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During visits in recent months, Emelie says that her husband, who was detained in Stewart until her deportation last month, described severe overcrowding. “He told me that Trump had taken over, they were running carpets in the corridors. People were sleeping there.”
Emelie is a pseudonym granted for privacy. She says that the conditions have made a visible assessment on her husband, who lost weight, has become more and more anxious and had trouble sleeping in the middle of noise and tension. He described that he had to wait long stretching between meals. When her husband fell with the flu and caused a high fever, she said, he has filed several requests for illness calls, but never received any care. “He had once Cavid-19 once,” she said. “The same thing. People would be sick and left to get worse.”
“You have no chance in Stewart,” says Emelie, “it’s a death sentence for you and your family.”
Asked about the overcrowding in Stewart, Todd told Wired: “Everyone for us is offered a bed.” But three lawyers who regularly visit the establishment said that their customers had always described sleep on the floors or in plastic containers equipped with thin carpets. Three parents of current and former prisoners corroborated these accounts.
Corecivic did not respond when he was asked how he defined a “bed”.
Rush to cope
The consequences of overcrowding extend far beyond Stewart.
“We see many more transfers that occur suddenly and frantically,” explains Jeff Migliozzi, director of communications for the Freedom Freedom for Immigrants, which manages the national hotline for immigration detention. “They rush.” Hotline calls more than doubled from 700 in December to 1,600 in March. Many remain unanswered, says Migliozzi, because the lines are often too busy.
The distribution data obtained from these detention facilities in the United States reflect overvoltage. Six of the 10 installations examined by Wired experienced a net month in 911 calls at a given time in 2025, emergency dispatches are more than tripled in certain cases. For example, nearly 80 emergency calls have been made from the southern South Texas ice treatment center between January and May. The newspapers show that the number of calls more than tripled in March, going from 10 in February to 31. In one week, the distributors presented 11 distinct calls in the establishment, which is managed by the GEO Group, one of the largest lucrative prison operators in the country.
Migliozzi warns that an increase in calls from 911 does not necessarily report worsening conditions – it could just as well reflect more attentive personnel or better emergency protocols. But the obverse must also be true: a drop in calls, he says, may indicate unreased medical problems or delays in care.
Three of the seven calls from the 911 obtained by Wired involving suicide attempts this year came from the South Texas Center: in February, a 36 -year -old man swallowed 20 over the counter. In March, a 37 -year -old detainee ingested cleaning chemicals. Two weeks later, a 41 -year -old man was found cutting himself off.
Immigration detention is not supposed to be punitive, explains Anthony Enriquez, Vice-President of the Defense of Human Rights by Robert F. Kennedy. “But the conditions of detention in detention are so brutal,” he says, “that people tried to commit suicide while waiting for their day in court.”
