Leak reports exposed troubling episodes of force and the use of four-point restraint chairs at the Krome North Service Processing Center—only to have the details vanish later.
A South Florida immigrant detention facility, long alleged to have substandard conditions and abuse, led the nation in employing physical force against detainees, according to leaked incident logs. The Washington Post, in conjunction with a May 4 report, analyzed use-of-force data from staff at the Krome North Service Processing Center, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility on the western edge of Miami-Dade County, which recorded more instances of physical force against immigrant detainees than any other ICE site over a two-year span. The Post extracted the information from hundreds of internal ICE messages labeled the “Daily Detainee Assault Report,” which summarize incidents of force against detainees. The dataset encompasses 98 ICE detention facilities from January 2024 through February 2026, spanning the last year of the Biden administration and the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term.
The records show that Krome logged 176 force incidents across 26 months, making up 12 percent of the 1,460 total documented use-of-force events in the collection. Reported use of force at Krome appeared to dip from 109 incidents in the Biden administration’s final year to 62 in the initial year of Trump’s second term. Yet that decline aligns with a broader nationwide decline in incident reporting that occurred a few months after Trump assumed office. While Biden-era reports often contained brief narratives detailing the circumstances and kinds of force used, those narrative descriptions largely vanish from ICE reports in 2025, replaced by boilerplate language.
Injuries to detainees are still noted, but the precise causes are often omitted. For instance, a September 2025 entry describes a Bahamian detainee at Krome who “sustained several contusions and a lacerated lip,” yet all other details are withheld.
Katie Blankenship, an attorney with Sanctuary of the South, a nonprofit organization that provides legal aid to immigrants and is involved in multiple lawsuits challenging conditions at South Florida detention centers, is not surprised by the figures. Blankenship notes that Krome is the region’s largest ICE facility. The data also do not include county jails and other holding sites that aren’t governed by 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 stood out for its use of four-point restraint chairs, one of the most extreme restraint methods. During the Biden era, 23 incident reports at Krome referenced the use of four-point restraint chairs. The dataset includes only 38 uses of restraint chairs overall, meaning Krome accounts for 61 percent of all documented uses of restraint chairs across the two-year period. The Trump-era records do not mention restraint chairs, likely due to the shift to boilerplate language mentioned earlier. “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 recalls a Biden-era client at Krome who “suffered basically complete nerve damage from the restraints on this chair.” “It’s not typically used as restraint,” Blankenship adds. “It’s used as corporal punishment, which is forbidden in civil detention. They shouldn’t be doing that at all.”
In one 2024 incident documented in the dataset, a wheelchair-bound detainee in Krome’s medical unit was restrained 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 repeatedly drawn scrutiny from civil rights groups and news outlets. A July report by Human Rights Watch, Americans for Immigrant Justice, and Sanctuary of the South concluded 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.” That assessment echoed a string of news articles documenting overcrowding, filth, and neglect at the Krome facility.
As federal immigration detention numbers have surged amid mass deportation efforts, deaths in ICE custody have reached unprecedented levels, and accusations of abuse and neglect continue to emerge from federal detention centers. “You’re just seeing this level of apathy and cruelty that’s literally killing people,” Blankenship observes.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.
