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Three Democratic members of Congress said they were horrified that immigrants were being stuffed into holding cells “like sardines” at a Mesa Immigration and Customs Enforcement holding facility they showed up to without warning on Thursday night.

The visit came in the wake of the Arizona Mirror’s reporting on Thursday detailing how the Arizona Removal Operations Coordination Center, located at Mesa-Gateway Airport, has been operating far over its 157-person capacity for most of this year.

The Mirror’s analysis, in fact, found that one of the few times ICE was detaining fewer people than that was when two of those same Democrats toured the facility during a scheduled oversight visit in February.

When Democratic U.S. Reps. Greg Stanton and Yassamin Ansari told ICE they would be conducting that oversight visit — ICE policy requires they give seven days’ notice before arriving — the number of detainees began to decrease to some of the lowest numbers the facility had seen all year.

Almost immediately after the inspection, those numbers began to climb again.

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The Mirror’s reporting prompted Ansari, Stanton and U.S. Rep. Adelita Grijalva to conduct a surprise oversight visit on Thursday night. When they arrived at the facility at around 9:30 p.m., they saw firsthand just how overcrowded it was — and the harm it was doing to the people being detained.

“What we saw tonight inside the facility was shocking,” Stanton told reporters outside the Mesa facility after the brief tour, calling the conditions inside “significantly overcrowded.”

He described concrete rooms with no bedding or blankets, packed with people mostly laying on the floor. When the lawmakers entered the facility, many of those individuals also scrambled to the doors of the holding cells, asking them for help.

Ansari was visibly shaken by what she........

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