Man held at Mesa ICE facility slept on feces-covered floor, wife says

Since 2010, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has operated a little-known short-term holding facility at Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport. But starting last year, as the Trump administration began arresting immigrants in large numbers and packing detention centers, the 25,000-square-foot facility has become a flashpoint.

Known as the Arizona Removal Operations Coordinations Center, or AROCC, the facility has no beds or showers and is meant to house roughly 150 people for just 12 hours at a time before they’re flown to detention centers in other states or deported from the country. But since President Donald Trump retook the White House in 2025 and implemented his mass deportation agenda, the facility has consistently been grossly overcrowded, with the daily population once spiking to nearly 800 people.

When Arizona lawmakers visited the facility earlier this year, the Arizona Mirror reported, the facility’s population suddenly dropped. It spiked again almost immediately afterward. When lawmakers returned unannounced for a subsequent visit, they were distressed by the conditions they encountered. The city of Mesa has told ICE that the overcrowded conditions there may violate the lease for the building.

To this point, descriptions of the AROCC facility have relied on reports from visiting lawmakers or population numbers obtained via public records request. But Phoenix New Times recently spoke to a detainee who was held there, providing a firsthand account of the inhumane conditions in which ICE is keeping people.

Marcos Gaspar Da Silva, a 32-year-old Brazilian father from Maine, was held at AROCC for 10 days — or 20 times longer than he should have been kept there if the facility were operating as it should. New Times spoke with Da Silva over the phone from Central Arizona Florence Correctional Complex, where he’s currently being held, and also spoke to his wife, Alessia Gaspar Da Silva, who is in Maine.

According to interviews with the couple, Da Silva arrived at AROCC three days after being picked up by ICE in Maine. The distance has made things particularly difficult. “It’s so far, my wife cannot help me here,” Da Silva told New Times. “I don’t know why they did that.” On top of that, Da Silva and his wife characterized the conditions at AROCC as terrible and filthy. 

Da Silva said he was kept in a crowded room with 40 men. During Da Silva’s stay at AROCC, an average of 541 people were detained in the facility each day, which is more than three times the facility’s capacity, according to an Arizona Mirror analysis of Deportation Data Project data on ICE detention records. There were no beds, which forced Da Silva to sleep on the freezing floor without a blanket. To make matters worse, his wife added, an overflowing toilet had covered the floor in fecal matter. “I could not take a shower,” he said, and he was never given a change of clothes, forcing him to wear the same clothes he was originally detained in for his entire 240-hour stay there.

His wife said that for his first 30 hours at AROCC, Da Silva wasn’t given any food. ICE finally provided bread and some fruit. But the water he was given was undrinkable and caused him “extreme, gastric pain,” his wife said, “sweating, fever and all that.” If detainees wanted clean water, they had to shell out $2 for a bottle — that’s true in ICE’s larger facility in Florence as well — while others got cups of ice and waited for them to melt.

“Some people drink that, but I don’t drink that,” Da Silva told New Times.

The facility’s overcrowding and nasty conditions took a toll on Da Silva’s body. He’s lost 20 pounds, he said, and his wife described him as “very gout-looking” with a yellow tone. She added that he has developed a fungus rash on his foot that’s spread to his hands as a result of sleeping in feces. He’s reported constant, untreated sinus and coughing issues.

ICE did not respond to a request for comment on Da Silva’s experience in detention.

Fleeing Brazil

A lawyer-turned-general contractor, Da Silva first traveled from Brazil to the U.S. in 2021 to seek asylum. He fled Brazil after a retired police officer and a local official threatened him multiple times with a gun during a dispute over the ownership of one of his clients’ properties, according to Da Silva’s immigration documents, which his wife shared with New Times. Upon entering the country, he was detained for 12 days at ICE’s Adams County Correctional Center in Mississippi, but was found to have “demonstrated a credible fear of persecution or torture” by a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officer and was released on parole as his asylum case progressed. 

“When I came to the United States, when I crossed the border, I was in jail for around another 12 days,” Da Silva told New Times. “In between this time, two people go into my cousin’s house and shot him in the face. The bullet coming through seemed like the size of his nose, and coming through his neck. But he’s not dead.” 

Da Silva then traveled to Massachusetts to be closer to his 11-year-old daughter, who was living with his ex, before settling in nearby Maine. That’s where he met his wife, a 50-year-old U.S. citizen, becoming a stepfather to her three minor children. He has also spent quality time in nature with his daughter and started his own business.

Da Silva ran afoul of ICE by missing an immigration court date. He knew only Portuguese when he entered the country, and his wife said he didn’t understand the U.S.’s complicated immigration system and failed to renew his asylum application. He didn’t realize the mistake until he was filling out post-wedding marriage paperwork at the DMV. Soon after, the couple filed an I-130 application, which allows an undocumented immigrant’s relative to petition for them to receive a green card.

That application is still making its way through the system, leaving Da Silva without permanent protections when the Trump administration took power. That made the family “nervous,” his wife said. Nearly a year to the day of the beginning of the Trump administration, ICE snatched him up.

Da Silva was on the phone with his wife of three years on a Tuesday morning in January when ICE pulled him over in his Ford F250 work truck. Both Marcos and a Guatemalan worker he’d hired for the day were detained on the side of the road in Portland, Maine. ICE transported Da Silva out of Maine almost immediately and moved him to Massachusetts, then Pennsylvania and then to Louisiana, all before he was brought to AROCC.

“I got an ‘I love you’ out, and then he was gone,” Alessia Da Silva told New Times.

The best of the worst

After 10 days at AROCC, Da Silva was transferred in early February to ICE’s Central Arizona Florence Correctional Complex. Amid that transition, his wife couldn’t locate him for 72 hours. A few days into his stay in Florence, Da Silva spoke to his lawyer for the first time since his detention began. Over a phone call from the facility, Da Silva told New Times that the conditions are better in Florence, but the effects of his stay at AROCC have lingered.

“He’s in the best of the worst,” Alessia Da Silva said.

In late January and early February, there was a measles outbreak during Da Silva’s stay at the Florence facility. Additionally, Da Silva had lingering health issues. “I was coughing every day for a month, but was only given ibuprofen, which wasn’t enough,” he said. Last month, he picked up another cold from detainees, his wife said. Prior to his detention, Da Silva didn’t get sick easily. Now, he’s coughing and under the weather all the time.

Also in early February, Da Silva developed a toothache due to an infected abscess that he said went untreated for weeks. The tooth was finally removed on April 1 after he passed out twice in the facility’s common area, his wife said. The situation mirrors that of Emmanuel Damas, a 56-year-old Haitian immigrant held in the same facility who died as a result of an untreated tooth infection in March. His wife said her husband watched Damas fall “on the floor” and “get loaded up” by staffers.

The private prison company CoreCivic, which operates the Florence facility, disputed that Da Silva or any other detainee is not receiving adequate medical care. “We are committed to providing safe, humane and respectful care for everyone entrusted to us,” wrote CoreCivic spokesperson Ryan Gustin in an emailed statement, “and we take seriously our obligation to adhere to all applicable federal detention standards, and ensure that all individuals receive appropriate and timely medical attention.”

In detention, Da Silva has been fighting removal proceedings while also pursuing his I-130 petition. His attorney has also filed a habeas corpus petition in Massachusetts seeking his release, although no ruling has been issued in that case. The couple has a two-hour interview on May 19 to prove their marriage is legitimate. Because he is more than 2,750 miles away, his wife doesn’t have the means or time to travel to Florence to advocate for him in person.