Report sparks debate on detainee treatment

PHOENIX – Yohana Oviedo said her heart broke when she heard the story of a detainee who stumbled to the ground in Eloy Detention Center and called for help, but the help never came. 

Oviedo, media and narrative coordinator for the Kino Border Initiative, spoke passionately about recent accounts of medical abuse at the detention center. It was one of many the organization has received, Oviedo said. 

The initiative works with migrants who are set to be deported to Nogales, Sonora. The initiative team spoke with migrants who have been deported, and they echoed the findings of a Jan. 6 report from the Florence Immigration & Refugee Rights Project. 

“Reports from people previously and currently detained, members of Congress, and advocates document a litany of abuses, including frequent suicide attempts, preventable deaths, excessive use of segregation, especially of people living with a serious mental illness, and inhumane living conditions,” the report states. “These accounts expose a disturbing pattern of negligence and mismanagement, with ICE repeatedly accused of complicity in concealing the mistreatment and suffering that occur within the walls of Eloy. 

The report calls for an “immediate closure” of the detention center and calls ICE’s decision to extend its contract for the center a “grave mistake.”

The most recent report by the Florence Project is just the latest in a series that dates back years. 

ICE and CoreCivic did not reply for comment. 

The Florence Project

The Florence Project published the report on Jan. 6, 2025, titled “Medical Neglect, Strip Searches, and Abuse: Deadly and Dehumanizing Conditions in the Eloy Detention Center.” It describes numerous detailed accounts of medical abuse in the southern Arizona ICE detention center. 

Social worker Liz Casey and her colleagues at the Florence Project have taken an uncompromising stance against ICE and immigration detention. She said ICE raids are dehumanizing. 

Casey said it is her duty to “dismantle” systems like ICE detention. She said if detainees weren’t put in a position to need assistance from organizations like Florence Project, there could be an opportunity for a system to be built that provides support for migrants.

“We’re inspired by the people who are surviving these systems right now, and who are still here, and who are still fighting,” she said. 

Casey said that she’s angry about reports of abuses  in detention centers like Eloy. She said that medical neglect has been an issue for the entire decade that she has worked at the Florence Project, and that this problem predates the ICE presence in states like Minnesota. 

“These aren’t new feelings. They might be exacerbated right now under this administration,” she said in reference to an increase in ICE detention rates under President Donald Trump’s second administration. Casey said that because the Trump administration “gutted” federal oversight agencies, like those that oversee ICE detention centers, there isn’t an agency to respond to complaints about medical abuse in Eloy. 

She said there has been little to no progress to make the immigration detention process more humane in the time she has worked at the Florence Project.

“There’s very little right now that we’re able to do advocacy-wise for people with severe medical problems or just terrible conditions inside the detention center, except basically what we’re doing like documenting these things and putting them out in reports for the public to know what’s going on,” she said. 

CoreCivic’s public affairs manager directed questions to ICE and said ICE’s Health Service Corps is in charge of mental and medical health care at the Eloy Detention Center. 

The costs of detention

More than 60 interviewees shared their stories in the report by the Florence Project, exemplifying what David Androff called a “perverse incentive,” or the consequences of the economic need to fill these detention centers. 

Since the center is operated by private contractor CoreCivic, there’s an economic need for the company to cycle detainees through, said Androff, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Social Work. According to Androff, most of the ICE detention centers in the U.S. are run by private corporations, and he said this means the detention centers aren’t directly held accountable by the public. 

He said that the costs of detention are high— and not just when it comes to economics. 

Androff outlined that costs of immigration detention can include the physical costs, such as loss of human life or illness, as well as the costs to families of detainees and communities affected by detention. Androff said a loss of breadwinners or caregivers can also be detrimental. 

“I think they do a really good job highlighting the physical cost of medical neglect, which in the worst scenarios … results in death, and has resulted in an unacceptable number of deaths,” he said. 

The costs of isolation associated with detention can include both physical and mental effects, he said. 

“Even a short stay in [an] immigration detention facility can really severely rupture somebody’s mental health,” Androff said. 

Androff said immigration detention is a civil issue, not a criminal one. He said this informs how he analyzed the Florence Project’s report.

“It’s not a criminal issue,” he said. “It’s really further criminalizing what’s a civil matter.”

Eloy is located more than 60 miles from Phoenix, in rural Pinal County. This can put an additional strain on the families of detainees. 

“I just think the for-profit detention center thing is the biggest evil issue in the United States, just because it’s absolute abuse, those folks are in there for no reason,” said Christy Stewart, who has worked for years with recently released detainees to connect them with sponsors or families in the U.S. 

Eloy’s history of medical abuse of detainees

Reports of deaths and medical neglect at Eloy Detention Center aren’t a new development, according to a collaborative report by Detention Watch Network, the Florence Project and Trans Queer Pueblo. The center opened in 1994 and has the capacity to house over 1,500 detainees. 

The situation in the detention center has evolved based on the presidential administration at the time. 

The report, titled “Anthology of Abuse: A Legacy of Failed Oversight and Death at the Eloy Detention Center,” illustrates the magnitude of reports of deaths and medical abuse at the detention center. In January 2024, the detention center was one of 12 in the United States that held an average detainee population of over 1,000 people. 

Casey expressed frustration that despite continued efforts, progress has not been made. The Florence Project compiled multiple reports of medical abuse in Eloy over an 18-month period. 

“I really never saw anybody receive health treatment that they needed,” Stewart said. 

Bob Kee, a volunteer who visits detainees at Eloy and Florence State Prison and often works with Kino Border Initiative, said he visited one detainee from El Salvador frequently. The man, who slept on the top bunk in his cell with other male detainees, often fell to the floor from his bunk. Kee said one time, when the man fell to the ground, there was a protrusion on the floor that punctured the detainee’s groin. When the detainee sought medical care, he was repeatedly left untreated. 

“I think they’re going to deport me because I’ve been complaining,” he said. 

Kee said the man was correct, and he was deported quickly after that interaction. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kee’s visitations to Eloy stopped because of health regulations. He said the guards in the detention center didn’t have proper protective equipment and wore garbage bags instead of sterile equipment when bringing sandwiches to the “tanks,” as Kee called them, from the shuttered kitchen. Kee said many guards left their positions at Eloy because of the lack of protections for them as well as detainees during the pandemic. 

Kee said he has received dozens of letters from women in Eloy expressing their fears for their lives. 

“I think I’m going to die in here,” one letter said. 

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