Federal immigration detainees are treated “irritatingly” well, a former Arizona sheriff claims, despite a troubling surge in in-custody deaths under the Trump administration and accusations of mistreatment at a local detention center.
During an interview with Newsmax on Tuesday, Trump booster and former Pinal County sheriff Mark Lamb claimed that the standard of care is “extremely high” across federal facilities and state and local ones holding detainees for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“The standard of care that is required for people in our facilities, especially those on an ICE detainer or ICE hold, is extremely high, irritatingly high, to the point where most sheriffs don’t even want to engage in those contracts because of how high the standard is,” Lamb said. “The care in those facilities is beyond what Americans would expect or anticipate for someone who broke the law and came to this country illegally.”
Lamb, who grew visibly frustrated during his comments, was responding to recent claims from Arizona congresswoman Yassamin Ansari, a Democrat, who has said she has received consistent reports of mistreatment at detention facilities in Eloy.
During a weekend visit where Ansari spoke with 23 detainees, she said she heard reports of immigrant detainees being forced to drink over-chlorinated water, as well as getting infections from having to wear used underwear, claiming such alleged conditions represent a “stain on the humanity of this country.”
“I spoke with more than two dozen women, one woman in particular, she has leukemia, she has been there for five months. She has lost 55 pounds, and she has still not been able to see a specialist,” Ansari recently said of her visit.
The Democratic lawmaker has said detainees have previously reported being forced to walk in punishing heat, or suffer in cells without functioning air condition despite brutal summer temperatures reaching above 100 degrees.
An ICE spokesperson told AZFamily the detainee in question had been arrested for attempting to smuggle an undocumented immigrant at the border in Nogales, but did not alert the Border Patrol to her cancer diagnosis. She has since seen medical professionals more than a dozen times since being detained, the agency said.
Facing criticisms from Ansari, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, has previously said “any claim that there are subprime conditions at ICE detention centers are FALSE” and that “all detainees are provided with proper meals, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers.”
Immigration detention facilities have long faced documented instances of medical neglect and other poor conditions, and advocates say this track record has gotten even worse under the Trump administration, which has pushed to rapidly deport millions of people and was holding more than 61,000 people in immigration detention, according to late August figures.
“These are the worst conditions I have seen in my 20-year career,” Paul Chavez, litigation and advocacy director at Americans for Immigrant Justice in Florida, told The New York Times this summer. “Conditions were never great, but this is horrendous.”
At least 13 people have died in immigration detention this fiscal year, which began in October. The Trump administration is on track to double the worst detainee death figures from the last three administration, according to an analysis in The Guardian. The figure is all the more striking given the plunging rates of immigrants attempting to cross the border.
Leaked video from an immigrant detention facility at a New York City federal building showed roughly two dozen people crammed in a single cell, lying on a cement floor in emergency blankets, steps away from a toilet separated only by a waist-high partition.
At Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz,” a state facility that holds federal immigration detainees, inmates and legal advocates said prisoners were consistently denied access to lawyers and proper sanitation. A federal judge has ordered the facility to close as part of an environmental lawsuit challenging the hastily built Everglades prison.
About 70 percent of people in ICE detention do not have criminal convictions, and immigrant offenses on their own are often civil violations rather than criminal ones automatically prompting detention.
Outside of the U.S., the Trump administration sent hundreds of immigrants it accuses of being gang members to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, where detainees and their families said they were tortured and held incommunicado.
