OCHOPEE, Fla. — The state is offering to build “several” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities across Florida to increase the agency’s bed capacity, promising to have them operating with 72 hours notice.
The proposal is a response to complaints from migrants’ attorneys about overcrowded conditions in ICE facilities. Florida said most of the locations for detention centers are close to airstrips, but didn’t give any specific location other than northeast and south-central Florida.
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WPTV has previously reported on overcrowded conditions within Krome Detention Center, after conversations with immigration lawyers in March. At the time of that report, data from ICE showed the facility had 605 people, but the capacity was listed at 581 based on congressional budget documents.
More recent data showed the number of people held at the facility increased to almost 700.
Katie Blankenship, an attorney, said she's seen her clients sleeping on the floors and struggling to get food and medical care. She said she's "haunted" by dozens of women banging on doors at the Krome North Service Processing Center, an ICE detention facility west of Miami.
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"There's people sleeping on the floor," Blankenship said. "I've had a client tell me they're forced to sleep literally next to the toilets. They're being stuffed into the bathroom. So, they're sleeping, literally their face, underneath a toilet, and they're rotating them off and on the buses."
Blankenship said she's started meeting with clients in different locations of the detention facility because the client intake room has been converted into holding cells. She said some people have slept on buses or waited hours on buses just to enter the facility.
Legal filings, which WPTV obtained from a nonprofit called Americans for Immigrant Justice, detail the experience inside facilities like Krome. Multiple people said the overcrowded issues led to detainees spending hours on buses, sometimes sleeping in shackles, as they waited to enter the facility.
"Spending the night on the bus was very painful," said one migrant whose name was redacted from the report. "We were fully shackled all night, and it was almost impossible to sleep shackled and sitting on uncomfortable bus seats…The bus also began to smell very bad. We could see other vans and buses in the parking lot, and detained men from these vans and buses were brought onto our bus throughout the night to use the toilet, since, the guards told us, we were the only ones with a toilet on our bus. Because of this, the whole bus started to stink."
Evelyn Wise, an attorney at Americans for Immigration Justice who collected these reports, said the level of human rights crisis within the facility is truly staggering. She said the facility won't allow cameras or recordings within the facility, which makes it hard for the public to understand the level of conditions.
Gov. Ron DeSantis mentioned using state resources to increase bed capacity at a press conference in May. He said that if asked by the federal government, he would allow the Florida Department of Emergency Management to work with the Department of Homeland Security to help build more detainment spaces.
DeSantis said on Monday they are looking at locations where they can avoid interfering with the public as much as possible, along with an airstrip to move people in and out of the facilities by plane, like Camp Blanding.
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“We’re thinking about where can you do it that’s not going to disturb the community, not going to create problems,” he said. “…You literally drive them 2,000 feet. Put them on a plane and they’re gone. It’s very logistically simple.”
DeSantis also said they could deputize people within the National Guard to become immigration judges at the facility. Those plans haven’t been announced by publication.
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