Asylum-seekers now held for days – in a downtown San Diego basement

All of the immigrants received letters in the mail. For some, it was anticipated — a notice for a routine annual check-in. Other letters, sent to people whose deportation cases had been frozen years ago, were vague, asking them to appear at the ICE office at the courthouse in downtown San Diego “in connection with an official matter.” 

According to their attorneys, most of these people would not traditionally have been detained. Instead, when they arrived at court, they were handcuffed and held in a makeshift prison in the basement of the court building itself. They would not leave for days.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, over the past two weeks, have detained increasing numbers inside their offices, according to detainees, their relatives, court observers, and immigration attorneys. 

The basement of the courthouse is a transit point, where agents could have confined as many as 200 people at a time in recent weeks, detainees, observers and immigration lawyers say. Immigrants are held for up to four days before they are transferred to a detention center or deported into Mexico. 

While in the basement, detainees say they endure cold temperatures, must use the bathroom with no privacy, eat undercooked food and go without medical attention. 

The claims of inhumane conditions are an escalation of an existing pattern. Court observers and attorneys have raised alarms for months as ICE agents in San Diego sweep people with no criminal background into detention rather than allowing them to continue with their lives as they await the outcome of their immigration cases.  

ICE declined to answer questions about the basement detentions in response to inquiries from Times of San Diego. 

Instead, in an email, an official suggested the agency be given the ID number for any migrant who had spoken with a reporter.  

“I’m even more worried than I was before,” said Ruth Mendez, one of the organizers of Detention Resistance, a group of volunteers who accompany migrants to their court hearings. “This facility is not equipped for this,” she said.

Asylum-seekers summoned, then sent to the basement

On Friday, after being summoned to the court building, a Vietnamese woman in her forties who had come to the country as a baby, a Russian asylum-seeker fleeing the Ukraine war, and a Mexican woman who had lived in the U.S. for decades, waited together to meet with ICE officers. 

All were handcuffed and told they would be detained while their cases moved through immigration court. They were three of at least 61 detentions volunteers have witnessed at the ICE office since Oct. 9. (Most migrants asked not to be identified by their full names because of fear of further repercussions from federal agents.) 

One of the women who arrived at the courthouse that day, Maria, said her annual check-ins were always completed on a machine, so she was not accustomed to interacting with ICE officers in person. The ICE agents told her the machine was now “out of order,” and sat behind a locked door, so she would need to have an in-person meeting with an agent. María watched as the migrants who had meetings before her were one by one handcuffed and led to the elevator. But if she failed to complete the check-in and left the building instead, ICE would have cause to arrest and deport her immediately. 

“There’s not much you can do when they decide they’re going to arrest your client,” Stuart Hansen, an immigration lawyer, said. “If you try to help, they’ll arrest you.” 

Immigration report: When ICE arrests U.S. citizens, little clear path for what happens next

The migrants were allowed to call their families, who were waiting in the hall. Shock presented itself in varied responses among the relatives of the detained: one woman collapsed to her knees and sobbed as she said goodbye to her mother. “They didn’t even let us hug,” she said. A man attempted to reason with one of the officers who passed in the hall. “I don’t know the details of the case,” the ICE agent said. “She was on our list.” One woman went to move her car after waiting for hours, only to find her brother had been taken while she was away. She stood for several seconds, wide-eyed, without saying anything. 

Their first prison would be the basement.

Detained migrants, and relatives of people who have been detained, told Times of San Diego that the holding space includes cells and repurposed offices. 

Esteban Rios Sosa, who spent a night in the basement two weeks ago, said he estimated his cell, which he shared with six other men, was 8 by 16 feet. 

A young woman seeking asylum from Venezuela, who spent a night and two days in the basement last week, said up to 10 people were held in a cell with her. 

She said the women in her cell were forced to huddle together for warmth at night, given only foil sheets as blankets. Fluorescent lights were kept on all night, preventing the detainees from sleeping. The mattresses resembled yoga mats, Rios Sosa said, an inch and a half thick, and five feet long. 

In some cells, there is no mechanism for privacy while using the toilet. There is a shower in the cell where immigrants are brought to eat meals, Rios Sosa said, but it has no door or curtain and the detainees are not provided with towels. 

The immigrants held in the basement say they wear the clothes they arrived in, not changing their underwear for up to four days. One immigrant got her period during the meeting in which she was detained, and was forced to wear that same underwear for days. 

In an interview, the Venezuelan woman’s aunt said she was wearing high heels when she arrived at her ICE appointment. After wearing them for several days in detention, her ankles became swollen, and now she sleeps with her legs up on the wall in an attempt to lessen the inflammation. Sleeping on the floor has caused her constant back and neck pain. 

The food is inedible, migrants said. Rios Sosa and the Venezuelan woman said they were served a still half-frozen burrito with potatoes the woman said “crunched like carrots.”  

The Venezuelan woman’s aunt said immigrants in the basement are allowed short phone calls with a family member, often just a few minutes, but the recipient of the call is forced to pay $53 by inputting card information into the phone to be able to speak. One man, Rios Sosa said, asked for a phone call for days, while an ICE agent said “soon” but never allowed him to use the phone. The Venezuelan woman’s first call was just thirty seconds long, her aunt said. 

