In the midst of the recent headlines about the awful conditions — and possible closure — at President Donald Trump’s “Alligator Alcatraz,” Arizona Mirror recently reported on a similar facility right here in the Valley.
It’s called the Arizona Removal Operations Coordination Center, or AROCC, and it’s actually been here since 2010. But its existence hasn’t been widely reported on — until now, with increased scrutiny on the Trump administration’s ramped-up dependence on these “temporary hold facilities.”
Jerod MacDonald-Evoy wrote the Mirror’s deep dive on AROCC.
Full conversation
JEROD MCDONALD-EVOY: Good morning. Thank you for having me on.
SAM DINGMAN: Thank you for being here. So as part of your reporting on this, you actually went over and took some pictures of this facility. Can you describe it to us?
MCDONALD-EVOY: Yeah, it’s pretty nondescript airport kind of style building over at the Mesa Gateway facility. It’s been there since about 2010. It was opened around then. It can house around 157 detainees and around 79 employees from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It’s housed along, as well with the Phoenix Interagency Fire Center, where the United States Forest Service also has facilities as well.
DINGMAN: And so this is a, ostensibly a temporary hold facility. What does that mean?
MCDONALD-EVOY: So temporary hold facilities and staging centers for ICE are areas where they will hold people who are either going to be transferred to another ICE facility for long term detention, such as, you know, facilities like we know of and are really well aware of in places like Florence and Eloy or in other cities, or to be deported … which is more often the case with this facility.
When I looked at detainee transfers and deportation and detention statistics that are released by ICE, a lot of the people that come through this facility are often being taken from this facility to another country, as this, this area is a hub for that activity.
DINGMAN: And as a result of the intention of this temporary hold nature, these places generally are not set up to house people long term. Correct?
MCDONALD-EVOY: Correct. In audits I found of this facility from 2017 and 2022, the auditors themselves said that ICE had told them that this is a temporary hold facility meant to house people for up to 12 hours at most. And so there are no beds, no showers, no … one auditor noted that there was no on-site food or medical staff and that they would have to rely on the Florence Staging and Processing Center, which is about an hour drive away, for those kind of things if they needed it.
There was one shower on the facility, but none of those are in the hold rooms. The holding rooms that they have at this facility do have bathrooms with kind of like a privacy curtain, as it was described in the audits, but no actual beds or anything like that that you would see in say like a county jail.
DINGMAN: But in spite of that, as you found, there were a number of instances where people were stuck there for a pretty long time.
MCDONALD-EVOY: Yeah, I found in the data about 95 incidents where people were staying for longer than 48 hours. One recently, in June, there were about 77 people who stayed for about a four-day weekend and were then, later I was able to kind of identify the flight that those people took.
They were chartered on through a company called Omni Air, where they were taken and deported later to countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan and some other places, which those are pretty lengthy charter flights.
So they stayed for four days in this facility with no food or water. They might have had food, we’re not sure. Because a lot of the problems with this – these types of facilities, as I’ve learned from speaking with, with other attorneys and advocates in this space, the immigration space, there’s not a lot of information that comes out of these facilities.
DINGMAN: Right, right. And I mean, I think in one case you said somebody was stuck there for 42 days. There was a Muslim detainee who was stuck there over the weekend of a religious holiday, correct?
MCDONALD-EVOY: Correct. That he was one of the 77 who was there over that four day period. He was there during Eid Al Adha, and he was deported to Bangladesh, I believe, according to the data that I reviewed.
DINGMAN: So speaking of the places that these folks are being sent, this story is part of a larger story that you’ve been reporting for years at this point, which is this idea of quote “ICE Air.” Remind us what you mean when you use that phrase.
MCDONALD-EVOY: So ICE Air is kind of a colloquial term that refers to the operations, which are actually headquartered at the Mesa Gateway Airport, that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement does in regards to transferring the detainees they have throughout the country and to be deported.
It refers to the fleet of aircraft, whether they’re charter or owned by ICE itself. Most of the ICE air fleet or operations are chartered through, through things like, the main charter company they use currently is CSI Aviation, which then uses other companies they charter out to, like Avelo, Omni and others, to conduct these deportation flights which they, they also call repatriation flights.
We used to do these more internally. We had a system called JPATS, Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation System. But then we’ve over the years transfer that more to completely kind of like a, a contractor, subcontractor system.
Although ICE has been in recent months looking to possibly kind of take that back over and buy their own fleet of aircraft and, and start doing this on their own again with the speed that the Trump administration and the, the kind of tone that they’re trying to set with the, the amount of deportations they’re trying to do.
DINGMAN: Right. Now in your piece, Jarod, you have some pretty harrowing details about what it’s like for the detainees to be on those flights. Can you tell us a bit about that?
MCDONALD-EVOY: Yeah, from what we know about, from these flights that we’ve, we’ve heard from flight attendants who have been on these flights, from detainees that have been on these flights, and from internal ICE documents that have been released, people who are put on these flights, they’re shackled at their feet and hands and put on these flights that, that are often very long flights. You’re talking about transatlantic going across, Pacific-type flights.
And there was one class action lawsuit against the United States where a group of these detainees were sitting on the tarmac in Louisiana for about 23 hours, were denied access to the restrooms, and ended up soiling themselves. There’s been other instances where there’s been deaths on these flights and miscarriages and other instances where, you know, detainees have been put in these body bag-style restraints in order to kind of keep them from acting up or having issues.
And then there’s also been reports of issues with the subcontractors because not all the people who work security on these flights are ICE themselves. Sometimes they’re subcontractors with groups like GEO Group or other security firms where there’s kind of less oversight you might see when it’s a government entity. And so there’s been some critiques from immigration attorneys and immigrant rights groups about how that’s kind of happened on these flights.
DINGMAN: Yeah, I can imagine. All right, well, lots of harrowing details there.
KJZZ’s The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ’s programming is the audio record.
