MIAMI — Hundreds of people swept up in the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration are being kept at an overcrowded detention center in Miami, sleeping on cement floors amid the stench of body odor and raw sewage — conditions that lawyers, families and former detainees call inhumane.

One woman, who spoke with the Miami Herald on the phone from Honduras, said she and fellow detainees were left in shackles and chains on buses overnight, so long that some urinated on themselves. She said she was put in a cell with about 30 women before she was deported.

“It was cold like you can’t imagine,” said the woman, who asked to be identified only by her middle name, Isabel, to protect family members in the U.S. “Sometimes we spent hours screaming, ‘We’re thirsty, we’re thirsty!”

The Herald spoke with three former detainees and the attorneys and family members for three more, all of whom were held at Krome North Service Processing Center. They described a facility at its breaking point, and detainees in a state of desperation.

In President Donald Trump’s first 50 days in office, the Department of Homeland Security ramped up immigration arrests across the country as part of his mass deportation effort — detaining over 32,800 people, according to ICE data. Public records appear to show about 600 people at Krome, one of four U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers in Florida. But detainees and their lawyers say that the population may be much higher, and far exceeds the capacity of the facility. One man detained there last month said it was so crowded, detainees were practically sleeping on their feet.

Former Krome detainees and families who spoke with the Herald said they were blindsided by the arrests. One person was picked up at home, another at the port of Fort Lauderdale, two during minor traffic stops, and two at scheduled immigration appointments in Broward County. Some have lived in the U.S. for over two decades and appear to have no criminal history.

As Trump casts a wider net for immigration enforcement, green card holders with years-old, resolved cases have also been taken into custody. At least two of them were transferred from Krome to the Federal Detention Center in Miami as part of an agreement ICE brokered with the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Their lawyers said they were moved due to the overcrowding.

In a written statement, a spokesperson for ICE told the Herald that “ensuring the safety, security, and well-being of individuals in our custody is a top priority.”

“Due to recent increases in detention populations, some ICE facilities are experiencing temporary overcrowding,” read the statement. “We are actively implementing measures to manage capacity while maintaining compliance with federal standards and our commitment to humane treatment.”

ICE would not provide numbers of how many detainees are held, saying that the office “does not provide population numbers due to operational and security concerns.” The spokesperson told the Herald those numbers fluctuate hour to hour and would also require a records request, which typically takes months to years. The Herald requested to visit the facility, and did not receive a response.

Three Krome detainees died from medical causes between Dec. 16 and Feb. 20, accounting for half of all deaths in ICE detention since the start of fiscal year 2025 in October, according to the agency’s official death reports. The most recent, a 44-year-old Ukrainian man who came to the U.S. through a humanitarian parole program, died at the facility after medical exams showed evidence of a possible hemorrhagic stroke.

Krome and other ICE facilities have policies holding them to stringent standards of medical, mental health and hygienic care. There are also standards about the detention itself, including access to legal counsel, abuse prevention and language access. Paul Chavez is a civil rights attorney and litigation director for Americans for Immigrant Justice, a Miami-based nonprofit representing several of the detainees at Krome. He said the conditions are the worst he’s seen in 20 years of being an attorney and have “risen to the level of being an international human rights disaster.”

“To treat other human beings this way, just in and of itself is awful,” Chavez said. “But more so it violates the Constitution and it violates (ICE’s) own standards.”

Maria Bilbao, a campaign coordinator at the American Friends Service Committee, an immigrant advocacy group, said that recent agreements allowing local law enforcement to detain people they believe are violating immigration laws, promotes “a hunt for immigrants.”

“All elected officials who sign agreements allowing police and highway patrol to act as ICE agents are complicit in these abuses,” she said.

In early March, a detainee decided to document the conditions. Osiriss Azahael Vázquez Martínez, 45, came to the U.S. over a decade ago, and was working in construction in Florida when he was arrested last month for driving without a license on his way home from work.

At Krome, he grabbed his phone when guards weren’t looking and filmed a crowded holding room with men sleeping on the floor under chairs. He pleaded for Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo to intervene.

“We are practically kidnapped. There are people who have been here for over 30 days,” he said in the video. “Please help us.”

Vázquez Martínez was deported to Mexico on March 14, and published the videos on TikTok after arriving at the border. They went viral, with one receiving over 4 million views. On Tuesday, the flu-like symptoms that started at Krome worsened, and he went to a local health clinic in Mexico.

“Krome, in a few words, is a concentration camp,” he said in a text to the Herald.

‘It’s worse than what we would allow for our pets’

On Jan. 26, a woman in New York got a call from her husband. He said he was detained at the port of Fort Lauderdale on his way home from his father’s funeral in the Bahamas. He has been a U.S. permanent resident since 2012.

