A new report is decrying "degrading and dehumanizing" conditions at several migrant detention centers in South Florida, which have received large influxes of detainees as the Trump administration ramps up its mass deportation effort.
The report is titled "'You Feel Like Your Life is Over': Abusive Practices at Three Florida Immigration Detention Centers Since January 2025." It was released by Americans for Immigrant Justice, Human Rights Watch and Sanctuary of the South. It focused its investigation on three facilities: the Krome North Service Processing Center, Broward Transitional Center and the Federal Detention Center in Miami.
The report is comprised a review of documents related to conditions at the facilities, interviews with 17 current and former detainees as well as family members and attorneys. Accounts repeat themselves: being denied access to basic hygiene and medical care, being shackled for long periods of time on buses without food, water or functioning toilets, extreme overcrowding in freezing holding cells, among others.
Another passage of the document details that detainees with different medical conditions like diabetes, HIV and chronic pain said they were denied essential medication and doctor visits. One detailed collapsing after not receiving his medication, noting that his family was not told and discovered he had been hospitalized under a false name. He was returned to the center in shackles.
Another man said he collapsed from a strangulated hernia after not receiving care. "The doctor told me if I had come in any later, my intestines would have ruptured." And a woman described witnessing the death of Marie Ange Blaise, a Haitian woman, in the Broward Transitional Center. "We started yelling for help, but the guards ignored us," she said, adding that by the time they got there she was already dead.
A fellow detainee told the Miami Herald back in April that Blaise was complaining about chest pains on the day of her death. She had her blood pressure taken, given pills and told to lie down. However, another detainee said she later "started shaking, screaming 'My chest! My chest!" She was later pronounced death.
Belkis Willie, conflict director at Human Rights Watch, said the episodes are not isolated, but the "result of a fundamentally broken detention system that is rife with serious abuses."
Miami Republican Rep. Carlos Gimenez has rejected seeing inhumane conditions at migrant centers in the region. He visited the Krome detention center in late June, saying afterwards that the only recommendation he would give is expanded recreation time. "One of the recommendations that I'm going to make is to allow for more recreation time, because actually that's one way you burn off energy," he said.
Earlier that month, a group of Cuban detainees staged a protest in the facility's recreational yard to oppose deportation to third countries including Libya, El Salvador and South Sudan. Concretely, dozens of detainees formed a large "SOS" sign, which was captured from the air by local media outlets.
Gimenez also rejected seeing harsh conditions in another Miami detention center after migrants held there claimed so.
"There's nothing going on in there that would make me as an American not proud to be an American, and ashamed of what's going on there," Gimenez told press after touring the Federal Detention Center in downtown Miami.
The lawmaker went on to say he did not see any "deplorable" conditions. He did confirm the April incident that catalyzed some of the claims, which were reported by the Miami Herald and catalyzed a conversation about the conditions in the facility.
The report in question quoted six detainees who told the outlet that officers launched crowd-control grenades and shot what looked either rubber bullets into a room with about 50 people.
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