ICE water isn’t clean, woman held at Southern Arizona detention center says

An Iranian doctor detained at the Eloy Detention Center for the past month said access to clean water is nearly impossible because the tap water at the facility “smells bad,” and an ice machine in her facility has been broken for weeks.

Shohreh Ghasemi, 42, spoke to the Tucson Sentinel by phone last week, and said the women detained with her do not have clean water.

“The tap water, it’s not very clean,” she said. She added the water smells and leaves stains, and the water has “worms.”

The Eloy facility is operated by private prison company CoreCivic, under contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

U.S. Rep. Adelita Grijalva said Friday that the treatment of ICE detainees is a “moral failure.”

A cosmetic surgeon based in Atlanta, Ghasemi found herself being detained in Arizona after she allegedly crossed illegally into the U.S. from Canada. Ghasemi, from Iran and a U.S. resident for years, was denied re-entry by American officials at an airport in Toronto over the summer.

Ghasemi added that facility about 53 miles northwest of Tucson is “super hot.” She said the ice machine in her areas has been broken for the last three weeks, and instead, officials with the detention center bring in small cups of ice around 8 p.m.— though they often run out of ice before all the woman can get some.

She added that the women can buy water bottles from the commissary, but the small 6oz bottles—the size of a baseball, she said—each cost $2.

“Water is a mandate at any detention center,” she said, adding it takes several days for someone to bring the bottles. “Some of the people don’t have financial support to buy these, much less 7 to 8 bottles per day.”

“Unfortunately, no one cares,” Ghasemi said.

Dr. Jeffrey Rosenthal, a plastic surgeon based in Connecticut, who advocated for Ghasemi’s release while she was in Vermont, said Ghasmi told him when the women in Ghasemi’s pod are forced to drink the tap water, they make sure to microwave it, because otherwise “it makes them sick.”

A spokesman for CoreCivic said the claims are “inaccurate and do not reflect current facility conditions.”

“Individuals in our care always have access to drinking water,” he told the Sentinel by email on Friday.

ICE officials did not respond to request for comment from the Sentinel.

‘This is a moral failure’

Ghasemi’s complaints were echoed by Grijalva, who said ICE detainees at Eloy are facing “deteriorating conditions” including a lack of proper drinking water and broken air conditioning. In a speech on the House floor,, she said her office has “received multiple reports” from family members and attorneys that detainees are “being denied access to proper drinking water. Instead, they are being given one cup of ‘ice chips’ per day.”

This includes a woman diagnosed with leukemia, she said, who told her wife detainees are “only being given ice chips for water, which they have to wait until they melt.”

She added two housing blocks are “also without air conditioning.”

“This is an outrage,” she said.

Grijalva has been stridently critical of how Immigration and Customs Enforcement manages its detention facilities, and has repeatedly used her office to inspect facilities in Arizona—as well as facility in Texas where families with children are held.

In February, she visited the Eloy facility and had what she called a heartbreaking” visit with a 79-year-old grandmother who remained in detention for nine months despite increasing concerns from family members that she suffers from dementia. That woman was later released after Grijalva’s urging.

“At least 57 people have already died in ICE custody this year – 4 of them in Arizona. This number is likely higher. How many more human beings need to die before we do something?” Grijalva said.

Advocates warned that should this pace continue, 2026 will be the deadliest year for immigration detainees on record.

“This is a moral failure,” Grijalva said. “I’m calling on DHS to immediately address these conditions and ensure that all detainees have access to safe drinking water, edible food, and humane living conditions.”

The Eloy facility was built in 1994 and can hold more than 1,550 people. While it was built to hold people in criminal custody, it has evolved what the Detention Watch Network called the “deadliest immigration detention center in the U.S.”

In July, a group of 120 detainees at the facility in Eloy wrote an open letter criticizing the facility, including a range of “human rights abuses,” the Arizona Republic reported. The detainees said they experienced verbal and physical abuse by guards, and when they complained about poor conditions they were sent to solitary confinement, or “The Hole.”

