(NewsNation) — Three Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers in Florida have been accused of keeping migrants in conditions that violate human rights standards, according to a report released Monday.
The report, entitled “You Feel Like Your Life Is Over,” focused on the Krome North Service Processing Center, the Broward Transitional Center and the Federal Detention Center, all in Florida.
The report, published by Human Rights Watch, makes several allegations, including that detainees were shackled for long periods on buses, migrants were forced to sleep on concrete floors under fluorescent lighting and that many migrants were denied access to basic hygiene and medical care.
Human Rights Watch said that by March, the number of detainees being held at Krome had increased by 249% since President Donald Trump’s inauguration. At times, reports said that the facility detained more than three times its operational capacity and that by June 20, the number of migrants being held at the three facilities had jumped 111% from population levels before Jan. 20.
“People in immigration detention are being treated as less than human,” Belkis Wille, the report’s author and associate crisis and conflict director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “These are not isolated incidents, but the result of a fundamentally broken detention system that is rife with serious abuses.”
A Bureau of Prisons spokesman told NewsNation’s partner The Hill that it cannot comment on the specific allegations in the report but that it was the agency’s mission to “to operate facilities that are safe, secure, and humane.”
“We take seriously our duty to protect the individuals entrusted in our custody, as well as maintaining the safety of our employees and the community,” the BOP told The Hill in a statement.
In a statement provided to NewsNation on Monday, Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, called the claims in the report false. McLaughlin said that the “type of lies” being pushed forward in the report contributed to an increase in attacks on ICE officers.
She said that detainees are provided with proper meals, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers.
“Ensuring the safety, security, and well-being of individuals in our custody is a top priority at ICE,” McLaughlin said. “ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens.”
Report alleges overcrowding, unsanitary conditions at Florida ICE centers
The report accuses ICE detention officers of degrading and dehumanizing those in the center. Some detainees did not have access to food, water or functioning toilets and suffered “extreme overcrowding” in freezing holding cells, the report alleges.
In one case outlined by the report, a woman housed at Krome with dozens of other women said they were without bedding or privacy. She told Human Rights Watch that there was only one toilet, which was covered in feces.
“We begged the officers to let us clean it, but they just said sarcastically, ‘Housekeeping will come soon,’” the woman said in the report.
McLaughlin, the DHS spokeswoman, said that it is not uncommon for women to be staged at the Krome facility and that they are not placed in the facility’s general population. She added that male detainees do not have access to the women who are placed there.
Other migrants who deal with medical conditions such as diabetes, asthma, kidney conditions and chronic pain were “routinely denied” prescribed medications by facility staff members, the report alleges.
In other situations, the report alleges officers made men eat while their hands were shackled behind their backs after the group was forced to wait hours for lunch. One man told Human Rights Watch that the group had to “bend over and eat off the chairs with our mouths, like dogs.”
Katie Blankenship, an immigration attorney and the co-founder of Sanctuary of the South, said that the rapid rate at which migrants have been arrested since Trump took office in January is “causing a human rights crisis that will plague this state and the entire country for years to come.”
ICE officials have indicated they are looking to add at least 40,000 more migrant detention beds, with White House officials pushing federal immigration enforcement officers to make at least 3,000 migrant arrests per day.
“The US government is detaining many people who pose no threat to public safety in conditions that violate basic human rights and dignity,” Wille said. “The United States has a responsibility to treat everyone in its custody with dignity and humanity.”
‘It’s not the Ritz,’ but there is no cause for alarm: Lawmaker
U.S. Rep. Carlos Gimenez, R-Fla., recently toured the Krome facility after seeing social media concerns about the conditions inside.
Gimenez described the facility, which currently houses 1,000 detainees, as being “adequate,” telling reporters that there were enough showers and toilets for those who are being held there and that detainees receive three meals per day.
“Yeah, it’s not the Ritz, but I can tell you that there’s nothing going on in there that would be cause for alarm,” Gimenez said, according to a local NBC affiliate in South Florida.