Migrants in U.S. immigration detention are spending longer stretches behind bars in facilities in Florida, Texas and California, as legal advisers and human rights advocates describe prolonged waits for immigration judges and conditions that detainees say deteriorate over time.
In Florida, Nicaraguan asylum-seeker Felipe Hernandez Espinosa said he spent 45 days at an immigration holding center known among detainees as “Alligator Alcatraz,” where he and other detainees reported worms in food, toilets that did not flush and overflowing sewage, along with mosquitoes and other insects. After that time, Hernandez was moved to an immigration detention camp at the Fort Bliss Army base in El Paso, Texas, where two migrants died in January, according to human rights groups.
Hernandez said he asked to be returned to Nicaragua, but that he was told he still needed to see a judge. After nearly seven months in detention, his hearing was scheduled for Feb. 26. In a phone interview from Fort Bliss, he said: “I came to this country thinking they would help me, and I’ve been detained for six months without having committed a crime.” He added, “It is been too long. I am desperate.”
Legal advisers and advocates linked the extended stays to a policy change in the second Trump administration that generally prohibits immigration judges from releasing detainees while their deportation cases work through backlogged courts. Prolonged detention has become more common in the term, at least partly because of that constraint, according to the Associated Press account.
Agency data cited by the Associated Press shows the scale of the detention problem has grown. With the number of people in ICE detention topping 70,000 for the first time, the article said 7,252 people had been in custody at least six months in mid-January, including 79 held for more than two years. It also said those figures were more than double the 2,849 people who were in ICE custody at least six months in December 2024, the last full month of the Biden administration.
The article also described how an incentive offered by the Trump administration—plane fare and $2,600 for people who leave the country voluntarily—has not resolved detainees’ legal delays. Hernandez and other detainees, according to the report, were told they could not leave detention until they saw a judge. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 2001 decision, ruled that ICE cannot hold immigrants indefinitely and found six months to be a reasonable cap.
Attorneys said the problem is not limited to asylum-seekers, and that some migrants who win protection are still being kept in custody while additional processes play out. Ana Alicia Huerta, a senior attorney at the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, said the first three detainees she visited in January who had signed forms agreeing to leave the United States were still waiting. “All are telling me: ‘I don’t understand why I’m here. I’m ready to be deported,’” Huerta said. She said that in earlier periods, similar cases occurred once every three or four months.
Sui Chung, executive director at Americans for Immigrant Justice, said conditions can push detainees toward giving up. “The conditions are so poor and so bad that people say, ‘I’m going to give up’,” Chung said. The report also said wait times may depend on the country of removal, with routine deportations to Mexico sometimes contrasted with cases involving countries that have resisted accepting deportees, including Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia and Venezuela.
Among those detained for months, the Associated Press report said are people who have won protection under the U.N. Convention Against Torture and cannot be deported to their home country but may be sent elsewhere. Sarah Houston, managing attorney at Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said those protections do not automatically end detention. “They’re just holding these people indefinitely,” Houston said, adding that every 90 days, attorneys request release and ICE denies those requests. Houston said she has clients with such protection who have been in custody for more than six months, including one from El Salvador detained for three years whose case was decided in October 2025 but who remains in custody in California.
The report described how some detainees are still waiting even when their removal pathways appear close to final. Hernandez said he did not have a lawyer and that he signed documents requesting to be returned to his country or to Mexico at least five times. He said an Oct. 9 hearing was abruptly canceled without explanation, and that he waited months until early February to learn a new hearing date.
It also described the circumstances Hernandez said led to his detention. Hernandez said he was arrested in July while on a lunch break from a job installing power generators in South Florida, and that his wife was detained with him but was allowed to return to Nicaragua without a formal deportation order on Aug. 28. The report said Hernandez and his wife crossed the Mexican border in 2022 and requested asylum, and that Hernandez said he received death threats after participating in marches against Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, Nicaragua’s co-presidents at the time.
The Associated Press report further described how detention can disrupt family life and legal progress across multiple transfers. It said Yashael Almonte Mejia had been detained for eight months after the government sought dismissal of his asylum case in May 2025, and that he had been moved from Florida to Texas to New Mexico. The report said Almonte married his pregnant American girlfriend via video call in November and became the father of a daughter he has not seen in person, and that he was unable to attend his sister’s funeral in November. Almonte’s aunt, Judith Mejia Lanfranco, said: “He has gone through depression. He has been very bad,” adding, “He is desperate and he doesn’t even know what’s going to happen.” The report said DHS did not comment on Almonte.
The report also said some detainees are pursuing relief through federal court, including a Mexican man detained in October 2024 in Florida who remained there for about a year after winning U.N. torture-convention protection in March 2025. The man, speaking on condition of anonymity out of fear it could damage his case, told the Associated Press that “Time was passing and I was desperate, afraid that they would send me to another country,” and that “I didn’t know what was going to happen to me,” adding that immigration officials were not giving him answers. The report said he was freed in October 2025 after a judge ordered his release seven months earlier. For Hernandez, the report said, desperation led him to request to be returned to the country he fled, and it included his statement: “I’ve experienced a lot of trauma. It’s very difficult,” along with, “I’m always thinking about when I’m going to get out.”