The bare numbers are stunning: in Trump’s immigration prisons, 19 detainees died in six months from inhumane treatment; 1,200 immigrants who simply vanished from the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” registry cannot be found by relatives or attorneys; and of the nearly 60,000 immigrants held unlawfully, 71 percent have never faced criminal charges and committed no crime.
Yet they are treated like the most dangerous criminals. Their lawful rights are stripped away; their detention is openly aimed at cruelty, designed to intimidate not only other undocumented immigrants, but Americans as well. The propaganda based on their treatment creates the illusion that they are serious criminals. Even more chilling are the videos that surface and the firsthand accounts.
The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General (DHS OIG) in 2019 documented, with photographs, “health and safety risks” and “plainly dangerous overcrowding” in El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley: families sleeping without toilets, children lying on concrete floors, weeks of confinement without showers or change of clothes. According to the reports, detainees in despair slid notes through the bars begging for help. This is hardly fitting preparation for Trump’s second term.
Independent investigations and a series of exposés have reported medical neglect in ICE detention facilities and deaths linked to these failures. The Guardian and other outlets for years have tracked death data; critics say chronic overcrowding, prolonged detention and neglect of mental-health needs have led to tragedies. Civil-rights groups emphasize these problems didn’t just persist—they worsened.
Attendees at a press-briefing by American Community Media included Heather Hogan, advisor to the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), who has worked in detention facilities closed to the public. She conducted screening-interviews of asylum seekers in Arizona and California, then supervised those interviewing families seeking protection.
„I spoke with hundreds of detained asylum-seekers,” she said, „and was often stunned how they were treated like incarcerated criminals, even though many had no criminal record. What struck me most was how a day begins and unfolds for them: they’re woken at 3 or 4 a.m., collared in orange jumpsuits, wrist- and ankle-shackled, marched out.”
She recalled a detainee who needed to go to the bathroom. They asked a guard to escort him, but when the man couldn’t immediately locate it the guard mocked and verbally abused him. Then the guard pretended to kick him and laughed with fellow officers.
Contract guards and ICE officers reportedly refer to immigrants in detention as “dead bodies”—a term common in prisons. And this phrase, lawmakers were told, is used inside the Department of Homeland Security. So the system is profoundly dehumanizing, and mockery and being called “dead bodies” are routine. Not surprisingly, prolonged detention has triggered widespread mental-health crises.
Hogan pointed out: „The majority of asylum-seekers, quite frankly, arrived with traumatic experiences already. Detention simply amplifies that trauma. Some arrive unwell; others are broken by the detention itself. Mental-health access is scarce.”
One young woman, according to a refugee-interview official, committed suicide days after her interview. A latest April report found that facilities still lack basic care, have serious failures in suicide prevention and treatment, and use force on detainees with mental-health issues.
Hogan added: „We now know that the federal government uses detention deliberately to coerce immigrants, refugees and asylum-seekers to abandon their claims and leave the United States. Government policy is trying to maximize the punitive nature of detention, making conditions so harsh that people prefer to leave rather than seek help.”
AILA member-lawyers report clients being moved facility-to-facility, often to remote parts of the U.S. where the client knows no one and has no resources. One attorney just last week said an asylum-seeker abandoned his petition for release because he’d mentally collapsed.
Families should never be held in detention, the expert said. „Detention is a penalty rarely used except when essential.” The practitioner added: „I believe the cruelty and dehumanization are being endorsed by the federal government. What once was forbidden has now become mandatory.”
At the press-briefing, experts said Americans don’t know what’s happening in these camps: they don’t know how long people are held or in what conditions, because it’s assumed that “we are America, we wouldn’t do this.” But what’s happening now is identical to places that don’t respect human rights—except that it’s happening in the United States.
Andrew Free, an Atlanta attorney who founded the #DetentionKills movement to support families and communities affected by deaths in immigration detention, said: „Immigration detention centers are the most dangerous institutions in the United States. Detainees lack access to legal protection, there is no transparency. That’s why the consequences of deaths never come. More than half the dead are Latino, and most deaths occurred in Florida at the Miami-area Krome facility, where activists say overcrowding and staff shortages created especially lethal conditions. The cruelty is the point. Taking people from their families and communities. The trauma is the point. Many die.”
Free noted that more than 400 non-reported deaths have occurred among ICE-detained persons since FY 2009. „There are people who die in state or local custody whose deaths are never publicly reported or investigated. We don’t know how many people die in ICE custody. I really don’t know—and I don’t believe anyone else does either.”
