When the South American man lay down in his bunk at night, he dreamed up ways to kill himself.
During his time locked up at the Aurora immigration detention facility, he said he witnessed violence and abuse, grew weak from hunger and was, eventually, brutally beaten by guards while handcuffed and suffering a panic attack.
The man, who spoke to The Denver Post on the condition of anonymity because he fears retaliation by the U.S. government, shared photos taken by his attorney from the encounter, after he’d been released from detention. The photos captured his swollen head, wrists, neck and arms covered in deep purple bruises.
Since his release, the man has endured nightmares, crippling anxiety and so much fear that he barely leaves his home. As he recounted his months in detention, he was reduced to shoulder-heaving sobs.
“I might be a big, tall man, but I am embarrassed to tell you that I am fragile now,” he said through tears and a Spanish interpreter. His attorney was also present. “They treat you as if you have no value. They treat you like trash, like you’re not a person. If I knew that being an immigrant in a first-world country that this was going to happen, I would have never came. Have mercy because there is no mercy here.”
Set between train tracks, highways and nondescript warehouses, privately run Aurora facility has long been criticized for its conditions. Three detainees died there between 2012 and 2022. , its operator, has been the subject of lawsuits, regular oversight visits from members of Congress, and reports and protests by advocacy groups and the .
Since President Donald Trump returned to office, the facility has ballooned to its highest possible capacity of 1,532 beds and has filled as many as 94% of them at a time, largely with people who have no criminal records. Reports about its poor conditions have increased, too: In interviews with The Post, current and former detainees described frequent fights and feelings of hopelessness. They say they’re often served inedible or rotten food that frequently gives them diarrhea. They speak of enduring summers without air conditioning and taking boiling-hot showers behind tattered and dirty curtains. Living quarters resound with sneezes and coughs, they say, either from the dust spewed from unreliable air conditioning or from the illnesses spread among the more than 12,000 detainees who have been booked into the facility since January 2025.
As the center’s population has increased, so have emergency calls and detainee trips to a nearby hospital, The Post found. Simultaneously, the oversight bodies charged with responding to complaints within the facility and others like it nationwide have largely been dismantled under the Trump administration, attorneys said.
The government has ended free legal training for detainees in the facility, sought to block congressional visits and enacted policies that have made it harder for attorneys to keep track of and speak with their clients. This year alone, two local health investigations, including one for tuberculosis, have been frustrated by the facility’s closed doors, and Geo amended its contract this month as it fought local oversight.
For many, the facility is a brief stopping point, a revolving door before they’re moved to another facility or readied for a flight out of the country.
Attorneys and advocates argued that the detention center’s conditions are intended to encourage people to stop fighting and accept that flight. Record numbers of detainees in the facility have done so, federal data shows.
“Their calculation is they need to survive,” immigration attorney Claire Noone said. “They have to get out to support their family. I am for the first time seeing more and more people look at their potential reality and look at the conditions of care they’re receiving and decide to take voluntary departure.”
But for others, it is a months-long limbo, where they fight their cases and ICE searches for ways to remove them.
To report this story, The Post spoke with eight current and former detainees and more than a dozen advocates, attorneys and experts. Five of them spoke on condition of anonymity or that only their first names be used out of fear of retaliation from the federal government. Some of the detainees had prior, low-level criminal records for driving under the influence or prior immigration violations. Two were arrested from county jails. The Post also confirmed details of their arrests and any prior criminal history using publicly released ICE data.
The Post reviewed 911 records, emergency reports and audio recordings from nearly two dozen ambulance and police calls to the detention center. The Post also used data from the in California, the at Syracuse University and from .
Nearly every detainee with whom The Post spoke had spent more than six months in the facility. Some had been there for more than a year. Two transgender women were told this month that they could either go to solitary confinement or accept regular housing with men, said AnnaRose Craig, an advocate with the .
Several detainees said they didn’t understand what they’d done to deserve being kept there.
“If I stole something, if I – I don’t know – beat someone, killed someone, if I did something, and then based on that action, I’m in prison – I know why I’m here,” said Hossein Batooie, an Iranian with legal protections who was released in April after 10 months. “What bothered me the most was, I never knew why they got me. Why? Why had I been arrested?”
Detainees describe spending their days playing cards, watching TV and trying to avoid fights or the ire of guards, whose behavior ranges from detached to aggressive. They wait for medical appointments and use tablets to talk with family members. A text message costs 35 cents. A day’s labor in a voluntary work program pays $1.
