An Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Miami plans to move up to 400 immigrant detainees into a large tent that was erected in recent weeks to accommodate a surging population of migrants, said Rep. Frederica S. Wilson (D-Florida), who toured the facility Thursday.
The soft-sided structure at Miami’s Krome North Service Processing Center contained cots, televisions, ventilation pipes and tile flooring, Wilson and her communications director said in interviews with The Washington Post. An ICE representative told her the facility could house 200 people on an upstairs level and 200 people on a downstairs level, and that the agency planned to begin moving people into the structure on Friday, she said.
A spokesman for ICE did not immediately respond to questions from The Post, including how long people may be held in the tent and whether the facility has increased its staff to meet their needs.
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There is little precedent for ICE housing detainees in temporary structures in the United States, said Eunice Cho, an attorney who advocates for immigrant detainees at the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project. U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Office for Refugee Resettlement have used soft-sided facilities, but those have typically been used for very short-term detention, she said.
The tent at Krome is the latest evidence of the government’s struggle to accommodate the nearly 50,000 immigrants currently detained by ICE. A nationwide uptick in arrests amid President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration has led to many detention facilities reaching or exceeding capacity, with reports of people sleeping on floors and going days without proper medical attention, The Post’s reporting has shown.
To meet border czar Tom Homan’s goal of 100,000 detention beds, ICE is contracting with county jails and paying millions of dollars to reopen shuttered private prisons. This month, it requested permission to bypass contracting rules to fast-track new agreements for private facilities in California, Michigan and other states, citing the southern border “emergency” and the urgent need to detain “aliens at-large that pose threats to national security and public safety.”
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At Krome, immigrant detainees were already being held in rooms that were never designed for long-term detention, waiting hours to use the bathrooms or see their lawyers, and going weeks without showers, according to interviews with immigration attorneys and advocates who have visited the facility. Reports about these conditions led a group of House Democrats to write a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem, urging her to “provide Congress with a detailed plan for how DHS will restore humane conditions for detained migrants and provide transparency in detention operations.”
Wilson, one of the signatories of the April 8 letter, said she arranged her visit to Krome about two weeks ago, to see the conditions and meet with some of her constituents being held there, including a foreign-born University of Florida student who was reportedly arrested for driving with an expired license and vehicle registration.
“Most of the people who I saw, and most of the people we ran into are not criminals,” Wilson said. “They are just people who have been here working and are undocumented. That’s the sad part about it.”
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The congresswoman said she could smell fresh paint during her visit — which she took as a sign that the facility had prepared for her arrival. ICE representatives told her the constituents she planned to meet with, including the UF student, were no longer being housed at the facility.
Krome, a former military base, reopened as an immigration detention center during the 1980s. ICE oversees the facility’s operations and relies on private contractors for services including guards.
It’s difficult to know which ICE detention centers are at or over capacity because the government does not share day-to-day population numbers for individual facilities. Based on the figures it does report — averages covering the entire fiscal year, since Oct. 1 — Krome and at least four other ICE facilities already have a higher average daily population than their contracted capacities.
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ICE holds migrants in at least 142 facilities, up from 115 when Trump took office, according to reports on the agency’s website. In a statement to The Post last week, ICE said it has increased its “available detention capacity” to “about 59,916 beds network wide” but declined to say whether this figure includes newly contracted facilities that have yet to open.
Trump set a goal of detaining 30,000 migrants at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station, but so far the facility has been used only sparingly. Satellite images revealed there were about 195 tents on the base in March.