Days later, T. Miller — who asked that her first name not be used due to fears of retaliation against her husband — hadn’t heard anything from him, and called the detention center at Fort Lauderdale airport. She was told her husband had been transferred, and was able to get in touch with him several days later at Krome.

“He said ‘When I came to Krome, I hadn’t eaten in like two to three days,’” Miller said. “‘It’s like 70 people in here with two toilets, two showers.’”

Over a week later, he developed a sore throat, couldn’t swallow food, and was having shortness of breath. Officials transferred him to the Federal Detention Center in Miami because of the overcrowding, she said, where he is still detained.

Miller, 43, is a U.S. citizen and a certified nurse. The couple has an 11-year-old daughter and lives in New York.

“He didn’t even know that he was facing deportation until I hired a lawyer,” she said. “They have him currently locked down like a prisoner.”

The lawyer told them his arrest was connected to a 2018 case, when he was charged with a felony for theft. According to his wife, he paid $5,000 in restitution for pawning jewelry that he didn’t realize had been stolen. “The case was done,” she said, “he paid his restitution, and he was off probation.” The Herald reviewed court records confirming his case.

Maria Serra, an immigration attorney representing Miller’s husband, said that her client’s respiratory illness worsened in federal prison and he lost “a ton of weight.”

“The treatment these detainees receive is inhumane,” Serra said. “It’s worse than what we would allow for our pets.”

Another attorney, Louize Fiore, filed a Habeas Corpus petition on behalf of her client, claiming he was unlawfully detained and denied access to life-saving medication.

Her client has multiple health conditions, including HIV and epilepsy, she said. The 49-year-old Brazilian national asked to remain anonymous because he worries that he will face discrimination in prison for being gay and HIV-positive.

He obtained his green card in 2006, she said, but later developed a drug addiction and was convicted of drug trafficking. In 2013 he was released on probation, but was convicted again in 2016 and served time in federal prison. He was released in 2020, and placed in ICE’s Alternatives to Detention program. He has since worked with nonprofits to help others with substance abuse issues and HIV, Fiore said.

His probation officer said in an email shared with the Herald that he was in compliance with his supervised release, had no pending criminal issues, and was due to finish his supervised release by the end of this year.

“He got himself sober,” Fiore said. “He turned his life around.”

But on Feb. 4, his husband died suddenly of a heart attack at their home in Florida. And four days later, immigration officers showed up at his door. Fiore said they then arrested her client without a warrant.

That same day, at ICE’s Miramar office, he had a panic attack and a seizure and was taken to the hospital, she said. Officials transferred him to Krome, where he slept on the floor for days, before he was moved to federal prison on Feb. 11.

Fiore said he didn’t have access to his medication and wasn’t allowed a confidential phone call with her until weeks later. She repeatedly called immigration officials to ask why he was arrested, and stressed the importance of his medicine.

On Feb. 14, he received his HIV medication and inhaler, she said. On Feb. 26 a doctor found that he had fractured his arm during his seizure in ICE custody weeks prior. An ICE officer gave him forms to release his medical and immigration files to Fiore. Tucked among the forms was a voluntary deportation order, which he didn’t sign.

Fiore said that she has not seen “a shred of evidence” that there has been a change in circumstance that warrants her client’s detention.

“This administration is looking for numbers,” she said. “Without actually reviewing if it was legal, if it was right, if it was morally correct to do what they’ve done. They don’t care about that.”

The two men — Fiore’s client and Miller’s husband — were placed in federal prison under a Feb. 6 agreement between ICE and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which allocates up to four units in Miami’s federal prison for ICE detainees.

Chavez, the civil rights attorney, said sending detainees to federal prison is “inhumane,” because immigration detention is inherently a civil proceeding. Detainees in these centers have served their time or have no crime, he said, and are awaiting an immigration judge or removal.

“It’s an affront to both our criminal justice system, our system of civil rights and our immigration system,” he said. “Our immigration system isn’t supposed to work that way.”

In response to Herald questions about what detainees had described at the facility, the agency spokesperson said that “these allegations are not in keeping with ICE policies, practices, and standards of care.” ICE said it was working closely with BOP to ensure everyone had access to counsel and their court hearings as they usually do in immigration custody.

The ICE spokesperson told the Herald that “ICE takes its commitment to promoting safe, secure, humane environments for those in our custody very seriously” and requested names and incident details “so the agency may look further into the matter.”

Lawyers say that they have repeatedly raised concerns about their clients to ICE officials, including in emails reviewed by the Herald, but say that conditions have not improved. Multiple South Florida civil rights organizations plan to protest outside the facility on Saturday.

