‘Some cry all day.' ICE detainees face harsh conditions in Miami federal facility

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Nearly 50 men spent hours in a small holding cell asking for water, food and medication. Instead, officers dressed in riot gear sprayed the room with rubber bullets and launched 'flash bang' grenades.
The men had overflowed a toilet in protest, and the ground was covered in putrid water. Smoke filled the air. Loud 'booms' rang in their ears. Some men began to cry. Officers handcuffed them with zip-ties that cut into their wrists.
Kneeling in water that soaked his socks and pants, Diego Rafael Medina Rodriguez, 26, thought: I've been through this before.
But this was not the tear gas and bullets he'd endured over a decade ago at protests in Venezuela. This was a United States federal detention center. It was April 15, 2025, and he and the other men had just arrived there.
'We were trying to get their attention, because they didn't want to give us anything,' said Medina Rodriguez. 'There were people that needed insulin, people that take their medication at the same time daily. So we took matters into our own hands with the only option we had.'
Migrant detention centers are overcrowded as a result of the Trump administration's mass-deportation campaign, and the government is housing detainees wherever it can — including five Federal Bureau of Prison facilities across the country under a February contract.
A Miami Herald investigation has found those detainees face harsh conditions, crumbling infrastructure, use of force and lack of counsel, according to legal documents and interviews with more than a dozen immigrant detainees, Federal Bureau of Prisons employees and lawyers. While some say conditions are better than at nearby migrant detention centers, legal access is far more difficult.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement shows an average daily population of 152 migrant detainees at the Federal Detention Center in Miami — but 350 to 400 men are held there at any given time, according to several officers who spoke to the Herald anonymously for fear of retribution.
The number changes rapidly as more than 100 men can be shuffled in and out every week. ICE calculates averages across fiscal year 2025 which began in October, four months before the Bureau of Prisons facilities had migrant detainees. The result is a dramatic undercount of the detainee population. One BOP employee in Miami called the 152 number a 'bold-faced lie.'
A spokesperson for ICE referred the Herald to the Bureau of Prisons for this article. A spokesperson for Miami's federal detention center said immigration questions should be directed to ICE, and that the BOP would not comment on individual cases.
'The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) can confirm we are assisting the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) by housing detainees, and will continue to support our law enforcement partners to fulfill the administration's policy objectives,' read the BOP statement.
On the top two floors of Miami's detention center, immigrant detainees sit in small cells with broken air conditioning, malfunctioning toilets and out-of-service elevators. Officers and detainees both said the facility is not an appropriate place to hold the men — who are not there for criminal convictions, but instead have ongoing civil cases to determine if they can stay in the U.S.
'I've seen some inmates just sit there and cry,' said one officer. 'Some cry all day. Grown men, just crying.'
Eunice Cho, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union's Prison Project, said a Kansas prison faces similar conditions and added third bunks on beds to fit more immigrant detainees. While ICE data shows an average of 26 migrants, she said it's closer to 80. Housing immigrant detainees in federal prisons, she said, is 'profoundly disturbing.'
'People who are in civil immigration proceedings have due-process rights,' Cho said. 'And that includes the right not to be punished.'
On May 29, Florida-based civil rights organizations wrote a letter to FDC Miami's warden about inadequate legal access. Evelyn Wiese, a senior litigation attorney at Americans for Immigrant Justice, described the facility as a 'black hole.' FDC Miami holds about 1,000 other men and women awaiting trial or serving their sentences.
The public faces a void of information on who is being detained and where — as top Trump administration officials demand 3,000 immigration arrests a day from ICE officers. Detention numbers fluctuate or are unclear. Individuals are transferred frequently across the country. U.S. citizens have been mistakenly arrested. Officials have refused to release names of migrants sent to a naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba, and a prison complex in El Salvador.
The Herald found that at least two detainees held in Miami's federal detention center are green-card holders with legal permission to be in the United States.
Javar Miller, a U.S. permanent resident since 2012, was detained in late January at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, he said, on his way home from his father's funeral in the Bahamas. Authorities wouldn't tell him why, and the 43-year-old father was soon sent to FDC Miami.
