Ansari wants to abolish for-profit immigration detention centers

In the first year of the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda, Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity has hit Phoenix hard. Agents have picked up DACA recipients and legal visitors. People in residential neighborhoods have watched agents use unnecessary force against immigrants. And local business owners have been stuck in overcrowded detention for months. 

Democratic Rep. Yassamin Ansari, who represents central and west Phoenix in Congress, has seen the “awful” impact of these policies firsthand in her district. She saw horrific conditions of detention centers in oversight visits, helped DACA recipients renew their status to prevent deportation and advocated for detained people. 

“The way that immigration enforcement has taken off in this country is something of people’s worst nightmares,” Ansari said in an interview with Phoenix New Times. “We’ve seen masked agents, which has never happened before, all across our cities, terrorizing our communities.”

The problems with the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement are wide-ranging. As the administration ramps up detention capacity, Ansari has turned her focus to one aspect of the Trump plan. She wants to eliminate private, for-profit detention centers.

In the first five months of this Trump administration, more than 48,000 people were held in immigration detention. By mid-December, ICE was holding 68,000 people — an increase of more than 40% in half a year. Of those detained, nearly 90% are held in private, for-profit facilities run by private prison groups such as GeoGroup and CoreCivic. CoreCivic runs multiple detention centers in Arizona.

Awash in cash, the administration’s Department of Homeland Security is seeking to expand its detention capacity nationwide. To that end, it is building warehouse facilities in Glendale and rehabbing a prison in Marana. 

“There is no accountability for these for-profit detention centers under Donald Trump,” Ansari said. “They don’t care about these people, and they put them in the worst possible conditions.”

Ansari wants the federal government to end its contracts with the private prison companies that run these detention centers. She argues that the facilities lack oversight and condemn detainees to horrid conditions. But she’s still a freshman in the minority party who is pushing back against an administration with strong anti-immigration and pro-ICE rhetoric and policies. Any legislation she offers in 2026 to crack down on these facilities is likely dead on arrival.

Nonetheless, she perseveres, working to change the public perception of Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

“In the first half of the year, I felt hopeless a lot,” she said. “It just seems like the Republican Party was in full lockstep with Donald Trump.” But, she added, “so much of the power that we have also comes from our potential ability to change public perception around issues” and “to be able to chip away at that and show the American people why they’ve gone too far, I think, is really important.” 

Visiting detention centers

Arizona’s main ICE detention facilities, in Eloy and Florence, are owned by the correctional institution company CoreCivic. Detainees are often processed in Florence before being shipped off to Eloy for longer-term stays. Since taking office, Ansari has made several trips to visit Eloy to conduct congressional oversight visits and meet with detainees. 

During her first visit in May, female detainees told Ansari they had been forced to walk around the facility’s yard without water in the heat, which resulted in one woman fainting. They also weren’t provided with adequate air conditioning inside and faced dehumanizing behavior from guards.

During another visit in November, Ansari met with Arbella “Yari” Marquez, a woman with leukemia, who has been in ICE detention since February. She’s lost more than 70 pounds. Ansari saw her cough up blood during her visit, which Marquez told Ansari is a “regular thing” that happens “multiple times a week,” Ansari said. Still, ICE officials have denied providing Marquez with inadequate care and said Marquez is “falsely claiming to have lymphocytic leukemia,” a claim Ansari called “disgusting.”

“She’s obviously very sick,” Ansari said. “Even if it’s not what you think it is, or even if you don’t think it’s cancer, it’s not normal to vomit blood.” 

Eloy, which has a capacity of more than 1,500 people, has gained notoriety for being among the country’s deadliest immigration centers, per a report released by the Detention Watch Network in October 2024.

That trend only continued in 2025. Last year, across the country, 32 people died in ICE custody, making it the agency’s deadliest year in more than two decades. The majority of those deaths occurred while the detainee was in the custody of a detention center, and 72% of those detention-center-related deaths were at a private facility.

In Arizona, three people died in ICE detention last year. Two of them died while detained in Eloy: 59-year-old Oscar Duarte, of complications with Alzheimer’s, and 45-year-old Serawit Gezaghn Dejene, of complications with HIV, according to records from the Maricopa County Office of the Medical Examiner. In Florence, one person, 32-year-old Lorenzo Batrez Vargas, died during detention due to a viral lung infection, according to Pinal County Medical Examiner’s Office records. 

State Sen. Analise Ortiz, who has been a vocal opponent of Trump’s immigration enforcement in the Valley, also supports a proposal to end private detention centers as they “literally profit off people being incarcerated,” she said. “They are profiting off of you by the day. It is disgusting, and it is all about money.” 

Last year, CoreCivic received more than $591 million from the federal government, including 21 new contracts. That’s a more than 27% increase from the year prior. However, with billions more flowing into DHS and ICE this year following the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, funding for detention centers is expected to increase as the administration aims to expand capacity. (CoreCivic did not respond to New Times’ request for comment.)

“There should be no support for any further DHS funding whatsoever,” Ansari said. “We should not be voting for any bills that have funding for ICE, because ICE already has this massive slush fund that they got last year through the ‘Big Beautiful Bill.’” 

‘We can’t give up’

As the midterm elections approach, Democrats are hellbent on flipping Arizona’s House seats in hopes of controlling a narrowly divided Congress. If that happens, Democrats can talk about passing legislation. Until then, Ansari wants to lead the public argument that Trump’s immigration policy — traditionally one of his strongest political issues — is a moral and economic failure. 

“Even if we can’t pass a law, or even if we can’t impeach, we can change hearts and minds across the country through our voices,” Ansari said. “That will have a longer-term impact in upcoming elections and in the support for the administration and its policies.”

Ansari has already deployed this strategy during her first year. It’s one she hopes more Democrats will adopt. Early last year, she traveled to El Salvador’s CECOT prison with a cohort of other progressive Democrats. In violation of a court order, the Trump administration had shipped off immigrants with alleged gang ties to the infamous prison. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident with legal status who has become a fixation of the Trump administration, was among those detainees. The lawmakers wanted to speak with him but were denied.

“One of the reasons I traveled to El Salvador in April was not because I was delusional enough to think I was going to be able to get Kilmar Abrego Garcia out of CECOT,” Ansari said. “But because I wanted to draw more attention to this issue.” 

Abrego Garcia, who has been the subject of ongoing litigation, has since been returned to the U.S. and released.

Ansari plans to continue her visits to ICE detention centers in 2026 and to amplify the stories of Arizonans such as Marquez. Ansari has also implemented her strategy for non-immigration-related issues. In November, she set up a folding table with a “CHANGE MY MIND” sign outside of House Speaker Mike Johnson’s office to call for the release of the Epstein files. 

Despite being in a “really dark chapter in our country’s history,” Ansari said she’s in for the long haul. On Wednesday, Ansari announced that she’ll be seeking reelection for her seat this November.

“We can’t give up on the country,” she said. “We have to recommit ourselves even further to making things better and trying to make the world a better place.”