They mount protests for better food and medical care. Their mail is searched and scanned. They buy chips from the commissary to add texture to flavorless beans and twist Ramen packages into miniature shoes they hang from keychains or send to their families. They work on their legal cases and wait for the court hearings that will decide their future.
“They treat you as if we’re animals, basically,” said Daniel, a 32-year-old Venezuelan who’s been in the facility for more than a year and who spoke through an interpreter. “They basically treat you as if you’re an immigrant, you’re an illegal. They treat you with racism. They look at you as, ‘You’re an immigrant, I can treat you however I want.’ ”
Geo Group did not respond to an interview request. The company expects to earn roughly $3 billion in revenues this year, buoyed by the Trump administration’s efforts to arrest and deport millions of immigrants without legal status. It has operated the Aurora facility for nearly 40 years. It was the company’s first-ever detention contract.
In a July statement to the New York Times about , Geo spokesman Christopher Ferreira said that “in the event issues are identified, deficiencies are promptly addressed through established corrective action processes” required by ICE.
Spokespeople for the , which includes ICE, declined an interview request. In response to a written summary of The Postap findings, an unnamed representative for the agency broadly denied descriptions of unsafe conditions.
“All ICE detention facilities operate in strict accordance with all applicable federal detention standards for safety, sanitation and humane treatment in accordance with national detention standards,” the agency wrote. “ICE is committed to transparency and accountability and regularly conducts inspections to ensure the well-being of individuals in its care. In fact, ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens.”
Life in detention
In August, Daniel thought about his own death.
For two consecutive nights early in the month, a noxious, gas-like odor filled the cell he shared with other detainees. The smell was so strong, and he was so convinced it was a gas leak, that he thought if a match were lit, the whole room would explode.
They’d banged on their cell door, but guards told them it was nothing. The fire department came and said there was no gas leak. But Daniel remembered hearing about the six people who’d died at a dairy farm after being exposed to gas last year.
He barely slept, and later called his wife and warned her that something might happen to him. They’d come to the U.S. together from Colombia, where they’d run a restaurant after moving there.
“I’m afraid,” Daniel remembered telling her. “And I want you to know, in case I do die, this is why I died.”
Daniel and two other men who also smelled the odor this summer haven’t detected it since. Like tuberculosis quarantines, medical treatment and nearly everything else in the facility, the odor became the latest in a series of incidents over which detainees had no control and little information.
“The conditions inside the facility are not good right now,” said Monique Sherman, detention program managing attorney at the . “We are seeing people who are sick, people not able to access medical care, and people who are being assaulted, and most of our clients don’t feel comfortable talking to us about something if somebody who works at the facility is listening.”
Showers blast water so hot that two people told The Post it felt like it would burn the hair off of their head. Bathrooms were dirty and appeared moldy. Shower curtains were so torn that one man said detainees would rip their own sheets to repair them for an inkling of privacy.
The air conditioning didn’t work for weeks over the summer, several people said, just as it hadn’t the summer before. One man, a young Guatemalan, said he would regularly sleep on the floor in his underwear because the ground was cooler.
It felt like “boiling in a pot,” he said.
He worked in the kitchen for access to better food. Food is a constant issue: Beans are the most consistent staple of detainees’ diets, watery and flavorless. Fresh fruits and vegetables are vanishingly rare; lettuce, frequently past due, is more common.
Food was often undercooked, the Guatemalan said. Stomach issues and diarrhea are common, even for people who’ve been in the facility for months. Batooie, 61, said they once received sliced apples, but they were moldy.
In its statement, the Homeland Security Department said meals are provided by dietitians. The agency said the facility has functioning air conditioning and never reached dangerous temperatures, and that fans and ice water were given to people detained there. It said ICE is regularly audited and that detainees are given proper meals, quality water, medical treatment and opportunities to communicate with families and attorneys.
Sometimes, there would be arguments and fights over the food, said Gabriel, a Mexican man arrested at a Denver-area Home Depot who was released this year. He’s been in the U.S. for more than 30 years, he said.
One , and the has taken “numerous” reports about fights at the facility in the past 18 months, a spokesman said. 911 calls reviewed by The Post described two sexual assault reports this year, one on behalf of a transgender detainee. Four April calls reported apparent overdoses, three of them believed to be intentional.
The Guatemalan kitchen worker, who is gay, said he was threatened with physical or sexual assault by other detainees and that he was bullied, including by staff. Gabriel and Batooie both said new arrivals would be greeted with jeers of “Vaseline” from other detainees, which Batooie took as a threat of sexual assault.
Fights broke out over the TV and the tablets that serve as detainees’ primary lifeline to their families and to the outside world.
