mass detention—a project that violates people’s dignity by design—without its abolition.
