Inside NW ICE Processing Center, where detainees may be held for years, sometimes in poor living conditions

TACOMA – Not long into his confinement at the sprawling immigrant detention center in Tacoma, Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez Zeferino heard swearing as dinner was served. “Hey, look at this,” said the man swearing as he brought his tray over for Juarez to see.

On it was chicken, normally the best food the Northwest ICE Processing Center has to offer, the Skagit Valley farmworker and labor organizer had been told. But on this day, the meat sat in a pool of blood. He inspected his own chicken and saw the same. He lifted the skin to take a closer look. “It was just raw,” he said.

“Everybody got mad and shouted that we weren’t going to eat this,” Juarez said. People returned their food to a cart. Close to 1 a.m., as he recalled, officers brought in sandwiches.

In March, the then-25-year-old had entered a world that, for many people, remains a mystery. The privately run detention center is one of the biggest such facilities nationwide, with 1,575 beds.

Advocates have for years called attention to conditions, collecting thousands of complaints from immigrants held there and submitting them to the state health department. Government agencies and human rights groups have written reports citing concerns. Immigrants locked up there have launched repeated hunger strikes, and some have tried to kill themselves. In 2018, one did.

But the low-lying gray building, surrounded by a chain-link fence, is rarely seen from the inside except by people who work there or are “detained.” Many people don’t even know what that word means, or how it differs from imprisonment. Even some who do would undoubtedly be surprised that one man has been held in ICE’s Tacoma facility for seven years.

More and more immigrants are learning about detention firsthand under President Donald Trump’s mass deportation effort. A record number are being held, nearly 60,000 nationally, according to the government’s September figures.

At Trump’s request, Congress has allocated billions of dollars to expand immigrant detention.

Already, the Northwest detention center’s surging population is putting a strain on the facility, exacerbating long-standing complaints and generating new ones, according to interviews with people currently and formerly held there, court declarations and accounts from lawyers and advocates. Many, like Juarez, tell stories of undercooked food and meals arriving in the middle of the night.

They also cite erratic access to outdoor recreation, little to no provided toiletries like soap, unclean uniforms and stained underwear, and long waits for medical care and legal visits. The atmosphere, they said, is tense amid new policies that offer little chance of getting out beyond being deported. Sometimes, even those ready for that outcome can’t leave quickly.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees the facility and provides its medical care, and the GEO Group, the Florida-based corporation running it since 2005, declined interview requests.

“False narratives about ICE detention facilities undermine the hard work of our dedicated professionals,” a spokesperson for the federal agency said in a statement. “ICE facilities operate under strict standards, including accreditation requirements for medical care and staffing.”

A GEO spokesperson said the company provides an array of services, including “around-the-clock access to medical care, in-person and virtual legal and family visitation, general and legal library access, translation services, dietitian-approved meals, religious and specialty diets, recreational amenities, and opportunities to practice their religious beliefs.”

Those familiar with ICE’s Tacoma facility say it does not have the harshest conditions. Some detention centers operate in remote locations far from attorneys, lawyers and outside observers, said Michelle Brané, formerly the immigration detention ombudsman for the Biden administration. “They’re really running in the shadows.”

On one occasion, an asylum-seeker asked to be transferred there because he heard it was one of the better detention centers.

“I would say that it is fairly typical,” Brané said of the Tacoma facility, its problems endemic to the unique system it is in.

From cold holding cell to tense unit

Juarez, who had no criminal record, arrived at ICE’s Tacoma facility the way many immigrants do: in handcuffs, ankle shackles and a chain around his waist.

He had been stopped by federal agents early that morning as he was driving his partner to work picking Skagit Valley tulips, and taken first to a small, unmarked building, he recalled recently. It was 9 or 10 at night when he reached Tacoma and was placed in a crowded holding cell with others waiting to be processed. He met construction workers in dirty clothes they hadn’t yet changed out of, a father and son, and residents of Seattle, Eastern Washington and Portland.

The hours dragged on. “It was really cold and we couldn’t really sleep,” he said. They tried, on the concrete floor, with no blankets.

He was called out around 4 or 5 in the morning, given a blue uniform that signifies low risk, and placed in a two-tier residential unit. Some units have cells where groups of people sleep, but his was a large open area with bunk beds, Juarez said. The unit also had tables and chairs, a microwave, sink and three TVs.

