Three members of Congress paid a surprise visit to an ICE detention facility at a Mesa, Arizona airport on Thursday night. What they found was exactly what the agency had been hiding from them. ICE detention facility overcrowding is a problem at many of the locations visited by members of Congress.
“Each room has capacity for just 21 people. And in each of these rooms there were 40 or more human beings”
People packed into cells at double and triple capacity. Detainees lying body-to-body on bare concrete with no bedding. Sick people sweating in extreme heat. Women begging through cracks in the door for sanitary napkins.
And an ICE supervisor who stared blankly at a congresswoman when she asked him to bring medical staff to a man with a fever.
“What we saw was shocking and sick,” said Rep. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona. “Well over 240 detainees stacked like sardines in cells.”
ICE Cleaned Up Before — This Time, They Didn’t Get the Chance
This wasn’t the lawmakers’ first visit to the Arizona Removal Operations Coordination Center at Mesa-Gateway Airport. Reps. Ansari and Greg Stanton had been there before, back in February. But that time, they gave ICE a heads-up.
According to the Arizona Mirror, when ICE learned the lawmakers were coming on February 20, the number of detainees at the facility — which has an official capacity of 157 people — suddenly dropped to one of its lowest levels in a year.
Right after the visit, the numbers climbed right back up, reaching as many as 777 people crammed into a 25,000-square-foot facility designed to hold a fraction of that.
This time, Ansari and Stanton brought Rep. Adelita Grijalva along — and they didn’t announce they were coming.
“The last time we were there, they very much cleaned things up and tried to make this horrible place as presentable as it could be,” Ansari said. “And what we saw tonight was massive overcrowding of every single cell. Each room has capacity for just 21 people. And in each of these rooms there were 40 or more human beings.”
No Beds. No Showers. People Held for Days.
The Mesa facility is classified as a coordination center, designed to hold people for no more than 12 hours right before deportation. There are no beds. There are no showers. It was never built for extended detention.
But the Arizona Mirror found that the average hold time this year has ballooned to 36 hours — triple what it was at this time last year. During the unannounced visit, an ICE supervisor told the lawmakers the center was a “72-hour hold facility,” directly contradicting what ICE had previously told reporters.
“People were laying on concrete without any bedding of any kind, and there were people that were so tightly in there that I couldn’t count them,” Grijalva said. “The overcrowding situation is frightening.”
ICE’s response? The agency told the Mirror that population fluctuations are a “normal part of operations” tied to flight schedules.
A Nationwide Pattern of ICE Detention Facility Overcrowding — and it’s Getting Worse
The Mesa facility isn’t an outlier. It’s the system working exactly as the Trump administration designed it.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council told the Arizona Mirror that overcrowding at ICE field offices has been reported nationwide as the administration pushes to arrest 3,000 people per day.
A February report from the council detailed how ICE’s detention population has skyrocketed more than 75% since Trump took office — from roughly 40,000 people on any given day to a record 73,000 as of mid-January. According to TRAC data current as of April 4, nearly 71% of those held in ICE detention have no criminal conviction whatsoever.
Congress fueled the expansion last year with a staggering $45 billion in funding for ICE detention through the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” The administration’s goal is to get over 100,000 detention beds online by the end of the year.
And the infrastructure being built to hold all these people? Warehouses.
Warehouses, Private Contractors, and the Company Behind “Alligator Alcatraz”
Human Rights Watch reported this week that ICE has awarded a $313 million contract to GardaWorld Federal to convert a 400,000-square-foot warehouse in Surprise, Arizona into an immigration prison that will hold up to 1,500 people.
GardaWorld is the same private contractor that runs the detention facility, “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida. Amnesty International says the Florida facility is guilty of human rights violations.
It has been documented for torture, enforced disappearances, and systematic abuse.
The warehouse was originally built for industrial use. It has no history as a habitable facility.
At least 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025 — making it the deadliest year for immigration detention on record. In 2026, 15 people have already died in ICE custody since January. People are being warehoused in facilities that were never designed for human habitation, overseen by private contractors with documented records of abuse, in a system expanding faster than any oversight mechanism can keep up with.
“No Human Being Should Be Treated This Way”
All three lawmakers who visited Mesa said they will push to block any new ICE funding in the upcoming DHS budget debate. Stanton called the visit proof of exactly why ICE should not receive another dime.
“What we saw was horrifying — crowded cells at two to three times the capacity and buses of more detainees being loaded in,” Stanton said. “This is Trump’s mass deportation machine in action.”
Rep. Grijalva put it more simply: “No human being should be treated this way.”
She’s right. What’s happening in Mesa, in Surprise, in facilities across the country isn’t immigration enforcement. It’s the construction of a mass detention system that treats human beings as cargo — warehoused, hidden from oversight, and left to suffer in conditions that would be illegal in any prison in America.
The fact that ICE scrambles to clean up before announced visits tells you everything you need to know: they know these conditions are indefensible. They just don’t think anyone will hold them accountable.
The lawmakers who showed up unannounced on Thursday proved them wrong. The question now is whether the rest of Congress will care.