“The human rights situation at the Eloy Detention Center is appalling and utterly deplorable, with high levels of discrimination by the CoreCivic employees responsible for custody at the center,” the detainees wrote, adding “many of the CoreCivic employees are unfit for their jobs because, having a degree of authority over us, they abuse the power through malpractice and policies that harm the detainees.”

Threatened with execution by Iranian police for supporting protesters

The Iranian-born Ghasemi landed in the U.S. immigration detention system after she flew from her home in Atlanta, where she has lived since 2019, to speak at the launch of a biotech company in Toronto.

While Ghasemi was granted to ability to travel, including to Iran, by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in 2023, in February 2025, officials rejected her work visa, claiming she had used a false birthdate.

She challenged this finding and stayed in the U.S. for the next year, but on May 27, U.S. immigration officials at the Toronto airport did not allow her through security.

Ghasemi later tried to cross into the U.S. twice more, first at the border crossing at Niagara Falls and again at a border crossing in Michigan. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers decided she was inadmissible and issued an expedited removal order and banned her from reentering the U.S. for five years.

On June 26, Ghasemi crossed into the U.S. in Vermont and was arrested with an Iranian man. A Border Patrol agent said they were wet and muddy, and were waiting for someone to pick them up after they allegedly crossed into the U.S. on foot, according to court records.

Ghasemi told the Tucson Sentinel she had crossed the border illegally, and she spent nearly 25 days in custody before she agreed to plead guilty to illegal entry.

Ghasemi said she told CBP officials she feared going back to Iran where she was arrested and held in the notorious Evin prison, known for the systematic torture of political prisoners.

Ghasemi told the Sentinel she tried to help during a series of protests in 2022 when Iranian police shot nearly 600 activists with rubber bullets, intentionally blinding them. She said dozens of people lost their eyes, and she later handed then-President Joe Biden a letter.

For this, the Iranian government decided to punish her, kidnapping her when she returned to Tehran after the death of her sister.

She told the Sentinel she was repeatedly blinded and officials threatened to execute her, accusing her of spying for the U.S. She said she tried to kill herself while in solitary there, and she remained anxious and paralyzed.

“Evin is the last point, it’s the last stage for people,” she said.

Iranian officials released her on probation.

She said when CBP officials held her Michigan, her post-traumatic stress from this experience returned, and she said she signed the expedited removal document after she spent 10 hours in a holding area, staying in holding from 12:30-10:30 p.m.

She said she told them she had PTSD and was claustrophobic “but, they didn’t care about that.”

“They forced me,” she said, adding agents told her “‘if you don’t sign this, you will stay in this room.'”

“I was paralyzed, and they didn’t care about what I was talking about. I was terrified,” Ghasemi said.

While she was in Vermont, an attorney filed a habeas corpus petition, asking a federal judge to order ICE to release her while her immigration case continued.

However, on August 6, that request was rejected and she was later transferred to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, and then the Florence Service Processing Center in Arizona where she slept on the floor along with dozens of other women.

Food is ‘awful’

Ghasemi also criticized the food and what she called “prolonged lockdowns” at the facility.

“The food is awful,” she said, adding that one woman from India is on a vegetarian diet, and she was serve moldy bread. She said officials told the woman to “remove the mold and you can eat the rest of the bread.”

“We don’t even have vegetables,” Ghasemi said, adding that milk for coffee is powdered milk.

She compared the Eloy Detention Center to a facility when she was held in Vermont where the food was cooked by chefs and those held there received milk.

“The food really tasted of food there,” she said. “The food here does not taste like food at all.”

Ghasemi said there was about 49 women in her part of the facility, or pod, including other women from Iran, four people from Indian and six people from China—including a women who worked as assistant professor at an Arizona university. There are also three Russians held at the facility.

