In the seven days after Ansari and Stanton told ICE they would be visiting the facility — members of Congress are allowed to inspect facilities, but 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 facility, first exclusively reported on by the Arizona Mirror, is a 25,000-square-foot facility at the Mesa-Gateway Airport. It opened in 2010 to little fanfare and can house up to 157 detainees and 79 ICE employees, according to an ICE press release announcing its completion.
It is one of many temporary hold facilities across the country, meant to house detainees for short periods of time before they are shipped to longer-term facilities or removed from the country.
But a Mirror analysis of data of ICE detention records that the Deportation Data Project obtained via the Freedom of Information Act showed that, in some cases, detainees have stayed for longer than the 12 hours ICE has said the facility is meant for.
Newly released data now shows that the facility, which in previous years has stayed below the 157 capacity of the facility, has been surging well above that number — and detainees are staying for longer.