posted June 28, 2025 09:58 PM            

http://www.sacurrent.com/news/detainees-from-ice-detention-site-near-san-antonio-keep-calling-911-37841050

posted June 28, 2025 09:58 PM            

The emergency calls, sometimes made by staff and sometimes by detainees or their visiting family members, paint a picture of dire conditions inside, immigrant advocates argue. The subject matter of the calls ranged from suicide attempts and allegations of sexual abuse to health issues faced by pregnant inmates, according to Wired's reporting.

"Conditions at the South Texas ICE Processing Center ('Pearsall') are broadly punitive, as they have been throughout its two-decade history under the management of private prison company GEO Group," immigrant rights advocacy group RAICES told the Current in an emailed statement.

"Near-capacity detention rates in recent weeks have only threatened to exacerbate long-held concerns and compound violations of the federal government’s own standards," RAICES continued. "Medical care is inadequate, disorganized and indifferent to urgency. Food is limited, heavily rationed and often expired. And inattentive guards enable systemic obstacles to qualified legal counsel for people in detention, which have only worsened under this administration based upon RAICES’ observations."

The South Texas ICE Processing Center, located less than an hour's drive from the Alamo City at 566 Veterans Drive in Pearsall, is operated by private prison giant GEO Group. The facility is one of the nation's largest such detention sites and has a capacity of 1,900 inmates, comprised of both men and women.

The Current reached out to the South Texas ICE Processing Center in Pearsall for a response to the claims of abuse but received no response by press time.

Wired reports that from January through May, more than 80 emergency calls originated from the facility, including several regarding suicide attempts. One 36-year-old man reportedly swallowed 20 over-the-counter pills, while another detainee, 37, ingested cleaning chemicals and a third, 41, was found cutting himself.

Other calls involved pregnant women bleeding or suffering severe pain, according to the magazine's data dive. ICE detention is linked to heightened rates of pregnancy complications — both for the child and mother — according to research by the peer-reviewed JAMA Network of medical publications.

While official ICE policy generally discourages detaining pregnant individuals, ICE booked 158 pregnant, postpartum and nursing people over a six-month period ending early last spring, according to federal data.

Jonathan Ryan, a San Antonio immigration attorney and former CEO of RAICES, told the Current that the 9-1-1 calls emanating from the Pearsall Center are a tactic by GEO Group to avoid cutting into profit margins by administering in-house medical treatment.

"You always have to remember that these are for-profit detention facilities," Ryan said. "These are corporations that are profit-based, and medical care is expensive. And so even if they have the facilities to provide medical care, if they are able to offload those services to the local community, they're going to do that because that's more money in their pockets."

Ryan continued: "You do everything you can to avoid spending money on the people who are detained there. And that's a race to the bottom in terms of safety and sanity and health for anybody who is unfortunate enough to be stuck inside of those facilities."

The JAMA Network's report showed a high rate of preventable deaths at ICE detention facilities nationwide due to inadequate medical care. Most deaths were people under 43 with no co-morbidities, and one-half of the deaths were due to preventable causes, such as COVID-19 and suicide.

"Systematic substandard care has been identified as a factor associated with these deaths, including lack of recognition of severe illness, medical staff dismissal of concerns about individuals’ health, and delays in activating external emergency care," the report states.

Ryan, who's dealt with cases at the Pearsall facility since it opened in 2005, said he's frequently heard of its on-site medical facility prescribing water for a slew of health problems.

"But you also see in some instances over-medication, and that particularly is in terms of things like psychotropic medicine," Ryan said. "And I've on many occasions seen my clients zombified in those facilities because they're being pumped up with psychotropic medicines that the facility uses in order to practically render catatonic anyone who doesn't follow their orders and doesn't comply with their regimen of rules in the facilities."

The number of 9-1-1 calls originating from the South Texas ICE Processing Center tripled in March, according to Wired. However, the magazine noted that a number of factors could have contributed to the jump, including worsening conditions, increased willingness to dial 9-1-1 or a surge in population. In one week, dispatchers fielded 11 separate calls from the facility.

In one such call, a woman complained that her husband detained inside had been too weak to get out of bed all day and "they have not helped," Wired reports. Another dispatch from the facility in March was due to a report of sexual abuse identified as "staff on detainee," according to the story.

In addition to 9-1-1 calls made from the facility, detainees' family members have taken to leaving negative Google reviews in apparent hope their cries for help reach the world at large.

"The detention is really bad, [nobody] hear[s] us, [today] all the inmate[s] stop[ped] eating food," Respina Saze wrote a week ago in a review of the Pearsall site. “Detainees have launched a hunger strike demanding justice and urgent review of their cases. [T]here is no [human] right[s]! And [nobody] answer[s.] [W]e are worry about our [family] member."

"This place does not know what it’s doing," said another one-star review, left a month ago by Tami Dube. "[Y]ou call[,] ask questions and you get transferred to phone numbers that don’t even exist. People get sick or hurt and they’re not medically attended to. You try to bond them out and people have to wait 6+ hours just to be turned away 2 hours before closing."

As of this week, ICE is holding a record 59,000 detainees throughout the country as part of President Donald Trump's aggressive immigration crackdown, according to CBS News. Historical data gathered by the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the criminal justice system, indicates that it's the largest population of immigrant detainees in the nation's history.