While in the basement, the immigrants are not searchable on ICE’s detainee locator system, giving their families no information on where they are. Volunteers are now encouraging anyone who enters the ICE office for a check-in to write their loved ones’ phone numbers on their arms in sharpie. 

There is no medical attention available in the basement, immigrants say. On Friday, ICE agents at the courthouse detained a woman named Bea with severe epilepsy. “She needs to be watched 24/7. She cannot be alone,” or she’ll “fall and hurt herself” her sister said, her voice breaking as she relayed to the rest of the immigrants waiting in the office that Bea had been detained.

Even when Bea’s lawyer presented a letter from a doctor saying that she was “at risk of death” in the basement, an ICE agent argued she should remain detained and said “she’ll be fine.” To release her, the agent said, she would need to be transferred to the Otay Mesa Detention Facility and undergo a medical review. 

In a statement last week sent to NBC, ICE said that the basement facility is “well-equipped” and detainees are held there for the “minimum amount of time necessary to complete processing.”

Rios Sosa described the emotional state of the detainees in the basement as shock, frustration, and uncertainty. Even as they were detaining him, Rios Sosa says the agents claimed it was a routine check-in, and he was being led to the basement just to take fingerprints and photos. “There was a moment where I thought, OK, this is not good. And my heart was at a million beats per minute… I was crying internally, and my nerves were exploding.” Rios Sosa’s wife, who was detained with him, was transferred to Otay Mesa, where she has begun taking antidepressants to cope with the detention. 

Immigration detention under scrutiny

Immigration officials have long faced scrutiny both for conditions inside their detention facilities and for holding migrants – whose immigration violations are civil, not criminal – in a range of structures unsuitable for habitation.

In 2018, during the first Trump administration, authorities housed migrant children in warehouses divided into cells made of chain-link fencing, drawing backlash over images of children in cages. Many migrant families were apprehended and held in Border Patrol operating bases – desert-area facilities more suited to garage patrol vehicles than to house young children. Public outcry rose amid reports of illness and poor treatment there, including the deaths of multiple migrant children. 

Nationally, immigration detention facilities have faced criticism for inhumane conditions, including reports of inadequate and inedible food, with federal inspectors finding a range of food, sanitation and other deficiencies at ICE facilities. Some of the same facilities were revealed to be the scene of systemic cases of abuse, sexual assault, mistreatment and inadequate medical care, as well as forced sterilization. 

ICE has increased the number of immigrants detained in the country by over 50% since January. Twenty-three people have died in ICE detention nationwide in 2025, the highest number since 2004, leading the American Immigration Council to write that the “Trump administration is deadlier for detainees than the COVID-19 pandemic.” 

Migrants’ and advocates’ descriptions of conditions in the San Diego basement, which echo previous allegations against ICE in other locations, began to prompt alarms from elected officials. 

On Monday, U.S. Reps. Juan Vargas (D-Chula Vista) and Scott Peters (D-San Diego) attempted to enter the facility as part of their right as congressmen to inspect detention centers – the same kinds of inspections that accompanied public revelations of mistreatment in the past. 

ICE turned them away, redirecting them from the immigrants’ cells to management offices. “It was an order from Washington,” Vargas said in a press conference on Monday. 

“If you were obeying the law and you were following procedures, you would want us to see this… It makes me very suspicious,” Peters said. 

This is just the latest example in a pattern of lawmakers denied access to ICE detention facilities. In July, 12 members of the House of Representatives sued the Department of Homeland Security over similar incidents in which they were turned away from immigration detention centers this summer. 

Detained, then deported

After he was detained, Rios Sosa said, an ICE agent asked if he had any criminal charges in the United States and he said no, and then the agent returned a few minutes later and said he had made the decision to deport Rios Sosa through expedited removal, and he would not have the opportunity to appeal to a judge. Rios Sosa, who is the father of a U.S. marine, was deported the next day to Tijuana. 

The Department of Homeland Security posted a tweet claiming that Rios Sosa had been charged with domestic violence and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, but Rios Sosa said it is his son, with a different name, who faced these charges. He also said some of the paperwork the ICE agents gave him had his brother’s name, Mauricio, on it, suggesting DHS had confused him with other members of his family. When Rios Sosa asked why the name on the forms was only correct some of the time, he said the ICE agents told him, “There’s no problem.”

Rios Sosa says his wife, who was detained the same day, was transferred to Otay Mesa and then back to the basement again for a night, before returning to Otay Mesa. 

Rios Sosa, who lived in the U.S. for 28 years and was applying for a U visa for migrants who have been crime victims or law enforcement informants, hopes to file a lawsuit claiming his deportation was unlawful. “After so many years in the darkness, I finally saw the light and then they shut me out again,” he said. “And the entire time, they [the ICE agents] kept saying that everything was going to be OK.”

The last time Rios Sosa saw his wife was a quick goodbye through a window in the hallway of the basement detention area at the courthouse. He says, even now, 10 days later, he is still in mental as well as physical pain, like his bones are trembling. “Half my body goes numb,” he said. “It’s like I’ve been through an electric shock.”

Lillian Perlmutter covers immigration for Times of San Diego and NEWSWELL.