People in ICE Custody Complain of Long Waits for Deportation

After Immigration and Customs Enforcement sent a Cuban man to a detention facility in Tacoma, Washington, from Miami, he gave up fighting his case.

The Cuban man and others still in immigration custody asked not to be identified because of retaliation concerns. 

The man said he had a lawyer in Miami, but a judge hearing his case at Northwest ICE Processing Center told him that the lawyer would have to come to Tacoma. The man and his partner didn’t have the money to pay for the attorney’s travel, so he asked to be deported. 

Months later, he is still in ICE custody with no end in sight.

“I can’t stand this anymore,” the Cuban man said in Spanish. “It’s a lot of suffering.”

He is among many who are in custody and have waited months to be deported after agreeing, often under pressure from ICE, to deportation. Capital & Main spoke with people from many countries, including India, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Mexico, in addition to Cuba, who said they had waited months in detention centers for deportation. 

ICE did not respond to a request for comment from Capital & Main.

The man and other Cubans at Northwest ICE Processing Center, a facility owned and operated by private prison company GEO Group, told Capital & Main that ICE said they would be detained indefinitely because they can’t be deported. They said both Cuba and Mexico have refused to take them.

“I don’t know what they will do with us,” the Cuban man said. “If they can’t send me to any country, and my country won’t accept me, they have to set me free.”

According to immigration attorney Ginger Jacobs, deportations often take months. 

When ICE deports people by plane, the agency either charters a flight to send a group of deportees to a specific country or region, or it sends the person with guards on a commercial flight. 

ICE chartered 207 planes to deport people in July, according to a report from Witness at the Border, which monitors both domestic and international ICE flights. About 60% of those flights went to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Cuba received one flight.

Deportation requires cooperation and negotiation between the U.S. and the receiving country. The receiving country has to confirm the citizenship of the person in question and provide travel documents. Some countries refuse to take back deportees.

In a 2001 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that detaining someone indefinitely in immigration custody is unconstitutional. As a result, people who are waiting for deportation can request to be released from custody six months after judges ordered them deported.

Some detainees at Northwest ICE Processing Center said they’re worried that, based on conversations they had with ICE officers, the agency is transferring people between facilities and restarting the six-month countdown. But since none of those detainees have yet reached the six-month mark, they were unable to verify what ICE officers had told them. 

Jacobs, the immigration attorney, said it doesn’t matter which detention center someone is in. The six-month countdown begins when someone in custody receives a deportation order if there is no pending appeal.

But to the detainees interviewed by Capital & Main, the wait feels indefinite.

“When you know that you did something wrong and you’re in jail, that’s something different, but doing time without a release date, that’s like a torture, and that’s what we’re doing here,” said a man from India who has been in custody for over two years. 

He said his case was on appeal at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, but he gave up so that he could leave to get treatment for a tumor behind his ear and because he felt he had already spent too much time away from his young children. His family plans to join him in India after his deportation.

The man said he asked a supervisor about the delay and learned that the officer who was supposed to be working on his deportation documents had been on vacation for weeks. He told Capital & Main that he was still waiting to have his picture taken and start the process for his travel documents. He said ICE told him it would take another six or seven months to deport him.

“There’s a lot of people who want to leave, but I think they want to set an example like this is how we’re going to torture you guys,” he said. 

A man from Ecuador detained at Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego asked a judge to deport him about a month ago. He’s still in custody.

“They just say have patience, have patience,” he said in Spanish. 

He said the treatment at the facility makes him feel depressed and made him decide to leave. He said the facility is overcrowded and that guards yell often at the people in custody.

Ryan Gustin, spokesperson for CoreCivic, the private prison company that owns and operates Otay Mesa Detention Center, said that detainees have access to a grievance process to express concerns about guards’ behavior. Gustin said ICE monitors the facility to ensure compliance with the agency’s detention standards.

When asked about overcrowding concerns, Gustin said everyone detained there “is offered a bed.”

Some of the men waiting to be deported believed that ICE had bungled their deportations. 

One said he’d been waiting about two and a half months for ICE to deport him to his home country of Mexico. Usually, deportations to Mexico happen quickly.

“They don’t come often, and they don’t give answers, just whatever excuse,” the man from Mexico said in Spanish about ICE officers. “Last time they told me I was lost in the system.”

Kulimba Nyembo, who gave Capital & Main permission to use his full name, said he’d already been waiting at the Tacoma facility for about six months for deportation to the Democratic Republic of the Congo when he spoke to Capital & Main in June. 

He said he had a deportation order from mid-December, and he had provided his travel documents to the deportation officer.

“Every single document that needs to be brought in has already been brought in,” he said. “Either it’s a money game situation where they’re farming me for more money on my head every month, or they know I have all my documents in order and I become less of a priority because it’s like we’ll get to you when we get to you. Now I’m spending every day here for absolutely nothing.”

Nyembo said he’d grown up in the U.S., and an assault charge landed him in prison. When he finished serving his sentence in early 2024, he rebuilt his life, he said, and didn’t get into any more trouble. But ICE arrested him in December, and Nyembo decided not to fight the case.

He said officers tried to deport him in May, but the guards who were supposed to escort him didn’t have the right visas. 

“Everything that has prolonged my stay here has nothing to do with me,” Nyembo said. “It has to do with someone not being efficient enough or proficient enough in their work.”

At the time of publication, Nyembo no longer showed up in an ICE database that tracks people in the agency’s custody.

Meanwhile, the Cuban man’s partner, who is a U.S. citizen, said she hasn’t seen him since last year, when ICE arrested him while he was waiting for her to do laundry.

She said she is struggling to pay rent, send money for him to call her and take care of their son by herself. She sold many of their belongings to try to pay for his attorney. She said she takes as much overtime work as she can get to try to make ends meet.

The partner and mother said she is exhausted.

“Sometimes I only have $1 in my account,” she said in Spanish. “I sit in my bed and cry.”

She said both she and her partner are afraid to go to Cuba because of the political and economic situation there, but that if he gets deported, she will go wherever the U.S. sends him. The most important thing, she said, is for them to be able to be together as a family.

“Why don’t they let him out already?” she said.

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