Three Arizona Democratic lawmakers conducted a late-night, unannounced visit to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement short-term holding facility at Mesa Gateway Airport, with one describing conditions as “uniquely horrible” amid reports of severe overcrowding and detainees held well beyond the facility’s 12-hour limit.
Reps. Yassamin Ansari, Adelita Grijalva, and Greg Stanton visited the facility after receiving reports of overcrowding and a possible hunger strike. Ansari posted a video of the visit to X.
“I cannot tell you how f—ing horrible what we saw was,” Ansari said in the video.
The facility is designated as a short-term pre-deportation processing center, where detainees are not to be held for more than 12 hours. Ansari said detainees reported being held for multiple days.
Ansari said each cell, designed to hold 21 people, contained 40 or more detainees. She described people lying “body to body” and “like sardines on top of each other.” Detainees also reported extreme heat inside the cells, she said.
The lawmakers said ICE staff initially did not respond when the group arrived at the gate. They were eventually admitted after approaching the tarmac side of the facility and flagging down an ICE staffer.
“We got to the gate, tried to call. Nobody was answering. So we actually went around the side where you can literally, like, see the tarmac right there, and we saw buses full of people that were about to be put on these deportation flights,” Ansari said. “After a lot of essentially begging, we were let in, the three of us, to conduct oversight here.”
During the visit, Ansari said a detainee reported that someone inside a cell had a fever. She said she attempted to have a supervisor summon medical staff, but received no meaningful response.
“One of the men was telling me that somebody has a fever in there. And I tried to get the ICE supervisor to bring medical staff over, and he was staring at me blankly, like I was asking for the most ridiculous thing,” she said.
ICE staff also told the lawmakers they could not speak directly with detainees, Ansari said, though she noted detainees communicated with them through cell doors regardless.
“They told us that we cannot talk to detainees, which is also this insane thing that ICE tries to do to prevent the truth from coming out,” Ansari said. “But they couldn’t stop this because the people were really desperate to talk to us, naturally.”
Ansari said it was her eighth oversight visit to an ICE facility. She and Stanton had visited the same location in February, when she said staff appeared to have cleaned and prepared the facility in advance.
“The last time we were there, they very much, you know, cleaned things up and tried to make this horrible place as presentable as it could be,” she said. “And what we saw tonight was massive overcrowding of every single cell.”
Ansari compared the conditions to widely circulated images from another detention facility where Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was photographed.
“If you’ve seen the images that came out of CECOT, where Kristi Noem was standing, and you see these cells with lots of detainees and lots of human beings just in each room, that’s what this was like,” Ansari said.
She said none of the staff provided clear answers during the visit, and that prior assurances about the rarity of overcrowding had proven false.
“The last time we were here, they told us it’s very uncommon for people to be here for more than 12 hours. It’s very uncommon for them to be over capacity. And it’s very clear now that that’s not the case,” Ansari said.
Ansari vowed that the lawmakers would press forward with oversight efforts and work with local governments on the facility’s conditions.
“We’re gonna continue to do these oversight visits. We’re not gonna give another dollar to ICE. Still, we need to be talking about this issue loudly and exposing ICE and these private prison companies for what is happening inside these facilities,” she said. “I think it is very important, now that I’ve seen this with my own eyes, for us to work directly with municipalities and the county to do everything possible to stop this.”
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