Conditions are deteriorating as many detention centers approach capacity and the Trump administration closes two agencies overseeing health and safety at the facilities.

At a crowded Miami detention center, some immigrants are being held in conference rooms with no toilets. The Cibola County prison in New Mexico doesn’t have enough chairs for all the immigrant detainees to eat their meals at a table. And at Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, some immigrant women have been forced to sleep on thin mats on the concrete floor because all the beds in the female holding unit are taken.

“You’re stripped from your humanity,” said América Platt, 29, who spent four sleepless nights on Prairieland’s floor after police arrested her on a warrant for an unresolved traffic ticket and turned her over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She was deported last month to Mexico, where she hadn’t lived since fleeing her abusive father two decades ago, she said.

The Trump administration’s efforts to boost deportations has increased the number of immigrant detainees so quickly that the government is failing to provide basic necessities, including beds and medical care, for some of them. Nearly half the people currently detained by ICE or Customs and Border Protection have no criminal charges, federal data show, yet some are being held in conditions that would be unacceptable in high-security prisons. At the same time, the administration has eliminated two oversight bodies that ensured that facilities met health and safety requirements.

According to federal data, the population of ICE detainees swelled from 39,000 in late January to about 48,000 in early April — its highest level in five years and well above the 41,500 beds for which ICE is currently funded.

The number of detainees is growing because of increased arrests and because ICE authorities are not exercising their discretion to release people who would normally qualify for bond or parole — those with medical conditions or who present no threat to the community, for example — said Eunice Cho, an attorney who advocates for immigrant detainees at the American Civil Liberties Union’s ACLU National Prison Project.

“This is a crisis entirely manufactured by ICE,” Cho said.

Mike Alvarez, an ICE spokesman, acknowledged in an emailed statement that “some facilities are operating above contracted capacity.” He said the agency is committed to “promoting safe, secure, humane environments for those in our custody” and is moving people from more-populated facilities to less-populated ones.

“ICE is diligently working to decompress these detention facilities while maintaining compliance with federal standards and commitment to humane treatment,” Alvarez said.

In its effort to meet border czar Tom Homan’s goal of increasing capacity to 100,000 detention beds, ICE is contracting with county jails and paying millions of dollars to reopen shuttered private prisons. This month, it requested permission to bypass contracting rules to fast-track new agreements for facilities in California, Michigan and other states, citing the southern border “emergency” and the urgent need to detain “aliens at-large that pose threats to national security and public safety.” Illegal border crossings plunged to about 7,000 in March, the lowest in decades.

ICE now holds migrants in at least 142 facilities, up from 115 when Trump took office, according to reports on the agency’s website. Alvarez said ICE has increased its “available detention capacity” to “about 59,916 beds network wide” but declined to say whether this figure includes newly contracted facilities that have yet to open.

Once the contracts are approved, it will take months to hire and train staff and prepare these facilities to house detainees — in addition to other logistical hurdles. The city of Newark, for example, has asked a New Jersey judge to halt a plan to reopen a facility where ICE plans to house 1,000 detainees, saying that its owner, private detention contractor GEO Group, is building on the site without needed permits.

GEO Group spokesman Christopher Ferreira declined to comment on the permits but described the pushback by local officials as politicized.

The crowding comes as the Trump administration makes it harder for immigrants to lodge complaints about conditions in detention. Last month, it closed two watchdog agencies at the Department of Homeland Security responsible for investigating such complaints — the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, or CRCL, and the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, or OIDO. Announcing the change, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said the agencies “have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS’s mission.”

In an April 8 letter to DHS Secretary Kristi L. Noem, a group of House Democrats urged her to reinstate the oversight agencies, citing recent news reports about worsening conditions at Miami’s Krome North Service Processing Center as evidence that detained immigrants need advocates in government.

“The elimination of oversight mechanisms leaves individuals detained at Krome and around the country without recourse, undermines transparency, and erodes public trust in the Department’s ability to uphold basic human rights,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Florida) wrote in the letter, which was signed by 48 other Democratic lawmakers.

In an emailed statement, DHS’s McLaughlin said the agency “remains committed to civil rights protections but must streamline oversight to remove roadblocks to enforcement.” ICE says it still operates a toll-free hotline for detention facility complaints.

It’s difficult to know which ICE detention centers are at or over capacity because the government does not share day-to-day population numbers for individual facilities. Based on the figures it does report — averages covering the entire fiscal year, since Oct. 1 — at least five ICE facilities already have a higher average daily population than their contracted capacities.

A spokesperson for Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego and a jail administrator for Monroe County Detention in Michigan both said their facilities are not experiencing overcrowding because they have room for more people than their contracted capacities with ICE.

CoreCivic and GEO Group, the two private prison contractors that oversee the vast majority of ICE detainees, declined to comment on the numbers of detainees at their facilities but said they meet the contractual standards set by ICE. The most recent version of these standards permit facilities to go over capacity with ICE’s prior permission, provided they have enough security and medical staff to support the population and stay within emergency capacity limits.

