A Florida Detention Center Was the Harshest in the Country. Then ICE Stopped Tracking Details on Use of Force.

A South Florida immigrant detention center that’s been the subject of numerous allegations of poor conditions and abuse was the national leader in using physical force against detainees, according to leaked incident reports.

Use-of-force data published by The Washington Post in conjunction with a May 4 story show that staff at the Krome North Service Processing Center, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center on the western edge of Miami-Dade County, reported more uses of physical force against immigrant detainees than any other detention center over a two-year period.

The Post culled the data from hundreds of internal ICE emails, called the “Daily Detainee Assault Report,” which summarizes incidents of physical force against detainees. The reports covered 98 ICE detention facilities from January 2024 to February 2026, covering the last year of the Biden administration and the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term in office.

The data show that Krome reported 176 uses of force over 26 months, accounting for 12 percent of all 1,460 documented use-of-force incidents captured in the data. Reported use of force at Krome appeared to have decreased between the last year of the Biden administration and the first year of Trump’s second term, dropping from 109 reports to 62.

However, that drop coincides with a nationwide documentation collapse that occurred several months after Trump took office. Biden-era reports often contained short narratives of the incidents, including the circumstances and types of force used, but those narratives largely disappear from ICE reports in 2025, replaced by boilerplate language.

Detainee injuries are still reported, but not their exact cause. For example, a September 2025 report notes that a Bahamian detainee at Krome “sustained several contusions and a lacerated lip,” but all other details are omitted.

Katie Blankenship, an attorney at Sanctuary of the South, an immigrant legal aid organization that is involved in several lawsuits challenging conditions at South Florida immigration detention centers, is not surprised by the numbers.

Blankenship says Krome is the largest ICE facility in the region. The data also don’t cover county jails and other holding facilities that aren’t subject to the same reporting standards.

“Lack of transparency is the norm,” Blankenship says. “Are these numbers troubling? Absolutely, because just what they self-report is terrifying, so imagine what’s actually happening.”

Krome was also a significant outlier in its use of four-point restraint chairs, one of the most extreme methods of restraining someone.

During the Biden administration, 23 incident reports from Krome mention the use of four-point restraint chairs. There are only 38 restraint-chair uses total in the dataset, meaning that Krome accounts for 61 percent of all documented uses of restraint chairs during the two-year period. The Trump-era reports never mention restraint chairs, although that is probably due to the previously mentioned switch to boilerplate language.

“I don’t know why this is, but for some reason Krome has been using these four-point restraint chairs for years,” Blankenship says. She says she had a client at Krome during the Biden administration “who suffered basically complete nerve damage from the restraints on this chair.”

“It’s not typically used as restraint,” Blankenship says. “It’s used as corporal punishment, which is forbidden in civil detention. They shouldn’t be doing that at all.”

In one 2024 incident included in the data, a wheelchair-bound detainee in Krome’s medical unit was placed in restraints after becoming agitated: “While being transported in a wheelchair, the detainee resisted [Krome] staff, refused…instructions, became aggressive, and attempted to eject himself from the wheelchair, prompting them to use a calculated use of force to put him in a four-point restraint chair and spit mask.”

Krome has been the subject of numerous reports by civil rights groups and news outlets. A report published last July by Human Rights Watch, Americans for Immigrant Justice, and Sanctuary of the South, found that staff at Krome and two other South Florida immigrant detention centers “subjected detained individuals to dangerously substandard medical care, overcrowding, abusive treatment, and restrictions on access to legal and psychosocial support.”

The report echoed multiple news stories that similarly documented allegations of overcrowding, filth, and negligence at the Krome detention center.

As the number of people in federal immigration detention has swelled due to the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, deaths in ICE custody have reached an all-time high, and allegations of abuse and neglect continue to pour out of federal detention centers.

“You’re just seeing this level of apathy and cruelty that’s literally killing people,” Blankenship says.

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.