A lawyer later told him the government had opened removal proceedings against him over a years-old closed theft case. He was released on probation and he paid restitution in 2019.
'This is not America, the land of the free,' Miller's wife, Tasha, told Miami Herald reporters on the phone. 'As you tear families apart, that's tearing up the fabric of what you call the United States of America.'
Under the agreement between the Federal Bureau of Prisons and ICE, immigrant men would be housed in designated units for a six-month period. The day after the contract was signed, BOP administrators across the country received a letter saying 'deportable non-citizen detainees' will be considered 'pretrial inmates.'
This is not the first time the government has moved to do so — in 2018, immigrants held at FCC Victorville, a California correctional facility, sued ICE over inadequate conditions and due-process and religious-freedom violations. The government moved them after a settlement. In Honolulu, Hawaii, detainees are also held in a federal detention center.
Wiese and other lawyers reported delays or cancellations of calls with ICE detainees at BOP facilities. In Atlanta, lawyers described missed hearings and 'desolate' conditions at a low-security prison. In Kansas, local civil rights groups wrote a letter raising concerns. At FDC Miami, lawyers described a lack of access to key legal documents, like notices to appear in immigration court. Immigration judges routinely deport people for not showing up to hearings.
They said it's harder to represent men incarcerated in the BOP facilities than at the ICE centers they are transferred from. 'You're going from bad to, like, extremely bad,' Wiese said.
'There is an access-to-justice crisis here,' she said. 'There is a due-process crisis.'
Located next to a courthouse and high-rise apartment buildings, the federal detention center is a concrete tower in downtown Miami. It holds pretrial inmates awaiting their sentencing, men and women who are serving their sentence, and inmates who have been sentenced but are awaiting transfer to another facility. On the 10th and 11th floors, the BOP set aside four units that can each hold up to 125 people — 500 people total — and ICE assigned two staff members to each floor. Two detainees share a bunk bed and a toilet in roughly 10-by-12-feet cells.
Officers shared guidelines and a handbook they received — but said printed material is insufficient, and that officers did not receive hands-on training for ICE detainees.
'How are we going to meet ICE standards if we didn't get ICE training?' one asked.
A third officer, speaking to the Herald on the condition of anonymity due to fears of government retaliation, remembers feeling 'unsure' about the arrangement from the start.
'You're dealing with detainees, and not criminals,' he said. 'The detainees are fighting for their freedom to stay in the country.'
He recalls one ICE officer telling him that the criminal history of the detainees was split: 60% had records and 40% did not. Data routinely published by ICE appears to show the ratio to be roughly 50/50.
As he started working with the detainees, his unease only increased. Some were charged with driving without a license. And detainees with previous criminal convictions had already served their time.
'To me, it's outlandish. You have people who have families, they have already established themselves in a country, they're good, hardworking people,' he said. 'All these immigration raids, they've come in and snatched people from their families. That's devastating.'
And the conditions are 'harsh,' he said. 'Deplorable.' Detainees are on lockdown in their cells, often the majority of the day. So far, the youngest he's seen was 18 or 19, and the oldest, in his 70s, was in a wheelchair. The smell of feces lingers and some don't have hot water. Employees told the Herald that the air conditioners don't work on one floor, as the South Florida temperatures climb into the high 80s. The windows don't open.
Many come in sick – and one detainee had tuberculosis, he said. Staff were worried; they had been given little information on the case and didn't know if they'd been exposed.
Officers themselves are not in agreement on how detainees should be treated. Detainees have been pepper-sprayed and wrestled to the ground for refusing to return to their cells, causing minor injuries on both sides, the officer said. With only two working elevators, he worries that help won't reach the top floors fast enough in an emergency.
Officers have referred many detainees with suicidal thoughts to the psychology staff, but the stress is taking its toll on them too.
'Mentally, it's very draining,' the officer said. Every day when he exits the building, he thanks God he made it out alive.
And the flow of detainees continues. One day, 70 detainees left. Two days in a row, 50 detainees arrived. Another day, about 100. The transfers make it difficult for officers to keep track of records — leading to the violent confrontation and the flash bang grenades.