But without oversight agencies, these contracts are not being enforced, said Michelle Brané, a former head of the OIDO, whose standards experts visited over 100 facilities each month to investigate individual complaints and perform facility-wide audits.

“Without oversight, there is much more likelihood that very concerning conditions will continue to deteriorate without anybody being aware of it or sounding the alarm,” she said.

The experiences shared by detainees and their advocates in interviews with The Washington Post revealed a strained system that was not prepared for a crush of people to arrive in mere weeks.

Adrian Garcia Diaz is being detained at Cibola County Correctional Center in New Mexico, where he shares a cellblock with 38 men, he said in a phone interview from the facility. Garcia Diaz, a preacher from Mexico, says the dayroom has only 18 chairs at the tables where people eat, so nearly half the men have to eat their meals on beds. The facility ran out of shower sandals, so Garcia Diaz takes showers barefoot, risking disease. A sign posted on the wall of the dayroom, where the men spend much of their time, says the maximum occupancy is 29 people.

ICE standards require Cibola to take detainees outside for an hour of recreation every day. But lately, that’s happened only about three times a week, Garcia Diaz says. “I think they don’t have enough personnel to do it.”

In an emailed response to questions from The Post, CoreCivic spokesman Ryan Gustin said the Cibola dayroom occupancy of 29 “doesn’t include the space inside each individual room or the walkways in front of those rooms, which provide additional living space” for detainees.

Cibola is not above capacity, he said. He denied that detainees are not provided footwear, but did not address the limited number of chairs, saying that detainees are allowed to eat in the dayrooms or at a desk and chair in their cells and that recreation time in the indoor gym has been offered on recent days when snow or dust storms made outdoor recreation unfeasible.

Immigrant detention centers run by the federal government and private contractors have long been accused of squalid living conditions and careless treatment of detainees. A federal watchdog’s analysis of inspection records from 17 ICE facilities from fiscal years 2020 to 2023 found evidence of deficient medical care at more than half the facilities and violations of environmental health and safety rules at more than one-third.

In some places, these problems now appear to be exacerbated by the new influx of migrants, said Jeff Migliozzi, communications director for Freedom for Immigrants. The nonprofit group runs the National Immigration Detention Hotline, a free resource that fielded 773 calls from detention centers from January to March — nearly double the 408 calls during the preceding three months.

“As ICE stretches its detention capacity to the limit, already abysmal conditions inside will only get worse,” Migliozzi said, citing hotline reports of medical neglect, racist slurs, verbal and physical abuse by guards and improper use of solitary confinement.

At Prairieland in Texas, where Platt was detained before her deportation to Mexico, conditions have worsened substantially since her previous stay there seven years ago, she said in a phone interview from Hermosillo, Mexico, where she now lives with her uncle.

After her recent arrest, she said, she waited 12 hours in a small holding cell to be processed into the facility, and then was told to grab a mat because there was no bed for her to sleep on. She slept on the floor along with about 15 other female detainees who didn’t get beds, she said.

The medical staff refused to give her the antibiotics she was taking for an ear infection, she said, and the guards refused to let her use the phone. She believes they denied her these things because their systems were overwhelmed.

“They were at max capacity, so there was no room for me,” Platt said.

LaSalle Corrections, the operator of Prairieland, did not respond to requests for comment.

Prairieland can accommodate 707 detainees, according to an ICE audit from 2018. Although ICE does not share numbers on the facility’s current population, it says the average daily population over the roughly six months between Oct. 1 and March 31 was 684 people, including 59 females.

Because the detainee populations of most facilities have shot up since October, these averages are likely below the current daily population, said Austin Kocher, a research assistant professor at Syracuse University who studies immigration data.

Aggravating the population increase is the Trump administration’s tougher stance on releasing immigrants pending deportation.

Rodney Taylor, 46, an Atlanta barber whose parents came to the United States from Liberia when he was 2 years old, has been held in Stewart Detention Center in Georgia since the beginning of the year, just before Trump took office. A double amputee, Taylor relies on electronic prosthetics to walk.

In a phone interview from the facility, Taylor said the guards don’t allow him to plug in his prosthetics for the eight hours they need to fully charge, leaving him unable to walk for portions of the day. Sometimes, this means he can’t get his own food and has to ask guards or other detainees to get it for him.

Taylor’s attorney, Sarah Owings, said she filed a request for his release on the basis of his disability. In the past, such requests would be reviewed by an ICE field officer who exercised their discretion to release certain people, she said. But when she filed Taylor’s request, she said, an ICE official told her it would be routed to the agency’s headquarters in Washington for review.

A month later, she and Taylor have heard nothing.

ICE declined to respond to questions about Taylor’s case. CoreCivic’s Gustin said the Stewart Detention Center staff has worked very closely with Taylor to accommodate his needs, giving him options to charge his prosthesis in different rooms.

For now, Owings said, she is trying to get Taylor the care he needs at the overburdened facility.

“When you start detaining everybody, then you don’t have the level of care available to attend to these more extreme needs,” Owings said.