As immigrant arrests surge, complaints of abuse mount at America's oldest detention center in Miami

MIAMI — As hundreds of migrants crowded into the Krome Detention Center in Miami on the edge of the Florida Everglades, a palpable fear of an uprising set in among its staff.

As President Donald J. Trump sought to make good on his campaign pledge of mass arrests and removals of migrants, Krome, the United States' oldest immigration detention facility and one with a long history of abuse, saw its prisoner population recently swell to nearly three times its capacity of 600.

''There are 1700 people here at Krome!!!!,'' one U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement employee texted a co-worker last month, adding that even though it felt unsafe to walk around the facility nobody was willing to speak out.

That tension — fearing reprisal for trying to ensure more humane conditions — comes amid a battle in federal courts and the halls of Congress over whether the president's immigration crackdown has gone too far, too fast at the expense of fundamental rights.

At Krome, reports have poured in about a lack of water and food, unsanitary confinement and medical neglect. With the surge of complaints, the Trump administration shut down three Department of Homeland Security oversight offices charged with investigating such claims.

A copy of the text exchange and several other documents were shared with The Associated Press by a federal employee on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Other documents include detainee complaints as well as an account of the arrival of 40 women at Krome, an all-male facility, in possible violation of a federal law to reduce the risk of prison rape.

There is a critical shortage of beds in detention facilities

Krome is hardly alone in a core challenge faced by other facilities: a lack of bed space. Nationwide, detentions have surged to nearly 48,000 as of March 23, a 21% increase from the already elevated levels at the end of the Biden administration. In recent weeks, they have mostly flatlined as efforts to deport many of those same migrants have been blocked by several lawsuits.

To address the shortage, ICE this month published a request for bids to operate detention centers for up to $45 billion as it seeks to expand to 100,000 beds from its current budget for about 41,000. As part of the build out, the federal government for the first time is looking to hold migrants on U.S. Army bases — testing the limits of a more than century-old ban on military involvement in civilian law enforcement.

By some measures, Trumps' controversial approach is working. Barely 11,000 migrants were encountered at the U.S.-Mexican border in March, their lowest level in at least a decade and down from 96,035 in December 2024, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Other facilities have caps on the number of detainees

Krome is just one of five facilities that ICE directly runs — the others are in Buffalo, Arizona and two in Texas — and can house detainees for more than 16 hours. After Trump took office, ICE had orders to round up migrants with few options on where to send them. The vast majority of bed space is leased from local prisons, jails or privately run facilities that have strict limits on how many detainees they are contractually obligated to accept.

As its concrete cellblocks began filling up, federal workers started documenting the worsening conditions in weekly reports for the Department of Homeland Security's leadership. They worked their way up the chain through DHS' Office of Immigration & Detention Ombudsman, an independent watchdog established by Congress during the first Trump administration to blunt the fallout from a string of scandals about treatment at detention facilities.

The office went through four ombudsmen in two months as Trump officials surged arrests with no apparent plan on where to send them. The situation worsened in mid-March, when the office's 100 staffers — including a case manager at Krome — were placed on administrative leave in what officials described as an effort to remove roadblocks to enforcement.

''Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations,'' DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said.

Around the same time, Krome's chaos spilled into public view. Images secretly shot on a cellphone and posted on TikTok showed a group of men sleeping on concrete floors and under tables with little more than their shoes as pillows.

''We are practically kidnapped,'' Osiris Vázquez, his eyes bloodshot due to a lack of sleep, said in the grainy video, which garnered 4.4 million views. ''We don't want likes. We want help. Please!''

Vázquez, who was detained while driving home from a construction job near Miami, said he shared for two weeks a small room with some 80 men. Showers and phone calls weren't allowed, the fetid-smelling bathrooms wre left unattended and food was restricted to peanut butter sandwiches.

''There was no clock, no window, no natural light,'' recalled Vázquez in an interview. "You lost all notion of time, whether it's day or night.''

Eventually, Vázquez decided to self-deport. But his nightmare didn't end. Once back in his hometown of Morelia, Mexico, where he hadn't set foot in almost a decade, he had to be hospitalized twice for a respiratory infection he says he caught at Krome.

''Everyone I know got sick. We were so close together,'' said Vázquez.

It could've been worse. Since Trump returned to the White House, three detainees have died while in ICE custody — two of them at Krome.

The latest, Maksym Chernyak, died after complaining to his wife about overcrowding and freezing conditions. The 44-year-old Ukrainian entered the U.S. legally with his wife in August under a humanitarian program for people fleeing the country's war with Russia.

He was sent to Krome after an arrest in south Florida for domestic violence and immediately got sick with a chest cold. After being monitored for a week with high blood pressure, on Feb. 18, at 2:33 a.m., he was taken to a hospital for seizure-like vomiting and shaking. An ICE report said he appeared intoxicated and unresponsive at times. Two days later, he died.

Other than acetaminophen, he received no medication to treat the blood pressure, according to a two-page ICE report about Chernyak's death. An autopsy listed the cause of death as complications from a stroke aggravated by obesity.

