As the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts continue, multiple lawmakers and immigrant rights groups are alleging that conditions at various Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities are “inhumane” and “unsanitary.”
Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., sounded the alarm last week in a video, stating she was deeply disturbed by what she saw during her visit to the Adelanto ICE facility, where many people swept up in recent immigration raids around Los Angeles have been brought.
Chu said the detainees she spoke with at the facility were “not the criminals that [President Donald] Trump says that he’s trying to get out of this country," noting that some of those detained simply had expired documents.
“They are undergoing conditions that are inhumane, in my opinion. They were not able to change their underwear for 10 days,” Chu said in the video, adding: “They did not get a PIN number for the telephone. As a result, they cannot be in contact with any legal representative nor with their family members. This is not right.”
Chu and Rep. Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, joined MSNBC’s “The Weeknight” last Friday to discuss the Trump administration’s efforts to block Democratic lawmakers looking to conduct oversight on the conditions at ICE facilities. In a clip, which you can watch below, Thompson raises concerns about ICE processing facilities being used to detain people for days at a time, essentially turning them into "jails," which the Mississippi Democrat says would constitute a misuse of the facilities.
In May, the Trump administration filed a motion in federal court seeking to kill a settlement known as the Flores Agreement, which since 1997 has established basic rights and protections — including rules around detention length and provisions for food and water — for immigrant children detained in the United States.
As The Associated Press reported, the administration's motion is being fought by several immigrant rights groups, and the groups submitted their own filing last Friday on behalf of their clients, which opposes the Trump administration’s proposal and lays out detailed allegations of mistreatment at two Texas ICE facilities. The filing alleged water scarcity at the facility, with detainees needing to scramble over one another for access. It also said detained children had been denied medical care and suffered psychological trauma due to arrests. (Neither Attorney General Pam Bondi's office nor Geo Group, which operates one of the facilities in question, responded to the AP's requests for comment. Core Civic, which operates the other ICE facility named in the filing, directed the AP to ICE, which said the agency doesn't comment on pending litigation.)
Reading and hearing all of the aforementioned stories — of immigrants being indefinitely detained and denied basic necessities — helps explain why some people have come to compare ICE detention centers to concentration camps. And if the Trump administration is allowed to scrap the Flores Agreement entirely, one can only imagine how much worse the conditions for ICE detainees might get.