Revealed: ICE violates its own policy by holding people in secretive rooms for days or weeks

Guardian analysis finds ICE increasingly keeps people in holding rooms with little oversight, as some facilities see a 600% rise in detention lengthImmigration officials have been increasingly detaining people in small, secretive holding facilities for days or even weeks at a time in violation of federal policy, a Guardian investigation has found.These holding facilities – located at ICE offices, in federal buildings, and other locations around the country – are typically used to detain people after they have been arrested but before they are transferred or released. In many cases, they consist of small concrete rooms with no beds and are designed to only be used for a few hours.ICE has used at least 170 ICE holding facilities nationwide, including at 25 ICE field offices.The Trump administration and its campaign of mass deportation has led to a near across the board increase in the time people are forced to spend in detention in holding rooms. After Donald Trump’s inauguration, the average time that people spend in detention increased at 127 hold rooms across the country.Despite ICE’s rule change in June, the agency is continuing to violate its own policy by detaining people at these sites for multiple days at a time.In some cases, such as a New York City holding facility located on the 10th floor of a federal building in downtown Manhattan, time in detention increased by nearly 600% on average after the June rule change.In one case the Guardian discovered by looking through agency data, ICE documented that a 62-year-old man was held inside that same New York City holding facility for two-and-a-half months.The Guardian also found an additional 63 people at the site who were held there for longer than one week, between Trump’s inauguration and late July. Continue reading...