The federal government has moved to buy up warehouses and turn them into ICE holding facilities around the country. And, in a lot of those cases, they’ve been met with local animosity — even in conservative strongholds.
But, one of those facilities is already operating in metro Phoenix — and reports of abuse there are mounting.
The latest incident that has three members of Congress demanding answers involved ICE officers using pepper spray on a group of 47 detainees in an enclosed room. One man ended up having a seizure, according to a 911 call made by Officer Gene Rivero in the early hours of late February.
GENE RIVERO IN 911 CALL: Um, yeah, we had a officer safety issue here, and uh, pepper spray was used, and we have a couple subjects that need to be looked at, and one subject specifically that appears to be seizing.
MacDonald-Evoy obtained that 911 audio through a public records request. He joined The Show to talk more about it.
Full conversation
JEROD MACDONALD-EVOY: Good morning.
LAUREN GILGER: OK, so tell us more about this pepper spray incident at this Mesa facility. Do we know why it happened?
JEROD MACDONALD-EVOY: Well, ICE itself says that what happened was that, that inmates were kicking the doors and the windows and, and it — they had to use the pepper spray on these detainees because they were exhibiting aggressive behavior towards officers at approximately 2:15 a.m.
And they ended up transporting one person to an ER due to "an asthma episode," and this person was released an hour later. They also say that that that their asthma episode, they claim that there was no evidence that the spray, you know, caused this kind of episode.
Now we don’t know any more than that. The, the other kind of information we have is from other ICE databases and reporting. And it really isn’t entirely clear as to what may have led up to causing, you know, detainees to, you know, have this kind of attitude towards officers, or if there was any sort of de-escalation or any other kind of narrative around the event.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Your reporting, Jerod, that this is one of many it sounds like use-of-force incidents at this specific facility in particular. And at ICE facilities around the state, you found they’re up 333% so far this year. Looks like the rates, if they continue at this rate, will be much higher than they have been in past years.
JEROD MACDONALD-EVOY: Correct. When the Washington Post obtained a database of ICE use-of-force incidents across the country, and they found that use of force is up significantly across the country.
And when I looked at specifically Arizona data, you know, when you look at 2024, there were 23 reports for that entire year for detention centers; 2025, that rose to 34, and just this year we’re already at 13 and on pace to be using use of force around 78 times.
So we’re seeing a significant increase of use of force against ICE detainees in all of the detention facilities that are run by ICE in the state.
LAUREN GILGER: But that of course is not happening in a vacuum. Like, there’s been a lot of attention on this ICE facility in Mesa in particular because of reports of overcrowding. People are only supposed to be held there 12 hours, they appear to be being held there much longer in some circumstances. What did you find?
JEROD MACDONALD-EVOY: Correct, this facility, the Arizona Removal Operations Coordination Center, which is based out of Mesa Gateway [Airport], it is meant to be kind of a staging facility, an area where detainees are brought and, and sent to another facility, whether that be long-term detention or deportation.
It’s meant kind of act as kind of almost like a — ICE has described it as an airport terminal. And people are meant to stay there for like 12 hours or so. When you look at data, there are people who are sometimes there for only a few hours.
But when you look at this data as well, you find people who are there for 18 days. I found someone there last year who was there for 44 days, and this is a facility that has no onsite medical according to previous audits of the facility. There is no showers. They’re just singular rooms that hold around 24 to 22 people with a singular toilet and no beds. And people are being held on there on average around 36 hours.
LAUREN GILGER: Wow. Democratic members of Congress that you’ve spoken with about this have conducted several visits there from Arizona here. I mean, you’ve included one you’ve reported on where it was sort of a surprise visit, right, from [Reps. Greg Stanton, Adelita Grijalva and Yassamin Ansari]. They said that afterward, they saw holding rooms with twice the number of people in them than they were supposed to have.
JEROD MACDONALD-EVOY: Correct, they’ve, they’ve conducted two oversight visits. The first one was in February, actually, a week before the pepper-spray incident. And, and then at that time, there was no overcrowding, but ICE had appeared to move the detainees around prior to that, because the facility had the lowest numbers it had seen prior in its history of this year.
And then afterward, the numbers went back up. And so, they made this surprise visit a few months later, and on that surprise visit, they, they walked in to the facility, they went in and saw these rooms that the max occupancy was listed as 21 or 24, and saw around 40 to 50 people in there. And Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva told me that she saw people who couldn’t even really lay down. They were kind of just standing, packed like you said like sardines in these rooms.
And many of them were, were pleading for help. And there were some people in there who said they had fevers and were sick, and were kind of crowded in this facility.
LAUREN GILGER: So, those representatives are now demanding answers from ICE about this latest incident as well. They tell you what do they want to know?
JEROD MACDONALD-EVOY: Yeah, they have six main questions that they’re kind of hoping to get answered about this incident and the facility. They’re asking for incident reports and medical assessments and surveillance footage, you know, witness statements about this pepper-spray incident.
They’re also asking for the number of detainees that were present in the room when that happened. ICE’s own internal report that was obtained by the Washington Post that I analyzed said that they used use of force on 47 people. We don’t know if that’s the ... entirety of the amount of people that were in the room or the area when that was used.
They’re asking for the total number of detainees at the time of the incident. ICE records say that there were 332 people at that facility that day. They’re asking, you know, what the ventilation, evacuation and decontamination procedures are following the use of pepper spray; what specific conduct .. promoted the use of the pepper spray; and if there are any de-escalation techniques used prior to the deployment.
And they’re also asking for what policies ICE has for, for using pepper spray in a place uh, that is enclosed and small like that.
LAUREN GILGER: Right. I mean, what does oversight look like at these ICE facilities, Jerod? I mean, it seems like the only way, you know, the public is getting information about what’s happening in facilities like this are, you know, when Congress members make a surprise visit or you dig things up.
JEROD MACDONALD-EVOY: Oversight exists in theory, but oversight generally is done by, internally by the Office of the Inspector General or internal units at DHS like, you know, auditor groups.
But those groups have been gutted by the Trump administration. One of the first moves the Trump administration did on their second term when coming into office was start kind of gutting the ability for the Office of the Inspector General and these authorities to do oversight. Just last month an office that was actually created during Trump’s first term to provide oversight of detention center abuses specifically was actually closed.
So, these, these oversight mechanisms that are internal specifically to the federal government are kind of handicapped currently, and so some of the only proper oversight that we have is members of Congress or through public records or things like that. Especially because when it comes to localities, the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution doesn’t really allow for local control on federally run facilities.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. All right, well, that is Jerod MacDonald-Evoy reporting this story for the Arizona Mirror. Jerod, thank you so much for coming on, appreciate it.
JEROD MACDONALD-EVOY: Thank you.
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