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Trapped in “El Pozo”: As Overcrowding in ICE Detention Increases, So Does Solitary Confinement

The spike in solitary confinement epitomizes the abuses of a migrant detention system that seems to be spinning out of control.

The practice of solitary confinement has soared during the Trump administration’s nationwide crackdown on illegal immigration.

This article received support from the independent nonprofit newsroom Solitary Watch.

Angel Lemus-Linares, a 32-year-old migrant from El Salvador seeking political asylum, recalls ICE officers shoving him into a filthy, cramped solitary confinement cell and beating him after another detained individual attacked him while in ICE custody. He remained for seven consecutive days in what’s known as “el pozo”—the hole—at the T. Don Hutto Detention Center, a notorious, privately run facility in Taylor, Texas.

“They beat me a lot,” Lemus-Linares said in a phone interview from inside Hutto. “They had left my ribs and sides all bruised.”

On three occasions from October 2023 to December 2025, he said, officers at the facility locked him in the solitary unit without giving a satisfactory reason other than that they don’t like him. He spent 24 hours a day isolated in the cell with virtually no access to medical care or even a bathroom until officers decided his punishment was over.

Lemus-Linares is one of thousands of individuals that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has locked in solitary confinement in its custody—a practice that has soared during the Trump administration’s nationwide crackdown on illegal immigration. More than 10,500 detained migrants were thrown in solitary confinement in the 14 months ending in May 2025, according to a recent report by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR). 

In the first four months of Trump’s second term, the monthly increase in the harsh punishment was twice the rate documented between 2018 and 2023. Trump has built on increases during the Biden administration, when it grew by 56 percent each quarter in FY 2025 compared to 2022.

The spike in solitary confinement epitomizes the abuses of a migrant detention system that seems to be spinning out of control. After 15 months, the Trump administration is already locking up a record high number of people—at one point holding over 70,000 individuals in its custody this January, 2025—in the over 160 facilities that ICE acknowledges; roughly 200 other “staging facilities” have been used by the agency, though not counted in its public figures. And the administration plans to spend billions of dollars to add more than 41,000 detention beds to its facilities by January of next year, giving ICE the capacity to hold more than 107,000 people, according to the Washington Post.

In the meantime, conditions are deteriorating, and mortality rates within ICE facilities are skyrocketing. Earlier this month, the agency reported the 18th death and the fifth suicide of an individual in its custody so far in 2026—the most on record in over 20 years and on track to be the highest in the agency’s history, according to a recent release from PHR. Denny Adan Gonzalez, the individual who took his own life, was reportedly isolated in solitary confinement while in custody.

Amidst a partial government shutdown that closed the Department of Homeland Security, ranking Judiciary Committee member Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) noted the appalling conditions and rising mortality rates within ICE facilities in a speech on the Senate floor, calling for reforms within ICE and CBP and stating that Democrats “will not fund cruelty without accountability.” Though the House has since passed legislation to reopen DHS without direct funding for ICE and parts of CBP, House and Senate Republicans are looking to enact legislation that would directly provide the agencies with over $70 billion through the end of Trump’s second term, without any reforms. Furthermore, the administration has moved to close a watchdog agency, which Trump had signed into law in 2020, citing its lack of funding in the spending bill that reopened DHS.

“Conditions inside of ICE detention have always been egregious and deplorable,” said Setareh Ghandehari, the advocacy director at Detention Watch........

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