“Everyone wants to speak with their family, everyone wants to speak with their kids, so that causes situations amongst the detainees,” said Ronald Aguirre, who has been in the Aurora detention center for more than a year.
He and others said guards didn’t try to defuse tensions before fights broke out; some speculated that guards wanted the tension. Detainees then “handle (arguments) among ourselves,” Aguirre said through an interpreter.
To break up those fights or protests mounted by detainees, Geo guards used pepper spray or brandished a gun that fired rubber or plastic bullets, Daniel and others said. They sprayed detainees full in the face, said Rony Chavez Martinez, who’s been in the U.S. since he was 10. He was arrested in Maryland last summer after getting into a fight with a coworker. He was transferred to ICE custody and has been detained in Aurora for more than a year.
Gabriel remembered watching from a window as men in another pod, who’d protested the food, were carried bloodied and handcuffed to solitary confinement after an altercation with a female guard. Aguirre said he’d seen guards use pepper spray “plenty of times.”
Rooms are searched and detainees’ few belongings are scattered or trashed, they said. Sleep was difficult in an “environment that never shuts off,” Batooie said. Group punishments are common. So, too, is the use of solitary confinement.
Batooie said he was called an anti-Arab slur by a guard and saw a guard verbally abuse a Muslim detainee, blaming him for conflict in the Middle East. The South American man who left detention with bruises recalled guards comparing stats on how many immigrants they had caught and how long it took to bring them down.
“We understand that we’re detained,” Daniel said. “If you demand respect, give respect. They ask for it, but they don’t give it. And we understand that — they don’t respect you.”
Medical delays
Protests were common — several men called them “strikes,” which mostly came in the form of refusing to participate in Geo’s regular head counts. Sometimes they’d refuse to eat or send the food back. In May, after one detainee was stabbed and the facility was put on lockdown, 51 detainees signed a letter criticizing the conditions and likening them to torture.
Daniel said they had protested last year to get more electronic tablets so they could talk to their families and curb the fights. Sometimes, guards took away people they perceived to be leaders.
Often, detainees banged on their doors and walls to get the guards’ attention for others who were sick and hadn’t received help. Several men complained about the lack of medical attention, a common issue raised by attorneys and advocates for years.
Gabriel said he had lost all of his molars because of the dental care, and that he had a friend who developed fungus on his feet. The man didn’t receive treatment until “the meat was falling off of his foot.”
In its statement, the Homeland Security Department said detainees were not denied medical care.
The facility has a history of disease outbreaks, including and chickenpox. The Adams County Health Department confirmed a case of tuberculosis in the detention facility in June; the agency’s attempt to investigate the infection has since escalated into an ongoing fight between public health officials and the facility over outside inspectors’ ability to access the detention center and its occupants.
Detainees said a housing unit was placed on quarantine this month after they were told they were exposed to the disease. said one of her clients was vaccinated against tuberculosis without his permission.
Lucie Donovan fought for her husband’s release from the Aurora ICE facility for more than a year, an effort chronicled in a Post story this year. But tuberculosis made them give up the fight, she said.
Her husband, Juan, was arrested by ICE on Feb. 5, 2025, during Denver’s most high-profile immigration raid since Trump returned to office. He had overstayed a work visa and had no criminal history. His immigration attorney, Anya Lear, said that was a common issue that would not have warranted detention under a different federal administration.
Juan endured rotten food and deteriorating health and inadequate medical care within the Aurora facility, he said in an interview with his wife. He said he was sent to solitary confinement after a detainee stabbed him.
Once Juan told Donovan someone in his housing unit had tuberculosis, she said that was their final straw.
“This is not the Oregon Trail. Why are we dealing with tuberculosis? What the hell?” Donovan said. “It started to feel like life or death.”
Juan put in for voluntary departure and was transferred to a detention center in Louisiana before being released to his home country of Mexico this month. Donovan plans to meet him there and start a new life.
“I am so overwhelmed by how gross the conditions are and how horrifyingly unregulated everything is,” Donovan said. “They can literally do whatever they want and nobody is checking, and it seems like nobody cares.”
All three of the deaths in the facility — in 2012, 2017 and 2022 — came after apparent lapses in medical care. One man died from opioid withdrawal after the facility cut off his prescribed medication. Another died of a heart attack after medical staff didn’t call an ambulance for an hour and a nurse was unfamiliar with the equipment needed to treat him, . The third died of a blood clot after repeatedly complaining of pain in his leg.
Batooie has clogged arteries and takes blood thinners. An Iranian who came to the U.S. more than 20 years ago, he was arrested in June 2025 as he left his home in the Denver area for soccer practice. It was the . Hundreds of Iranians were arrested nationwide, and as he waited to be processed, Batooie sat with eight or nine other Iranian immigrants.
