As overcrowding at Florida’s largest immigrant detention center ballooned this year, the emergency calls flooded in.
“I got a gentleman here, new arrival detainee, he’s complaining of chest pains.”
“We have a detainee having a seizure.”
“We got a new arrival detainee here that’s complaining of lightheadedness.”
Krome Processing Center’s average daily population has climbed from less than 600 at the start of the Trump administration to 900 in July according to data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement – and that’s likely a significant undercount. In April, Krome’s population reached three times its capacity with more 1,800 detainees, according to data gathering organization Transitional Records Action Clearinghouse, which obtained additional public records from ICE to provide a fuller picture beyond the average population data ICE regularly publishes.
As Krome burst at the seams with new detainees, emergency calls have risen faster than the detainee population.
From January to July, 911 calls made from the detention center doubled compared to the same time period the year before, according to records released from the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office. More than 170 calls were made this year until July 15, compared to 86 in the same time period the year before. This year, about half of the calls have been related to a sick or injured person, compared to just 25% of the calls last year. Other common reasons for the calls were an arrest or investigation.
That tracks with a similar trend at ICE’s Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach, where 911 calls are also on track to double from last year, according to data obtained and analyzed by The Tributary last month.
But at Krome, Florida’s largest detention center, the problems are particularly acute: Interviews with lawyers and detainees’ relatives, 911 call logs and recordings, and ICE’s own records show that overcrowding and medical neglect have run rampant at Krome since Trump took office. The detention center has also been the deadliest this year, with at least three deaths.
As the Trump administration has ramped up its deportation machine and Gov. Ron DeSantis has wielded the full force of the state’s law enforcement to help, no ICE detention center has exceeded its capacity more than Miami’s Krome, according to a report by TRAC.
“It is absolutely horrendous,” said Chelsea Nowel, a Tampa-based immigration lawyer with multiple clients who have been detained at Krome. “It’s not something that I’ve ever experienced before in practicing detained immigration for almost 10 years.”
Ramped up enforcement
Since President Donald Trump took office, immigration enforcement has intensified, targeting immigrants at their workplace, courthouses, and immigration check-ins. With Gov. Ron DeSantis as an eager partner, Florida’s immigrant communities have borne the brunt of ramped up ICE activity.
With most Florida law enforcement agencies required to collaborate with ICE, a routine traffic stop now can lead to detention without so much as a citation — let alone a criminal arrest. Changes to mandatory detention have also meant that immigrants without a criminal record and with ties to their community who may have been released on bond under past administrations are now spending months in ICE detention. More than half of the people detained at Krome have no criminal record, according to the latest ICE statistics on the detained population.
“What we’re seeing is how politicians across the political spectrum have sold us that immigration is a public safety issue, but it’s not,” said Florida-based senior organizer for the Detention Watch Network Nery Lopez. “In reality, we’re seeing that people are being incarcerated, being detained and deported and having no due process.”
As the largest detention center in the state, Krome has been the site of many of these detentions and the population quickly surged.
Within a month of Trump’s inauguration, 44-year-old Ukrainian immigrant Maksym Chernyak died in custody after being transferred to the hospital after having a seizure. The Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner determined the cause of death as a stroke. In August, his family filed a wrongful death complaint under the Federal Tort Claims Act.
Overcrowding only increased at Krome in the following months. In April, Democratic lawmakers in Florida called the conditions at Krome “alarming” and demanded more oversight. In June, detainees used their bodies to spell out SOS to protest the conditions and prolonged detention.
Even ICE has noted overcrowding at Krome. In the latest ICE inspection conducted from April 29 to May 1, the agency documented 14 instances when the facility failed to comply with national detention standards, compared to 6 during the last inspection in September 2024. Most of the issues were related to the holding rooms or medical care.
ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
Ron Smock, who often visited his friend Vangelis Ricardo Dos Anjos Gomes, a Brazilian immigrant who was detained at Krome from October 2024 to April 2025, watched as more and more people crowded the facilities during his visits. In the spring, he saw detainees eating and sleeping in a room meant for lawyer visits.
READ MORE: Rights groups: 'Abusive, degrading' conditions exist at South Florida immigrant detention centers
The overcrowding climbed steadily until June, which saw the largest 911 call volume since January 2024 with 53 calls. That same month, 75-year-old Isidro Perez died in ICE custody after reporting chest pains and being transferred to the hospital, according to ICE. The medical examiner has not yet released an autopsy or report on his death.
A 36-year-old Cuban immigrant, whose wife spoke to The Tributary on condition of anonymity because of fear of retaliation, got to Krome in June after being detained at an ICE check-in in Tampa. By then, according to the immigrant’s wife, the intake process was so overwhelmed that detainees were forced to sleep on the floor for days and weeks at a time.
