The US government has jailed hundreds of immigrants in notorious federal prisons in a dramatic escalation of its detention practices, cutting people off from their attorneys and families and subjecting them to brutal conditions, according to accounts from behind bars.
Since February, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has increasingly used Bureau of Prisons (BoP) facilities to incarcerate immigrants facing deportation, records show. The partnership between BoP and Ice, two agencies that have generally operated separately, means people accused of civil immigration violations are being imprisoned in harsh environments of federal penitentiaries run by prison guards.
Several immigration detainees said they had been mistreated, neglected and denied due process – some unable to contact anyone for days on end during their abrupt transfers to prisons, then left in the dark about their ongoing deportation cases. Some detainees described shortages of food, clothes, toilet paper and other necessities. Others alleged they were forced to live in dirty, overcrowded cells and unable to access basic medical care and regular outdoor time.
“It’s pandemonium,” said one detainee about the frenzy when he and dozens of others were moved in February from an Ice detention center in Georgia into Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Atlanta, a BoP prison recently investigated by Congress for its squalid conditions, violence and staff misconduct. “The place was filthy and disgusting. There was no communication. It was just chaos, and I had to deal with the mental state of not knowing what was happening and whether I’d be there for two months, three months, six months.”
The man, accused of a minor civil immigration violation, ended up spending roughly a month in the Atlanta federal prison before being deported and requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation by immigration authorities.
Ice’s expansion into the prison system comes as Donald Trump’s agenda of mass deportations has seen detainees shipped to Guantánamo Bay and an El Salvador prison without officials presenting evidence of crimes; severe overcrowding in Ice detention, with the government aggressively seeking new locations to imprison people; and reports of arrested immigrants disappeared by the system.
In addition to FCI Atlanta, Ice has sent immigration detainees to BoP facilities in Miami; Philadelphia; Berlin, New Hampshire; and Leavenworth, Kansas, according to BoP.
The BoP system, which houses federal criminal defendants, has long been plagued by reports of systemic abuse by officers, preventable deaths and crumbling infrastructure at facilities across the country. In recent years, former staffers at the Berlin and Philadelphia prisons were convicted of bribery and contraband. A Miami officer was charged with sexually abusing an incarcerated person. Atlanta staff were accused of covering up abuses and severe neglect. And Kansas staff allegedly have left residents without adequate food and water during lockdowns and forced them to defecate in bags.
The influx of immigration detainees has exacerbated these crises, as guards working in an already strained system are now overseeing immigration detainees, pre-trial criminal defendants and people serving longterm prison sentences under the same roof.
‘Unlivable and inhumane’
An associate BoP director told Congress in February that roughly 700 immigration detainees were in four of its prisons at that time, and Ice data shows that months later, hundreds continue to be in BoP custody.
While horrific conditions have also long been documented at Ice detention centers, those facilities tend to offer more freedom of movement than prisons and have processes that are supposed to serve the specific needs of people with active immigration cases.
In the BoP facilities, however, “access to counsel is almost impossible”, said John Gihon, a Florida-based attorney who has had multiple immigration clients moved to BoP-run Federal Detention Center (FDC) Miami. “I can’t schedule a phone call with my clients. There’s no mechanism.” One client told him more than 150 detainees had to share roughly four or five phones for all communications, and when a client does manage to call, it’s brief, loud and not a confidential legal meeting.
Ice staff are not regularly present at FDC Miami, and as a result, some of Gihon’s clients haven’t received critical immigration paperwork or notice about court dates or why they were being held. One client, he said, was granted release, but because of the apparent lack of communication between BoP and Ice, he remained detained for several more days.
The chaotic transfers were delaying people’s cases, Gihon argued: “It’s violating people’s rights and it’s a huge waste of money. It’s the opposite of Doge,” he said, referencing Trump’s so-called “department of government efficiency.”
The arrival of immigration detainees has worsened the living conditions for others housed at FDC Miami, said one incarcerated woman. She requested anonymity due to concerns about staff retaliation. Two women’s units were packed into one area to make room for Ice detainees, she said, and they were all placed on lockdowns for a week. The women were given no recreation time, as male immigration detainees were placed in a nearby unit and the facility worked to keep them separate.
With increasingly overcrowded housing, some women were now housed in areas with broken toilets and leaks, she said; her bed became soaked when it rained. “Everything was wet and the officer just said, that’s how it is,” she said.
After Ice detainees moved in, the women in BoP custody started getting smaller portions of food and had reduced access to toilet paper, she said: “Everything is worse. There’s more scarcity.” The residents had already struggled with hunger, as they were sometimes given expired or moldy food, she said.
During lockdowns, staff slide their food trays to them on the ground under their cells: “It’s as if we’re animals. This prison already wasn’t livable and now they’re adding more people into a place that’s so unsafe and inhumane.”