Chernyak's widow said that before her husband's detention he was a ''strong, healthy man." Without a translator, she said, her husband struggled to communicate with guards about his deteriorating health.

''They saw his condition, but they ignored him,'' said Oksana Tarasiuk in an interview. ''If he wasn't put in Krome, I'm sure that he would still be alive.''

ICE, in a statement, didn't comment on specific allegations of mistreatment but said it adjusts its operations as needed to uphold its duty to treat individuals with dignity and respect.

"These allegations are not in keeping with ICE policies, practices and standards of care," the agency said. ''ICE takes its commitment to promoting safe, secure, humane environments for those in our custody very seriously.''

Attorneys said that in recent days, Krome has transferred out a number of detainees and conditions have improved. But that could just be shifting problems elsewhere in the migration detention system, immigration attorneys and advocates say.

Some 20 miles east of Krome, at the Federal Detention Center in downtown Miami, correctional officers last week had to deploy flash bang grenades, pepper spray paint balls and stun rounds to quell an uprising by detainees, two people familiar with the matter told the AP.

The incident occurred as a group of some 40 detainees waited almost eight hours to be admitted into the facility as jail officers miscounted the number of individuals handed over by ICE, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly. As confusion reigned, the arriving detainees, some from Jamaica, ripped a fire sprinkler from a ceiling, flooding a holding cell, and took correctional officers' batons, according to the people.

The federal Bureau of Prisons, which runs the facility, would not confirm details of the incident but said that at no time was the public at risk.

''That has put a massive strain over our staff,'' said Kenny X. Castillo, the president of the union representing workers at FDC Miami. ''We are doing the job of two agencies in one building.''

Detentions drive profits

Trump's administration has yet to reveal his plans for mass deportations even as he seeks to eliminate legal status for 1 million migrants previously granted humanitarian parole or some other form of temporary protection. The latest ICE data suggests so-called removal of migrants is actually below levels at the end of the Biden administration.

That means detentions are likely to rise and, with facilities at capacity, the need to house all the detainees will get more urgent. Spending on new facilities is a boon for federal contractors, whose stock prices have surged since Trump's election. But finding workers willing to carry out Trump's policy remains a major challenge.

Only a handful of applicants showed up at a recent hiring fair in Miami organized by Akima Global Services, a $2 billion federal contractor that staffs several immigrant detention centers, including Krome.

''Many of these facilities have been chronically understaffed for years,'' said Michelle Brané, an immigration attorney and the last ombudsman during the Biden administration. ''These are not easy jobs and they aren't pleasant places to work.''

On Thursday, advocates led by the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization filed a lawsuit against DHS seeking to challenge the Trump administration's decision to shutter the oversight offices.

Krome has a history of substandard conditions

Allegations of substandard conditions are nothing new at Krome.

The facility was set up as essentially the nation's first migrant detention center in the 1970s to process the large number of boat refugees fleeing Haiti. Before that, almost no migrants were detained for more than a few days.

In the early 2000s, the facility was wracked by harrowing accounts of guards sexually assaulting or coercing sexual favors from female prisoners. Several guards were criminally charged.

But more recently, the facility appeared to have turned a corner, with ICE even inviting the media to tour a first-of-its-kind mental health facility.

Then it changed abruptly.

The facility housed 740 men and one woman on March 31, according to the latest ICE data, which reflects only the midnight count on the last day of the month. That's up 31% from just before Trump took office. ICE refused to disclose Krome's current capacity because of security concerns.

So far this year, the ombudsman's office has received more than 2,000 inmate complaints, according to the federal employee.

Brané said she worries that detainee deaths, which started to rise during the Biden administration as arrests surged, could spike without anyone on the ground to investigate complaints of mistreatment.

''To my knowledge, everything was just frozen and people were told to go home,'' said Brané. ''If you're ramping up, you're taking away the oversight and you're increasing the number of people you're detaining, it's a recipe for disaster."

Following Chernyak's death, a grassroots coalition of immigration activists and far-left groups organized a demonstration on the highway leading to Krome's entrance calling for the closure of the center. A few hundred protesters showed up, some holding pictures of migrants ''kidnapped'' by ICE and signs that read ''American Gulag, American Shame" and ''Immigrants Make America Great.''

This month, Miami Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, a Democrat, wrote Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem requesting a tour of the facility. The DHS media office didn't reply to an email asking whether Noem had granted her request. In addition, 49 Democrats in Congress have also written Noem demanding to know how the agency intends to ease overcrowding at ICE facilities.

Huber Argueta-Perez said he saw many of those same conditions during his detention at Krome last month. The 35-year-old Guatemalan, who has lived in the U.S. for almost two decades, was detained March 10 after dropping off his two American daughters at school in Miami. He spent nine days sleeping on the concrete floor of a small, overcrowded room. He said he got feverishly sick from the cold but was repeatedly denied a sweater and medicines.

''We didn't fit," Argueta-Perez, who was deported March 19, said in an interview from Guatemala. ''But the more we complained, the worse was the punishment.''

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AP writers Michael Sisak in New York and Rebecca Santana in Washington contributed to this report.