He went without his medication periodically. At one point, he woke up with chest pain and called for help. None came, and other detainees began to bang on the doors, he said.
A guard peered through the cell window and left, Batooie said. He lay on the floor in pain until another guard came and he was later taken to the medical unit.
After his chest pain incident, the guard who ignored him was counseled, a supervisor wrote to Batooie in a grievance reviewed by The Post.
Aurora’s emergency medical services were called to the facility’s main address 168 times during the first 18 months of the second Trump administration, nearly 50 more calls than during the final 18 months of the Biden administration, call records show.
911 calls describe seizures, mental health crises and head injuries. A nurse told one dispatcher that a man who was hearing voices jumped from a toilet and hit his head.
Between October 2025 and the end of August, there were 188 hospital admissions, clinic appointments and emergency visits to UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital from the facility, said hospital spokesman Dan Weaver.
‘It damages us’
Attorneys and advocates argued that conditions in the facility were not accidental. Geo is one of the nation’s largest and most profitable private prison companies, and problems within its Aurora facility are well known.
“We’re detaining people at an extraordinary cost in large part because we are using detention as a way of brutalizing people in order to get them to self-deport,” said Chapin, the attorney and CU law professor. “The system wants people to give up and leave, and itap been fairly effective, except we still have thousands and thousands of people in detention.”
Donovan’s husband Juan is one of nearly 4,000 Aurora detainees who’ve agreed to voluntarily depart the facility since Trump’s return to office, according to the Syracuse-based clearinghouse. There were 520 voluntary departures in July alone, the most in a single month in the 29 years of the clearinghouse’s data.
Aguirre, who came to the U.S. from El Salvador after he was bullied for studying to become a nurse, said one guard harangued detainees for fighting their cases.
“When he comes to our dorm, he’ll say things like, ‘Why are you fighting your case? You guys are animals, you guys need to leave this country,’ ” he said.
Unlike criminal cases, people in immigration court do not have the right to an attorney, meaning most are forced to navigate the complicated legal system alone.
Even if immigrants manage to secure representation, their attorneys’ ability to see clients inside the Aurora detention facility has grown considerably worse in the past few months, Sherman said.
On the south side of the facility where immigrant women are held, Sherman said, the facility either doesn’t have enough rooms or enough guards to monitor those rooms, meaning only one attorney can visit their client at a time.
“It might take someone four hours to meet with a client, even to have a 10-minute conversation, so if you think about all the work that person could be doing during that time, that just means we can’t help as many clients because we were spending so much time waiting and spinning our wheels,” Sherman said.
Noone, the immigration attorney, once worked in the Office of the Prosecutor at the . The holding facility used for alleged war criminals had yoga classes, pristine cells and an on-call medical service, drawing a contrast to the conditions at the civil detention center half a world away in Aurora.
She said she sees people with solid, winnable cases now considering voluntary departures as a means of survival.
“They’re just reading the temperature of the room and saying it doesn’t matter if their case is strong. If they’re there one more day, they may not make it,” Noone said. “Creating conditions under which survival is questionable, people are going to be more likely to self-deport. And that calculation is wild.”
In its unsigned statement, the Homeland Security Department said that “being in detention is a choice,” and it encouraged immigrants without legal status to self-deport.
Daniel does not want to return to Venezuela, where he believes he’ll be treated as a “traitor to the nation.” He was determined to fight his case and was grateful he still had the strength to do so.
But fighting is difficult. Before he was detained, in rare moments of downtime between working construction and cutting hair, he and his family went to the park, watched movies at a local theater in Aurora and visited the “beautiful scenery” of Red Rocks Amphitheatre. But when he goes to sleep now, he’s reminded that he’s not with his wife. He eats less. Talking to his family can be hard, their voices a reminder of the distance between them.
“It damages us,” he said of the effects of detention. “Not only psychologically, but our kids, our little ones.”
Aguirre said he’s cut off from this family and doesn’t know whatap happening to his son, his mother, his father and his brothers. He didn’t know how he would overcome what he’d experienced in detention.
“I don’t feel like I’m some type of criminal; I’m not a bad person. Even though I may have all these tattoos, I have a good heart,” he said. “And being locked up, wasting my time instead of helping my family or being with my son and teaching him a good example in life, itap very hard for me.
“I wish I could speak to my kid,” Aguirre continued, “and say, ‘Hey son, I love you. One day we’ll be together, and this situation is going to end.’ ”