One TV was always set to English-language programming, one to Spanish-language. Juarez, who came to the U.S. from Mexico as a child, speaks both languages, but some people spoke neither, having immigrated from Russia, Turkey, Egypt and elsewhere. What to watch was a source of contention.

“There was always a high risk of a fight breaking out over the smallest thing,” Juarez said.

Still, the well-regarded labor organizer, whose detainment generated community outrage, said he got along with most everyone. He would buy instant ramen soup and macaroni and cheese from the commissary and share with those who didn’t have money.

Sometimes, he helped immigrants who had lost their cases write requests to be deported as soon as possible so they could get out of detention. One he recalled as waiting at least two months.

Days after Juarez arrived, an officer came into his unit with a list of people to be deported right away. Juarez’s name was on it. “Pack your stuff, you’re going tonight,” he said he was told.

Years before, a judge had ordered Juarez removed after he didn’t appear at a court hearing. Juarez said notice of the hearing had gone to the wrong address and he didn’t know about the removal order until he was detained. His lawyer, Larkin VanDerhoef, quickly filed a court motion that stopped him from being deported that night.

Months ticked by. “I started having vision problems because the lights were on pretty much 24/7,” some of them anyway, he said. He went to the “sick call” area one day, where immigrants line up starting as early as 5 a.m. to see health care providers.

There weren’t enough providers to see many of them, Juarez said. He went back to his unit and didn’t try again.

In July, after a judge declined to release Juarez on bond, he opted for “voluntary departure” to Mexico. He lives there now, hoping to find a way to come back to the U.S.

‘Stuck in quicksand’

A paradox defines the detention system. It is part of a civil system that’s supposed to be, as ICE says on its website, “non-punitive.” Yet, it operates like a jail or prison system, an Obama-era ICE official noted in a 2009 report.

The Trump administration, which consistently portrays detained immigrants as dangerous, apparently sees no contradiction.

To be sure, some detained immigrants have committed crimes, including entering the country illegally. But whatever punishment they receive in the criminal legal system is intended to be separate from detention, which ICE standards say exists “for no purpose other than to secure their presence both for immigration proceedings and their removal.”

An array of immigrants without formal legal status in the U.S. can be detained, including people who overstay visas (which is not a crime) and asylum-seekers who entered the country without breaking any laws. In some cases, lawful residents with criminal convictions have also been held by ICE.

At the Tacoma detention center, roughly 60% of those reported in September ICE records as being held were categorized as noncriminal.

Despite similarities, detention and criminal incarceration differ in key ways. Those confined to prison have a fixed sentence. Those detained do not.

“It could be three days. It could be three years,” said Brané, the former ombudsman.

Some might be whisked away using a fast-track removal process the Trump administration increasingly deploys. Others are held until a judge or administrative body issues a final ruling on whether they can stay in the U.S. Huge backlogs impede the immigration court and appeals system, adding to the uncertainty of how long detention stretches on.

“It’s like you’re stuck in quicksand,” said Javier Martinez.

Martinez is the man who has been held at the Tacoma detention center for seven years.

The 44-year-old has applied to stay in the U.S. based on what he says is a fear of torture should he be deported, in part for political reasons. His case is complicated, involving two countries he could be deported to, Costa Rica, where he was born, and Nicaragua, where he is a citizen.

While his case has gone through multiple levels of review, he has tried and failed to get bond through every legal avenue, including the U.S. Supreme Court. Once a lawful resident, Martinez’s biggest stumbling block has been two cocaine distribution convictions before ICE took him into custody.

He served prison time for those convictions, offering him a point of comparison. In prison, Martinez earned a GED, obtained a waste management certificate and took parenting classes.

Martinez has found no such activities in detention, designed for comparatively short stays. “Sometimes, I just sit there and I feel like a vegetable,” Martinez said. Even getting to walk around or play sports outside has been tough lately. “Sometimes we have yard and sometimes we don’t,” he said.

He attributes that, as well as irregular meal times that have him going to bed hungry rather than waiting for dinner, to insufficient staffing.

After a steep decline in population due to COVID and slowed immigration enforcement, the detention center’s population has roughly doubled since January, according to immigration lawyers who regularly visit and ICE figures provided to the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights.

Other detained immigrants said it’s patently clear the Tacoma facility is short-staffed. In a lawsuit on behalf of five immigrants held there for more than six months, plaintiff Jesus Bento Cardozo said in an April declaration that one officer frequently oversees two units. “The guard typically goes back and forth between two units and is sometimes gone for as long as 45 minutes or an hour. I worry that something bad could happen.”

