Whistleblower photographs released on Monday show that an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office in South Florida is severely overcrowded, with detainees sleeping on the floor of the building's garage and forced to use portable toilets overflowing with human waste.

Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform published the photographs and allegations by an anonymous ICE employee, who alleges that people being detained at an ICE field office in Miramar, Florida, are being stuffed in overcrowded holding cells, given inadequate access to medical care and hygiene, insufficient food, and limited to no legal access.

The photographs also show many detainees being confined in the building's sally port, an unventilated garage entrance, where they allegedly are forced to sleep shackled for eight to 10 hours a day. According to the disclosures, although the Miramar ICE facility only has a rated capacity to hold 56 detainees at a time, it's routinely detaining hundreds of people—up to 342 at one point in August.

The disclosures back up months of reports by immigrant aid groups, attorneys, detainees, and family members of detainees alleging inhumane and unhygienic conditions at the Miramar field office, as well as an ICE holding facility in Orlando, Florida.

Reason reported last month that the Miramar ICE facility, which is typically an administrative office where immigrants check in with federal authorities, had instead become a makeshift detention center as immigration arrests surged over the summer, with people languishing for days in what were supposed to be temporary holding cells.

A South Florida woman told Reason that her sister was arrested by immigration officers and detained at the Miramar field office for five days—jammed into a bare concrete holding cell with roughly 50 other people, where she suffered an anxiety attack.

According to the new whistleblower allegations, one woman who was seven months pregnant was detained for three weeks at Miramar until she was finally released on an order of supervision.

In letters to the acting director of ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) inspector general, several congressional Democrats demanded more information about "abusive and life-threatening conditions, including overcrowded cells, prolonged shackling, inadequate access to medical care and hygiene, insufficient food, and limited to no legal access."

"Acting in clear defiance of court orders and ICE's own internal policies, the Trump Administration has created crises at these facilities where brutal conditions put staff, detainees, and the public at imminent risk of serious harm or death," Rep. Robert Garcia (D–Calif.), Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D–Miss.), and Rep. Maxwell Frost (D–Fla.) wrote.

According to ICE's revised 2025 National Detention Standards, the holding rooms at field offices such as the one at Miramar are supposed to be short-term cells for detainees awaiting processing, transfer elsewhere, or court proceedings. Those standards limit confinement in holding rooms to no longer than 12 hours.

However, ICE issued a nationwide waiver last June allowing field offices to hold people for up to 72 hours.

That directive has fared poorly in court. A federal judge vacated the memo in June, in response to a lawsuit challenging conditions at ICE's San Francisco field office. Last year, federal judges also ordered ICE to drastically improve living standards in migrant holding cells in its New York City and Los Angeles offices, ruling that plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their claims that they were being held in unconstitutional conditions and illegally denied access to legal services.

But the surge in immigration arrests has overwhelmed many ICE facilities around the country, especially in Florida, which has been one of the Trump administration's most enthusiastic allies in its mass deportation campaign.

Oversight Democrats also say that detainees in an ICE field office in Orlando, Florida, are kept in standing-room-only cells where they're shackled 16 hours a day. The Orlando office is also allegedly delaying, backdating, and deleting booking records to obscure cases where people were held longer than allowed or detained against court orders.

The whistleblower allegations are the latest in a string of news reports and inspections finding similar conditions at immigrant detention centers across Florida.

A DHS inspector general report published last month found that detainees at Florida's now-closed "Alligator Alcatraz" immigration detention camp were held in phone booth–sized cages as punishment, a practice that inspectors wrote was "highly unconventional and does not align with standards for humane treatment." The report identified numerous other violations of detention standards, including overcrowding, insufficient medical care, food safety violations, lack of hygiene, and lack of access to legal counsel.

Another DHS inspector general report published earlier this month found that the Krome Detention Center in Miami–Dade County, which has been the subject of numerous news investigations and civil rights reports alleging inhumane conditions, was operating well above its rated capacity. Inspectors found the detention center's housing units and intake holding cells were all overstuffed, and detainees were being kept in holding cells for longer than the 12-hour limit.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D–Fla.) inspected the Miramar facility in July after immigrant advocacy groups and detainees' families began drawing attention to it.

"There are literally people lining the floors," Wasserman Schultz told reporters after her tour. "There is absolutely no room at all. It is wall-to-wall people."

As evidence of wretched conditions stacks up, pressure has increased on ICE and its partners in Florida's state government. David Jolly, Florida's Democratic candidate for governor, recently called for an investigation into the state's "Deportation Depot," another state-run immigrant detention center that, unlike Alligator Alcatraz, is still operating and hasn't been inspected by auditors.

"The reality is, the same conditions likely exist," Jolly told reporters.

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The post Whistleblower Photos Show ICE Detainees in Miramar, Florida, Amid Extreme Overcrowding, Overflowing Toilets appeared first on Reason Magazine.