In midtown Phoenix, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) runs a short-term holding site that was never built to keep people for long. It has no beds, no medical staff on hand, and only restricted access to food. ICE says it's meant to hold people for no more than 12 hours.

That's not what's happening anymore. ICE's own data, obtained by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by the Arizona Mirror, shows the average detention time at this location has climbed to roughly 25 hours so far this year — more than twice the facility's stated limit. Between December 2025 and March 2026, agents called 911 for medical help at this site 11 separate times: a pregnant woman in severe abdominal pain, a man seizing on the floor with blood on his mouth, an older woman with diabetes who fell and injured her leg, and multiple people reporting chest pain.

Victoria Lopez, executive director of the ACLU of Arizona, said calls like these point to a deeper failure: "it is because they are unable to manage the health of the people in their custody... And that is a huge problem that needs to be meaningfully addressed."

Nobody should be held for a full day or more in a room with no bed and no nurse, waiting on an ambulance to catch what routine screening could have caught hours earlier. ICE should cap hold times at this facility to the 12 hours it already claims to follow, and put real medical staff on site for anyone held there.

Sign the petition to demand on-site medical care and enforced time limits at the Phoenix ICE facility — before another medical emergency becomes a tragedy.