As the only person in his unit to speak Konkani, an Indian language, Cardozo also said in his declaration: “I feel very isolated here.”

In Martinez’s particularly low periods, he has turned to a chaplain at the Tacoma facility.

“He’s a great guy,” Martinez said. “You can request to have a one-on-one with him, or a prayer session with him and he will come to the unit.” In a separate area, volunteers lead religious services.

But Martinez may have reached his limit on how much detention he can take. He is now considering an agreement to leave the U.S.

Detained while pregnant

In recent months, Martinez has noticed a new level of despair among those detained with him.

Until several years ago, many stood a decent chance of getting bond in Tacoma’s immigration court located within the detention center, but that changed as judges started automatically denying release to most immigrants who entered the country illegally. A U.S. District Court in September ruled the practice unlawful, and the federal government – which in July made the practice a nationwide policy – has indicated it will appeal.

In the past, ICE refrained from taking some people into custody for humanitarian reasons. A Biden-era policy, for instance, directed ICE officers to refrain from detaining pregnant, postpartum and nursing immigrants in most circumstances. ICE’s website notes the policy “is not reflective of current practice.”

Alejandra Gonza, executive director of a human rights legal group called Global Rights Advocacy, said she knows of three pregnant women who have been recently held at ICE’s Tacoma facility.

One, Anelys Garcés Infante, was taken there in July. A Venezuelan asylum-seeker living at the time in Oregon, Garcés Infante, 27, said she had been arrested on a shoplifting-related charge and ICE officers took her into custody as she left a sheriff’s office.

After advocates and members of Congress from Washington and Oregon pressed ICE to release Garcés Infante, the agency did so in early October, allowing her to continue her immigration court case while living in the community. Her lawyer, VanDerhoef, who also represented Juarez, said it’s the first grant of a procedure known as humanitarian parole he is aware of under the Trump administration.

Seattle midwife Amanda Heffernan visited Garcés Infante at the detention center and contributed to a release request supported by Seattle University’s International Human Rights Clinic and Global Rights Advocacy. “She walked in and I was like, oh my goodness, this person looks really thin and really sick,” Heffernan recalled in an interview.

Garcés Infante had been nauseous, throwing up and losing weight. Much of the problem, Garcés Infante said in a September call from the detention center, was the food. The extra sandwich she got because she is pregnant, bolognalike meat on white bread, was so unappetizing she didn’t eat it. The meals she got relied heavily on beans, which don’t agree with her stomach.

“I just don’t feel good here,” she said in Spanish.

She worried that her baby or babies – an early ultrasound indicated she may be carrying twins – would be malnourished.

She received prenatal vitamins and medical care in detention, and said the doctors there treated her well. The facility called an ambulance to take her to the hospital when she was experiencing severe pain, Garcés Infante said. The hospital gave her medication.

But in Heffernan’s opinion, Garcés Infante needed more specialized care, especially because of possible twins, than detention offers.

Where’s the oversight?

Inspections by Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General and the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman during previous administrations often haven’t fixed problems but they have cataloged some. Among those cited in reports on the Tacoma facility over the past two years: medical understaffing, inconsistent suicide-watch checks and preventive health screenings, and foods stored years past their “best-by” dates.

That oversight is now shrinking. The Trump administration largely defunded the detention ombudsman’s and Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which investigates complaints. A legal challenge is ongoing.

Washington state’s Department of Health, which has received 2,800 complaints since 2023, is attempting to step in. It is backed by recent state laws explicitly giving the agency authority to conduct inspections.

“I have been shocked by the complaints that we hear, said Lauren Jenks, a department assistant secretary. One of her top concerns is the drinking water, which more than 100 complaints to her department describe as strange looking, smelling and tasting.

The department believes there’s something wrong with pipes inside the building, which it could help fix. But GEO and ICE have long prevented state health inspectors from coming in, which is being litigated in court. (The litigation also involves the state Department of Labor & Industries, which the detention center has allowed in to conduct workplace safety inspections but would likely do so more frequently under state legislation challenged by GEO.)

In August, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals lifted a preliminary injunction that kept state health inspectors out. GEO has asked for a hearing before all of the court’s judges. So for now, the state’s role is still in doubt.