'Don’t take my mom'

On Feb. 17, the Honduran mother, Isabel, was driving to her daughter’s orthodontist appointment when she was pulled over by police for a traffic infraction. Afraid to show her expired Florida driver’s license, she presented her Honduran passport. She was arrested for driving without a valid license.

“Don’t take my mom,” her daughter remembered telling the police. “I didn’t want them to take her.”

Her mother was then shuttled to various detention facilities across the state: from Tallahassee, to Orlando, to Miami and Broward.

But Krome, Isabel told the Herald, was unlike any of the others. After the bus pulled up to the large concrete building, guards placed her in a small cell with over 30 people.

“There, my nightmare in this prison began,” she said.

Several of the women were seriously ill, she said. Krome often receives patients with chronic conditions because it has the facilities, including a pharmacy, to treat them.

One had a heart condition; one had a recent cesarean section, and was screaming in pain; and another woman cried and vomited all night. They yelled for help, but a guard told them “It’s not my problem.” The guards only intervened, Isabel said, when the woman vomiting passed out.

“That same day, they took her to the hospital, operated on her,” she said. “And the next morning they took her back, tied up by the hands, waist and feet.”

Krome has not housed women for years, following a 2000 Justice Department investigation into allegations that guards were sexually assaulting women. However, women are still processed there before being sent to other facilities or deported. ICE told the Herald that women and men are housed separately at Krome.

In their cells, Isabel said there was “nothing on the bare concrete where we had to sleep.” She had back pain from being in chains, she said, but guards said there was nothing they could do.

“They didn’t take me to the shower until the fifth day,” she said. “We begged them, please, let us shower but they didn’t listen. They didn’t do anything.”

She said that the women were shuffled between Krome and a detention center over an hour away in Broward County multiple times. They were counted, she said, and then left on the bus in shackles and chains for as long as 16 hours without water or food. Some women had to relieve themselves in their seats and sat in their urine.

Isabel was 15 when she fled Honduras for fear of her life. Around that time, 2010, the country had the highest homicide rate in the world.

She later moved to a small community in the Florida Panhandle, raising three children and running a cleaning company as a single mother. She recently left her husband after years of domestic violence, and her family said she went to regular check-ins with immigration authorities.

On March 5, weeks after she’d been detained, Isabel was put on an airplane, and told midflight that she was being deported to Honduras. She thought of her children still in Florida, ages 5, 11 and 17. When she landed, she was in such a state of shock that authorities brought her to a psychologist. She later connected with family in San Pedro Sula.

“I couldn’t speak because I was so traumatized,” she said. She is considering bringing her two youngest children, who are staying with family, to Honduras.

‘This has been the worst experience of my life’

Last month, Mario Meléndez stepped foot in his home country for the first time in over 20 years.

The 41-year-old auto body technician said he had unsuccessfully tried to legalize his immigration status since he came to the U.S. from Honduras in 2004. Lawyers mishandled his case, he said, and he received a deportation order. Every year for the past decade he has gone to immigration check-ins in Miramar.

That’s where he was arrested on Feb. 12 under the new Trump administration. From there, he was sent to Krome.

He slept on the floor of a cell holding about 30 men and went days without access to a shower. Detainees didn’t have a change of clothes, the smell was “horrendous” and one man was “almost dying” from the flu, he told the Herald by phone from San Pedro de Sula.

“It was a total nightmare,” said Meléndez. “This has been the worst experience of my life. And I’ve never committed a crime.”

Thousands of miles away from his wife and 17-year-old daughter, he is struggling to adjust to his new life. In Homestead, he owned a house, paid taxes, and was an active member of his church. Now he worries for his family.

“They deport you, and they don’t know if you’re leaving a family in the street, if you are leaving your children in the street,” he said.

Under the Biden administration, officials primarily focused on detaining individuals who had serious criminal records or were national security and public safety threats, as well as new arrivals coming through the border. But the White House has expanded its immigration enforcement targets in South Florida and beyond, taking away legal protections of hundreds of thousands of people and arresting immigrants who have been complying with authorities, or have little to no criminal records.

Another man from Honduras asked to remain anonymous because he is afraid speaking out will affect his legal case. The 42-year-old house painter from West Palm Beach was detained during his annual appointment in Miramar after two decades in the U.S., and sent to Krome.

His wife, a U.S. citizen, told the Herald that he is the primary breadwinner for the couple and their 9-year-old daughter.

On the phone, his wife said that he described Krome to her as overcrowded, and in a state of “chaos” and “constant turmoil.” On March 12, he was deported to Honduras.

“I don’t work,” she said, her voice shaking. “Our child is disabled. I don’t know what I’m going to do if (he) doesn’t come back.”

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