Migrants are sent by ICE to more federal prisons, including a controversial one in NY

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) is transferring immigrants in its custody to more federal prisons in the country, already totaling eight, including one in Brooklyn (New York) repeatedly denounced for its poor conditions. A spokesperson for the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) told EFE in an email that, following a new agreement with ICE, the prisons and correctional centers used to hold detained immigrants have increased from five, as the agency disclosed last February, to eight at present.

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The penitentiary facilities are in Miami (Florida), Atlanta (Georgia), Leavenworth (Washington), Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), Berlin (New Hampshire), Honolulu (Hawaii), Lewisburg (Pennsylvania) and Brooklyn (New York), said spokesman Benjamin O’Cone. The BOP representative alluded to an "agreement" with ICE to "house detainees" and support law enforcement in "the policy objectives" of the Donald Trump administration, but declined to provide details on the number of detainees in those facilities or their legal status. Last February, the acting deputy chief of the BOP, Kathleen Toomey, disclosed in a session with the House of Representatives that there were a total of 700 immigrants detained in five federal prisons. The Federal Bureau of Prisons is suffering from financial problems that affect the working conditions of its staff and the conditions in which inmates live, and one of the best-known cases is that of the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, now used to assist ICE. The MDC Brooklyn, where high-profile inmates such as rapper P Diddy, accused of sex trafficking, or Luigi Mangione, of murder, are held, and which at one time housed the Mexican drug lord Joaquín Guzmán (El Chapo), has been denounced for violent acts inside and its "inhuman" conditions.

The Legal Aid Society of New York considered it "cruel" to use MDC Brooklyn to hold ICE detainees and lamented that their "conditions will deteriorate even further due to lack of staff, limited access to lawyers and overcrowding of facilities not prepared to meet even the most basic standards."

This Monday, a Canadian immigrant in ICE custody died at the Federal Detention Center (FDC) in Miami under circumstances that are not clear, according to local media reports.