In April, the tension and confusion came to a head when officers counted an extra person among incoming ICE detainees. They left them waiting in the cell as they figured out the recount — which is when the roughly 50 men flooded the cell in in protest.
ICE officers had transferred them from the Krome detention center – which was so severely overcrowded detainees were sleeping on the floor. Two people had died after being held there.
When they arrived at Miami's Federal Detention Center, the men were placed in a small room. Officers told them they would be there until they were processed, which could be until the next day. There was only one toilet. Accounts differ on the time they were in the cell, but all said it was hours on end.
Reporters spoke with six detainees who were in the room on April 15 when they say officers launched flash-bang grenades into their cell. Three employees confirmed details to reporters. The Herald also obtained civil-rights lawsuits and testimonies about the incident, and spoke with two lawyers of the detainees.
'They treated you as if you were a condemned prisoner from the start,' said Medina Rodriguez, the Venezuelan detainee.
The men had grown desperate without food, water, or medical attention, he said. One detainee said he was coughing up blood. As they flooded the room, a guard asked what they wanted.
'Send us back,' one man responded, according to a recent lawsuit. 'There's no reason why we got transferred to a Federal Prison to be treated as prisoners when we are ICE detainees.'
Detainees say 20 officers then approached the cell, yelling at them to get down on the floor, which was still flooded.
They threw in grenades, and shot at the men with what appeared to be pellets or rubber bullets, detainees told the Herald.
Detainees were then placed by twos in cells, still soaked in the water, without mattresses or blankets. They said they had marks on their skin from the pellets, and pain in their wrists from the zip-ties. It was unbearably cold.
The next day they were brought back to Krome, they said, and placed again in a holding cell where they slept overnight. The detainees filed the lawsuit themselves, which was dismissed Monday without prejudice due to procedural issues in the filing.
The employees told the Herald that the account matched what they had heard from colleagues. They said the water had started to leak through the floor, into the visitation room below. One said officers 'cannot allow a situation where we lose control' in a dangerous environment where confrontations can escalate quickly. The situation was out of control, he said. Another said the officers don't know how to treat ICE detainees — who are held to different standards and face different repercussions.
'They're technically not in BOP custody, they're ICE detainees, how can we throw grenades at them?' he said.
'It's the Wild West. What are we doing here?' he added. 'Who is in charge, and what are the rules?'
Javar Miller hadn't seen his wife and daughter since he left for his father's funeral in January. In his cell in Miami, he passed the time reading.
The closest he got to fresh air was a part of the recreation room, where a section of the roof is open and covered like a 'cage.' The BOP guidebook for ICE detainees states they will have access to outdoor recreation.
'They had us locked down like prisoners,' he said. 'Like animals in cages.'
He said others, like him, had legal documents to stay in the U.S. But it didn't change anything.
One man repeatedly said he couldn't breathe, Miller said, but officers told him 'it's not an emergency.' In another instance, he saw one detainee stab another in the face with a screw, he said.
His wife, Tasha, said the detention has been hard on the family and the couple's 11-year-old daughter. On one occasion, they thought Miller was being released, and his daughter made a sign to welcome him home. When he didn't return, she refused to get her hopes up again. 'She was in agony,' his wife said.
She heard politicians say the administration is going after 'criminals.'
'That's not what they're doing. They are breaking up families,' she said. 'I think it's racist. I think it's about black and brown [people].'
'Let's call a spade a spade, let's be honest. This is not about criminals, people that are killing people,' she said. 'Let everybody be aware of what they are up against and give them a chance to fight. We didn't have a chance.'
In the early morning of May 17, Javar Miller was released after a judge dismissed his deportation case. His wife and sister were waiting outside to meet him.
'That was the greatest feeling in the world,' he said. 'Just to be free.'
But ICE still has not returned his green card, Bahamian passport or wedding ring. He has spent the last several weeks asking authorities for his possessions — and trying to return to his life in New York. Bills that he couldn't pay during detention has piled up.
'I'm hanging in there. I ain't gonna let it break me,' he said. 'I'll get through it.'
Miami Herald Staff Writer Julie K. Brown contributed to this report.This story was produced with financial support from the Esserman Family Foundation in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners. The Miami Herald maintains full editorial control of this work.