As the Trump administration works to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants in the U.S., officials are looking for more space for those detained. The administration’s border czar recently said 100,000 more beds are needed.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has more than 100 facilities around the U.S., many of which are privately run. More than 43,000 immigrants are currently in ICE custody, according to TRAC, a nonpartisan data research organization at Syracuse University. The number has increased over the past month.
The News4 I-Team spoke with experts and those who have been on the inside about what it’s like to be in the system.
At ICE’s Baltimore Field Office, the I-Team got a glimpse of how detained immigrants are processed. Officials there aim to process immigrants quickly, Field Office Director Matt Elliston said.
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“We don't want anyone here more than 12 hours,” he said.
But that’s not always possible.
“Yesterday, you know, we had 40 people we had to send to Denver, Colorado. That's something that these people are going to be here for a couple of days before we can make that change,” Elliston said.
Immigrants facing deportation are no longer housed in Maryland because of the 2021 Dignity Not Detention Act, which prohibits governments there from entering contracts with ICE for detainees.
“I'm forced to separate them from their family and their attorneys and send them elsewhere throughout the country,” Elliston said.
Locals who are detained are often sent to facilities in Virginia, including Farmville Detention Center and Caroline Detention Facility, or Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania, if there's space.
Experts and immigration attorneys say those spots are at capacity or nearing capacity. The I-Team reached out to ICE for total numbers of immigrants being detained locally, but we have not heard back.
Michael Lukens with Amica Center for Immigrant Rights is often inside detention facilities.
“It is supposed to be civil detention, but if you ever go to an ICE detention center, it is a jail. It looks like a jail,” he said.
Lukens helps those in custody understand their rights and says conditions can be challenging.
“The living conditions are pretty rough,” he said. “The food is not great. There's no privacy. There's very little contact with the outside world. It's overcrowded.”
He said what is supposed to be a civil detention can often feel more criminal to his clients.
'It was hard psychologically'
Abdoulaziz Moussa Djibril, who is now a legal resident, spent close to five months inside Farmville after being detained at Dulles International Airport in 2019.
“They asked me to wear a yellow jumpsuit,” he said. “And to be honest, that's where my brain just shut off.”
He said he came to the U.S. seeking asylum from his home country of Djibouti, in Africa, where he worked as an attorney, judge and legal advisor.
“It was hard psychologically,” he said about staying in Farmville. “It was like someone who's living in a dark room.”
What inspections of ICE’s Farmville detention center found
Farmville is one of the largest detention facilities in the area, originally built to hold more than 700 people. ICE started housing detained immigrants there in 2010.
It was one of four facilities a group of senators called to be shut down last year due to “well-documented horrific conditions.”
In 2024, the Department of Homeland Security's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) made several recommendations after doing an inspection due to complaints including alleged inappropriate use of force. The CRCL ended up making 33 recommendations; ICE agreed with 21 of them and agreed to provide Farmville with training for different types of use-of-force incidents.
However, when searching for that memo detailing those civil rights concerns on DHS's site, it’s not available. A DHS spokesperson told News4 the reports are currently unavailable for a compliance review from the president's executive orders.
The I-Team also found an inspection of Farmville from December, part of an ICE compliance inspection, which noted multiple violations, including incomplete mental health evaluations, irregular welfare checks for detainees on suicide watch and lack of reporting of communicable diseases.
The I-Team reached out to ICE and Abyon, which runs Farmville, about those complaints but is still waiting on a response.
‘Very limited detention space’
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the conservative think tank Center for Immigration Studies, says detention has been a part of federal immigration policy since the beginning.
“Detention has been something that's required,” he said.
Holding undocumented immigrants is more necessary now because of the large number, he said.
“Because of mass illegal immigration, which really wasn't possible before transportation and communications became so cheap and easy, the numbers, the scale of detention was not large. But it has become so, inevitably because of changes and really changes in technology, " said Krikorian.
"We have very limited detention space here on the East Coast. We are all sharing the same detention resources," ICE Field Office Director Elliston said.
That overcrowding, along with the alleged poor conditions, leads some detainees to choose to leave the country on their own, according to Lukens with the Amica Center.
"It is not odd for us to hear from clients that they are getting what we call detention fatigue because they just can't take the isolation,” he said.
Reported by Tracee Wilkins, produced by Rick Yarborough, shot by Steve Jones, Jeff Piper and Jerry Lawlor, and edited by Steve Jones
