At 3:25 in the morning of July 24, Milagro Solis Portillo was woken up and booked out of B-18, ICE’s basement detention facility in the downtown L.A. courthouse. She was not told where she was headed as she was put onto a commercial flight along with two immigration officer escorts. A few hours later, she was booked into the Clark County Jail in Jefferson, Ind.
Ming Tanigawa-Lau, an attorney at Immigrant Defenders Law Center representing Portillo, said her transfer was retaliatory, especially when there was open space at nearby facilities. The 36-year-old’s encounters with ICE had caused a local stir. She suffered a medical incident during her arrest outside her home in Sherman Oaks that required treatment at Glendale Memorial Hospital.
While at the hospital, she was monitored constantly by immigration officers. Local activists and representatives held events protesting her treatment. After two weeks, ICE forcibly removed her from the hospital against the advice of her medical team and sent her to B-18 and then across the country.
Portillo isn’t the only detained immigrant flown across the country. The Times analyzed ICE data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the Deportation Data Project and found that transfers between facilities in the first half of this year are happening faster and more frequently compared with the same period last year. The typical detainee is transferred at least once. From January through July, 12% of those detained have been transferred at least four times. In the first half of 2024, 6% of detainees were transferred 4 or more times.
Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network, said transfers have been used as a retaliatory tactic for those who make requests, file complaints or stage protests such as hunger strikes. Transfers move people from places where they may already have an attorney or where there are established legal-services organizations to a place that is unfamiliar and where there may be fewer resources for detained migrants.
ICE moves people from temporary holding spaces to more long-term housing as they prepare detainees for deportation. But, as a result, they could be sent far from loved ones, professional organizations, church groups and other community networks. They miss out on in-person visits from family and instead have to pay for phone or video calls. Ghandehari said she believes this isolation is deliberate.
“Conditions are bad because it’s meant to be a deterrent,” Ghandehari said. “So it’s also part of the way the system is set up. And I think transfers play into that more than people realize.”
On July 18, a 20-year-old man was deported from the Alexandria Staging Facility to Honduras. Two months prior, on May 13, he was arrested outside of Orlando and then transferred 15 times back and forth across the country between facilities in Florida, California, Arizona, Hawaii and finally Louisiana.
He had no criminal history. Public ICE data do not show whether he had an attorney or was fighting his case to remain in the country.
The journeys from one facility to another can be difficult. On Aug. 15, ICE moved Portillo from Clark County Jail to Louisiana through a flight out of Chicago. First, she spent about 12 hours in a holding room in the nearby Clay County Justice Center without access to communicate with anyone. Around 1:30 a.m. the next day, she and nine other women were put into a van headed to Chicago, five to a bench on either side.
“It was a very scary trip,” Portillo said, speaking with The Times through a translator. “We couldn’t be comfortable because our hands and feet were handcuffed. It was dangerous because it seemed like the officials driving were falling asleep. We could feel that the van would sway one way and another way at dawn.”
According to Tanigawa-Lau, it can take days after a transfer for family and legal representatives to find out that a person has been moved. The online system that is meant to show where detainees are located is not updated right away. The families of detainees typically find out where their loved one has been sent from the detained person — once they are able to place a phone call.
The abrupt relocations of her clients have led to missed appointments and court hearings, Tanigawa-Lau said. When a client is transferred, it becomes more difficult to mount a legal defense.
In the Los Angeles area, Tanigawa-Lau and her organization have knowledge of the judges and how to contact detention facilities to communicate with clients.
States such as Louisiana don’t have the same kind of immigration defense infrastructure. On the Immigration Advocates Network site, California has 205 resources listed to help migrants and their representatives find local legal services. Indiana has 16. Louisiana has 10. The Alexandria Staging Facility in Louisiana, which has deported the most immigrants this year, routinely limits access to attorneys, according to reporting by the Guardian.
Portillo recounted a comment made on the flight from California to Chicago by one of the ICE agents escorting her that it was thanks to the laws in California that she was being brought to Indiana. Indiana’s Republican Gov. Mike Braun is a strong supporter of the Trump administration’s immigration strategy.
ICE did not respond to questions about what considerations are made when transferring detainees or about why Portillo was sent to the Indiana facility.
Jason Houser, former ICE chief of staff during the Biden administration, said the goal of transfers is to optimize for removals, which typically happen from Louisiana and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.
They also have to consider facility capacity. ICE is operating under a policy to fill all beds. Additionally, with bond hearings being denied, immigrants are stuck waiting for their cases to be resolved in detention. As many facilities reach, and even exceed, their bed capacity, Houser said this means that folks that need to get to Louisiana are stuck because there aren’t open beds along the way.
“If you fill every bed, can I move somebody from Northern Virginia through Tennessee to Louisiana? No, because the Tennessee field director will tell the Virginia field director, ‘I have no empty beds.’ Your person must just continue to sit there,” Houser said.
Most detention stays for those arrested in 2025 lasted about 24 days and resulted in removal. So far, 63% of those booked into a detention facility were deported. But some are held in detention much longer. More than a quarter of those booked into a detention center this year are still in custody. About 24% were held for more than two months. Nearly 9% for more than five months.
“If there is someone in an ICE bed that isn’t a convicted criminal and has no foreseeable way to be removed within 30 days, that isn’t a criminal, they should not be in a … bed,” Houser said. “They should be out at their job being a thriving member of the community until they’re humanly able to be removed. But that’s not what this administration is about.”
In the first half of 2024, more than 45,500 immigrants were released from detention on bond, through parole or under supervision while they went through immigration proceedings. This year, 13,800 received similar treatment. The vast majority have had to wait for their cases to conclude while in detention.
Portillo still gets emotional talking about her experience in ICE detention. She had been in California for 15 years. Her family was in Los Angeles. When she was transferred to Indiana, she lost all hope of winning her case and returning to them.
Upon arrival at the jail, it was clear to her that this was not a detention center. She was being held with people who had committed crimes. For weeks, as her mental health declined, she felt like she was being tortured.
Ghandehari says that the transfers create an environment of “fear and anxiety” as a tactic to encourage people to self-deport. She says that it is an explicit strategy for this administration but it is not new. This year, however, the number of voluntary returns and departures more than doubled.
“It is about efficiency for ICE on their end, but with a total disregard for the people that they’re detaining and ripping apart from their loved ones,” Ghandehari said.
For Portillo, her treatment in detention became too much to endure.
“I decided to give up. We weren’t going to keep fighting … not because I didn’t want to stay but because of health reasons. … My mental health since being in Indiana started to suffer. When I was in L.A., it was one thing. I knew that my family was close and I had access to my attorney,” she said.
Ultimately, she decided it would be better to return to El Salvador.
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