“He was there for a whole week in horrible conditions, where you couldn’t shower and had the same clothes on all week, with a toilet in the same room where you were,” the immigrant’s wife said in an interview. “The capacity was supposedly for 25 people, but there were up to 60 people there.”
Mich González, a lawyer for Sanctuary of the South who represents clients in Krome, said the overcrowding has created inhumane conditions.
“People were held in processing for over a week and in processing, you don’t get regular access to meals, bathroom, potable water. You have to ask to go to the bathroom,” González said.
“There’s no beds. You have to sleep on the floor. People were so cold, they were sticking cardboard in the vents and trying to hold them in place with plastic forks.”
At least four 911 calls regarding medical emergencies mentioned that the person was a new arrival who had not yet been booked into Krome, stuck instead in a limbo in which the facility’s medical staff were not yet authorized to attend to them.
“I have a detainee over here that’s complaining of chest pains,” one caller said on May 24. “Nurse staff told me to call 911 because they can’t see him because he’s not all the way booked in yet.”
In its latest inspection report, ICE documented that at least two out of six holding rooms at Krome exceeded the 25-person capacity and three exceeded the 12-hour wait time in the holding room. It also documented a failure of all the holding rooms to document detainees held there, meal times, and security concerns. Krome staff also failed to provide proper mental and medical health screenings upon arrival, the report found.
When Rep. Carlos Gimenez visited, the 36-year-old Cuban immigrant said ICE staffers took steps to get the facility more in regular order: All the men were moved out of the intake center, he later told his wife.
Gimenez told media after his visit that he did not witness any overcrowding or detainees sleeping on the floor and that the medical care was adequate.
“It’s not the Ritz, but I can tell you that there’s nothing going on in there that would be cause for alarm,” Gimenez told the media after his visit.
The office of Rep. Gimenez did not respond to a request for further comment.
Issues with medical care
Once inside Krome, overcrowding persisted and detainees reported having to request a medical appointment but waiting days to receive care, according to lawyers, relatives, a wrongful death complaint and a report by Human Rights Watch.
Smock said that Gomes, the Brazilian friend he’d regularly visited at Krome, relayed that there were 120 people in his pod, which was only supposed to hold 60 people. He spent two months in solitary confinement, which he preferred to the overcrowding and abuse he endured with the general population.
“When solitary is a better option, that shows how horrible things are,” Smock said.
The 911 calls reflect a general deterioration of the conditions at Krome and the issues with medical care, which is provided by ICE Health Service Corps. They document head injuries, chest pains, stroke symptoms, and multiple seizures.
The wife of Maksym Chernyak, the Ukrainian man who died in February, alleges that he sought medical treatment multiple times but was denied care, according to a wrongful death complaint shared with the Tributary.
Chernyak reported feeling sick and was seen by doctors on Feb. 9. Despite complaining of the same symptoms, he waited 6 days for another medical visit. His blood pressure rose by this second visit, but nothing was done, the complaint alleges. When he began vomiting and having seizures in the early hours of Feb. 18, Krome staff waited nearly four hours before calling for emergency medical care.
Smock also reported that Gomes experienced long wait times for critical medical care. It took a week to see a doctor after he fell in the courtyard and scraped his leg, which became infected with flesh-eating bacteria, Smock said.
“They kept refusing him to get treated. They finally sent him to the hospital and the hospital filed notice about how bad his condition was. He was only hours away from having his legs amputated,” Smock said.
Injuries inside Krome were common for Gomes because he was repeatedly targeted and attacked by other detainees and guards for being gay, according to Smock.
Gomes was indicted in March on two charges of forcibly assaulting a federal officer, a case that Smock believes is retaliation for filing a complaint with DHS after guards forcibly restrained and beat Gomes.
Delays in receiving medical care at Krome were common, according to interviews and a Human Rights Watch report.
One man spent a week asking for medical care for a cough, the HRW report said. He only received treatment when he showed his bloody tissue. Another waited three weeks for treatment for flu-like symptoms. A nurse wrote off his issues as marijuana withdrawal symptoms.
Another complained of abdominal pain, according to the report. An officer said that did not warrant a medical emergency. The in-house doctor said it was probably just gas. When he was finally taken to the hospital, the doctor said he had arrived just in time before his intestines ruptured from a strangulated abdominal wall hernia.
A transgender detainee who became friends with Gomes fell and lost her teeth without receiving care, Smock said. A Guatemalan woman told Smock that her husband had been attacked and fell and started having seizures, even though he was only in his 30s. The 911 calls report multiple seizures of inmates in their 30s.
All these issues could be avoided, or at least mitigated, if the government used its discretion to release people with serious health issues, family responsibilities and no criminal record as was customary in the past, according to Nowel, the Tampa immigration attorney. But instead detention only seems to be increasing.
“It’s so much worse than we’ve ever seen before and all for nothing,” Nowel said. “There is no reason for any of this to be happening.”