She said the Iranian women have been at the facility for 18 months, or more, a consequence of the Trump administration’s drive to make detention mandatory for nearly everyone. Further, the Laken Riley Act increased mandatory detention by allowing the administration to hold people “not only convicted of but charged with or arrested for crimes such as shoplifting to detention without a bond hearing.”

“This latest statutory expansion is the culmination of decades of expanding immigrant detention,” according to the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Ghasemi said the food was making some people diabetic, while others faced higher blood pressure, hair loss, and problems with their gums and teeth. She said one woman had been in the facility for nearly 19 months along with her husband and lost 30 pounds because of a lack of good food and stress.

Ghasemi also criticized medical care at the facility, telling the Sentinel she helped treat a woman who had a tooth extracted. The woman was left with an abscess, which Ghasemi helped treat by draining it. She said the wound “smelled,” but officials at the detention center did not give her antibiotics, but instead just mouthwash.

In March, Emmanuel Cleeford Damas, 56, died at a Scottsdale hospital weeks after he complained of a toothache while in custody at the nearby Florence Correctional Center. A preliminary report from the Maricopa County Medical Examiner said Damas died from “complications of necrotizing mediastinitis with neck and retropharyngeal abscess in the setting of severe dental caries and periodontal disease.”

Necrotizing mediastinitis is a rare, life-threatening complication caused by an abscess in the deep issues behind the back of the throat.

In June, ICE decided to stop reporting deaths of people who die within 30 days of their release, a move immigration advocates and health professionals warned will make it harder to understand rising problems with health care inside the immigration detention system and it comes after federal watchdogs were effectively dismantled. Authorities could release someone about to die from a critical illness or injury, and that would not be counted as a detention-related death in the agency’s statistics.

Ghasemi said another woman suffered seizures, and officers refused to help and instead tried to lockdown their area. She said she, and a woman from China, treated her for low blood pressure.

The complaints about the facility come as detainees are spending more time there—some over a year—because the Trump administration has sought to deport them to countries they had never lived. More than half were detained more than six months, passing a measure the Supreme Court said could violate the constitution, according to an analysis by the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting.

Earlier this year, the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project said they are seeing an “alarming increase” in the number of people in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody facing “potentially life-threatening medical neglect.”

The nonprofit group offers legal and social services, and advocates for the civil rights of immigrants being held in Arizona, including those at the Central Arizona Florence Correctional Center, the Florence Service Processing Center, and the Eloy Detention Center.

This includes people who have “severe medical issues or chronic illnesses,” and they group attributed this to ICE’s move to “detain everyone, regardless of their medical history, regardless of whether they can obtain the medical care they need in ICE custody, and regardless of how unsafe detention conditions would be for them.”

Ryan Gustin, a spokesman for CoreCivic, said the allegations regarding drinking water and air conditioning are “inaccurate and do not reflect current facility conditions.”

“Individuals in our care always have access to drinking water,” he said.

He said the “safety, health and well-being of the individuals entrusted to our care, and our nearly 350 staff members, is our top priority.”

“We take seriously our obligation to comply with all applicable federal detention standards and to maintain a safe, secure and humane environment for those in our care at the Eloy Detention Center,” Gustin said. “Facility operations are subject to significant oversight and accountability, including regular audits, inspections and monitoring by our government partners.”

“We are not aware of any ongoing air-conditioning outage affecting housing units, and facility leadership has confirmed that the HVAC system is operating properly,” Gustin said. “We have no recent record of maintenance issues affecting housing unit temperatures.”

He said the facility has “established maintenance protocols and contingency measures in place” in case a system fails.

Gustin said the company provides “three nutritious meals daily, with menus reviewed and approved by a registered dietitian. Accommodations are made for religious, therapeutic and cultural dietary needs.”

“We have a robust grievance process that provides multiple avenues for individuals in our care to raise concerns, and we investigate issues brought to our attention,” Gustin said. “At this time, we are not aware of grievances substantiating the allegations outlined in your inquiry.”