As of May, U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, have made more than 100,000 arrests—about 120 percent more arrests than they did in the same period in 2024. But what happens to those who are arrested? Do they have any rights once taken into custody?
A Bonita Springs man who was taken into ICE detention in February says that during his three months in custody, he was mistreated so badly, he nearly died. He has asked that we call him Andres, an alias, to protect him and his family. The translator is Sigfredo Hernandez.
“I spent four days in a bus outside the center because there was not enough space inside. My hands and my legs were shackled. And they didn't clean the only toilet in the bus. For four days, they gave us no food,” said Andres.
Andres is a 48-year-old Bonita Springs man and father of four. Here, he is describing his time in Krome Detention Center in Miami. He was arrested in February for leaving the scene of a very minor traffic accident in Collier County. Though he previously had temporary protected status, or TPS, from his native country of El Salvador, he had let it lapse, according to ICE records and his immigration attorney.
After 12 days in the Naples jail, Andres was moved to the Krome Detention Center in Miami. That’s where he came close to losing his life.
“The sugar level went way up and I started to kind of faint. So the other inmates in the bus started to call Immigration so that they come out for him,” Andres continued.
After staff at Krome brought him inside from the bus that day, they measured his blood sugar and got a dangerously high reading of 650. A healthy level, according to the CDC, is below 180.
Andres was placed in a small room—a space designed for 7 but occupied by 75 inmates. No one could lie down, only stand up or squat, and, he says, it was very cold. He was held another 17 days as he became more and more sick. He was not able to see his attorney.
“One time he came over to try to see me at Krome. But because I was so sick, they didn't allow him to come in,” said Andres.
Ira Kurzban is an attorney and author of Kurzban’s Immigration Law Sourcebook.
“The first thing to understand is that immigrants, documented or undocumented, who wind up in detention are in civil detention. It's not criminal detention. So civil detention people have many due process rights. In other words, they haven't been sentenced, they haven't had a criminal trial. They're just, you know, put in detention for what amounts to kind of pretrial determination as to what should happen to them,” said Kurzban.
“They have a right to a hearing if they're undocumented, to go before an immigration judge, to have a lawyer if they can afford to have a lawyer, to not be kept in conditions that are so bad, as you know, you've often heard. That's a violation on its face of due process.”
After Krome, Andres was moved around—to the Broward Transitional Center and then to a county jail near Cleveland, Ohio. In mid-May, after paying $7500 in bail, he was released. He was left in the middle of Ohio without his driver’s license, money, or any way to get home. He luckily ran into the wife of a friend. Together, they reached a relative who drove to Ohio and brought him back home to Florida.
The type of detention Andres went through, Kurzban says, amounts to incarceration. And in the US, even people in incarceration have a right to have their basic human needs met.
“There always have been standards, and those standards are not the standards that you might see in a Latin American modern day concentration camp like in El Salvador. We have standards in America, and those standards say you can't put people in a detention center when they exceed the amount of people who are supposed to be there. You have to feed them properly. You have to house them properly. You have to give them medical care,” Kurzban said.
Andres is home now, back at his job and taking care of his family. He’s working with an immigration attorney to get residency status, and his immigration court appearance is scheduled for four years from now: 2029. Still, nothing can erase the inhumane treatment he received while in detention.
“I was so sick that the official would come to the bed, thinking that I was dead,” said Andres. “He would pinch me. I would pray, like I show you now. And I would cry too. I would pray for my family. The most important thing I was asking was to see my family. That was it.”
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