She said she had struggled for a year to access healthcare at the facility and has never seen an eye doctor, dentist or psychiatrist. The medical challenges have gotten worse as the population has swelled, she said: “There are some good officials who are more humane and try to help us but they’re overwhelmed. When they call medical [staff] for help, they’re told it’s not an emergency, so we don’t have time.”
Detainees ‘disappeared’
In FCI Atlanta, another BoP prison housing people for Ice, staff failed to take at least one immigration detainee to their scheduled court hearing, according to Samantha Hamilton, a staff attorney with Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, a non-profit group that advocates for immigrants’ rights. She and her colleagues have visited several detainees at the facility.
“It’s like there is no rhyme or reason to the chaos,” she said. The placements have caused wild inefficiencies, she said. For example, when detainees have to appear in court remotely through video conferencing, instead of giving them computer access at BoP, officials have driven them hours away to an Ice detention center to log on for their hearings. “I fear there are many others who have been prevented from going to their hearings. That’s a denial of due process.”
Dozens of immigration detainees who were transferred to FCI Atlanta were abruptly sent back to an Ice detention center a week later, with the reasons behind the move unclear, according to Hamilton and a detainee who was part of the group.
At FCI Atlanta, immigration detainees have been forced to sleep on dirty mattresses and were given clothes that were ripped and appeared to have bloodstains, while also forced to wear used underwear, said one detainee. Their outdoor time was limited to an enclosure that was partially open to fresh air, but where they could not see the sky, he said. Detainees who didn’t speak English or Spanish were left in the dark about their cases and everyone struggled to get basic information from Ice, the detainee said.
Immigrants sent to FCI Berlin in New Hampshire have been widely unreachable, advocates and attorneys said. Attorney Stephen Roth had a client in Ice detention in Massachusetts who called him in March and said he was being moved. Roth didn’t think a transfer would happen, because he was in the middle of an active appeal, but the attorney drove to Ice headquarters in Massachusetts to inquire.
“They told me he’s not being moved,” said Roth. “They lied to my face.” The client was transferred out of state to Berlin and it took more than a week for the attorney and the client’s wife to reach him. “I wasn’t given any notice they were moving him out of the jurisdiction. The government is doing everything they can to prevent access.”
Annie Gonzalez, a volunteer with the Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network, which supports detainees, said her group has almost entirely lost contact with detainees moved to Berlin. The group has also repeatedly been unable to put commissary money on the accounts of detainees now with BoP.
“It’s really terrifying when people can’t reach their loved one, especially right now as people are sent off to prisons in foreign countries or disappeared completely,” she said.
Spokespeople for Ice and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Donald Murphy, a BoP spokesperson, said in an email that the bureau “has entered an interagency agreement that allows Ice to place detainees in five BoP facilities” and would “continue to support our law enforcement partners to fulfill the administration’s policy objectives”. He declined to disclose how many Ice detainees were in BoP custody and did not respond to questions about conditions and claims of mistreatment.
Spokespeople from FCI Atlanta, FDC Miami and FCI Berlin did not respond to the accounts from detainees and advocates.
‘We will fight’
Ice’s use of BoP facilities is one of many ways the Trump administration is pushing to rapidly increase its detention capacity. Officials have sought to detain immigrants at military bases, expand contracts with local jails and reopen shuttered facilities, said Stacy Suh, program director at Detention Watch Network, an immigrants’ rights coalition.
“The Trump administration is using every tool at its disposal to target as many people as possible for deportation in every area of public life,” they said. “The scale and speed at which they’re expanding detention is extremely concerning.”
Ice is reportedly interested in reopening FCI Dublin, a shuttered BoP prison in California, for immigration detainees. Dublin was plagued by a major sexual abuse scandal and had problems with mold and asbestos.
“We will fight it. It is not a safe facility … for detainees or employees,” said Mark DeSaulnier, a California Democratic congressman, in an interview. He said BoP officials had refused to share basic information with him about potential plans for the facility: “Their level of disrespect and disdain for members of Congress is pretty obvious … There is a very strong culture in the Bureau of Prisons of not adhering to their responsibilities by law.”
Some BoP workers are also concerned about Dublin reopening. John Kostelnik, western regional vice-president of the Council of Prison Locals, the union representing correctional officers, said BoP workers have been forced to do maintenance work at the closed prison, exposing them to asbestos and mold, without proper PPE.
In 2018, Kostelnik witnessed the chaos when Trump’s first administration moved roughly 1,000 detainees into the Victorville BoP prison in California. There were major disease outbreaks and staff struggled to address the needs of immigrant detainees he said: “We could not keep up with providing medical care. It was a nightmare.”
Understaffing remains a systemwide problem, and as Trump attacks union rights, BoP employees are afraid to raise the alarms about conditions, he said.
“If you bring immigration detainees into a BoP facility and there are wrongdoings and they are not getting what they deserve, it’s going to stay behind those walls. If staff are terrified to speak up, who will?”
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