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Three Democratic members of Congress said they were horrified that immigrants were being stuffed into holding cells “like sardines” at a Mesa Immigration and Customs Enforcement holding facility they showed up to without warning on Thursday night.
The visit came in the wake of the Arizona Mirror’s reporting on Thursday detailing how the Arizona Removal Operations Coordination Center, located at Mesa-Gateway Airport, has been operating far over its 157-person capacity for most of this year.
The Mirror’s analysis, in fact, found that one of the few times ICE was detaining fewer people than that was when two of those same Democrats toured the facility during a scheduled oversight visit in February.
When Democratic U.S. Reps. Greg Stanton and Yassamin Ansari told ICE they would be conducting that oversight visit — ICE policy requires they give seven days’ notice before arriving — the number of detainees began to decrease to some of the lowest numbers the facility had seen all year.
Almost immediately after the inspection, those numbers began to climb again.
The Mirror’s reporting prompted Ansari, Stanton and U.S. Rep. Adelita Grijalva to conduct a surprise oversight visit on Thursday night. When they arrived at the facility at around 9:30 p.m., they saw firsthand just how overcrowded it was — and the harm it was doing to the people being detained.
“What we saw tonight inside the facility was shocking,” Stanton told reporters outside the Mesa facility after the brief tour, calling the conditions inside “significantly overcrowded.”
He described concrete rooms with no bedding or blankets, packed with people mostly laying on the floor. When the lawmakers entered the facility, many of those individuals also scrambled to the doors of the holding cells, asking them for help.
Ansari was visibly shaken by what she saw.
“Shameful, absolutely shameful that the United States government, funded by our taxpayer dollars, is allowing this to happen,” she said.
Ansari said that each of the rooms holding immigrant detainees lists its maximum capacity; the majority had a capacity of 21, while two others were 24. Ansari, Stanton and Grijalva all said they counted more than 40 people in each of the 6 rooms and estimated around 250 people in total were inside the facility.
“I’ve never experienced anything like this in my entire life,” Grijalva said, fighting back tears. The Tucson Democrat described the way people were laying down inside as “like sardines.”
“It is frightening in there,” Grijalva said. “It is disgusting.”
When lawmakers arrived at the AROCC facility, they were also greeted by another sight: aircraft used to shuttle around detainees to either other facilities or deportations.
The facility, first exclusively reported on by the Mirror, takes up 25,000-square-feet in a building located at the Mesa-Gateway Airport, where it shares space with the U.S. Forest Service and the Phoenix Interagency Fire Center.
Arizona, and specifically Mesa-Gateway Airport, are at the center of ICE’s accelerating aerial deportation efforts, in which AROCC plays a major role. The airport hosts the agency’s headquarters for its “ICE Air” operations, which uses subcontractors and subleases to disguise deportation aircraft.
The AROCC facility has also been at the heart of flights that have sent immigrants to African countries, even when they’re not from those countries. Most recently, the facility made national headlines because it was set to be where two gay Iranian men were set to be deported from, ultimately to their deaths.
When they arrived, Stanton, Ansari and Grijava had to get the attention of someone working to load the aircraft in order to get access to the facility. That person then contacted their supervisor, who later told the lawmakers that they could not bring their staff with them into the facility.
The three Democrats said that an additional bus full of migrants, observed by the Mirror as well, contained upwards of 80 more people, but ICE staff could not tell them if they were coming or going to the facility. Many of their questions went unanswered, they said.
In fact, all three spoke of their frustrations with the ICE staff, particularly when it came to tending for the people being detained. As they briefly toured the cacility, the Democrats said the immigrants tried to speak to them through the holding cells, asked for help and tried to tell them about issues at the facility.
In one example, Ansari said a detained man pleaded for help for another detainee with a fever who needed medical attention. When Ansari asked staff about getting that person medical attention, she was told it would happen when she left.
“He literally stared at me blankly like I was asking him to do something impossible,” Ansari said of the supervisor.
Grijalva shared a similar story of a woman asking if she could ask the guards to provide sanitary napkins for a woman who needed them.
Detainees are supposed to be at AROCC for no more than 12 hours while they wait to be loaded onto a plane, either so they can be deported or transferred to a different ICE facility. The Mirror’s reporting found that publicly available data shows how overcrowded the facility has become in the past year. The average length of stay in 2026 is about 36 hours, compared to the same time frame in 2025, when the average stay was about 12 hours.
In 2025, the average daily population was approximately 21 people for the same timeframe. So far in 2026, there have been an average of 274 detainees each day. The Mirror found one individual in the data who stayed for 18 days, coinciding with a time when the population of the facility was near its peak of 777 individuals in a single day.
A supervisor who spoke with the three Democrats claimed that the facility is a 72-hour hold facility, even though it has no beds or showers. But that contradicts ICE’s own statement to the Mirror for the story it published Thursday morning, in which the agency emphasized that the facility is meant to house people for “typically under 12 hours.”
Stanton said that the visit exemplified exactly why he and other Democratic members of Congress will be pushing to not include any new money for ICE for the budget for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which is expected to be debated in Congress next week.
“We have to be as loud as possible to expose what is happening to the public,” Ansari said about AROCC, adding that she believes that talking to city leaders may be a next step.
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