I FELT LIKE

'I FELT LIKE I WAS NOTHING'

ICE uses solitary confinement as a 'quick fix' for vulnerable, suicidal detainees

EMILY BREGEL| Arizona Daily Star AND EMILY HAMER | Lee Enterprises Public Service Journalism Team

When she arrived at Eloy Detention Center in Arizona last year, asylum seeker Narges Dehghani said she was at her most vulnerable.

The Iranian dissident hadn't yet told anyone about being sexually assaulted by government agents, during the days-long violent interrogation she'd endured in her home country. She was still reeling from the extortion and physical stress on her long journey to the U.S.-Mexico border.

'I was emotionally, mentally and physically wrecked,' said Dehghani, 32, on a video call with the Arizona Daily Star from Eloy. 'The only thing on my mind was killing myself. I was just thinking that my life is over, so I should be over.'

When a psychologist at Eloy asked about her mental state during her intake assessment, Dehghani let herself be honest: She admitted she'd thought about hurting herself.

Before long, two guards appeared and handcuffed Dehghani, who has no criminal record. She was led to another building, uncuffed, and left alone in a cold room the size of a parking space, containing nothing but a toilet and a plastic box to sleep in.

For those three days isolated on 'suicide watch,' Dehghani existed in a state of delirious pain, both psychological and physical, as she also had excruciating cramps from untreated ulcerative colitis, she said.

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ILLUSTRATION BY KRISHNA MATHIAS, LEE ENTERPRISES

'It's not like a treatment; it's a punishment,' she said on the call from Eloy, where she's now been detained for 14 months as she fights for asylum protection.

Dehghani still hasn't recovered from the stay in solitary, which she said compounded her trauma from the kidnapping and torture she'd survived in Iran.

'That place is not a place you should put a human being,' she said. 'I felt like I was nothing, by the way they were treating me. Like I'm nothing.'

ICE's own policy says vulnerable individuals should be isolated 'only as a last resort and when no other viable housing options exist.' But in practice, ICE frequently sends people with suicidal thoughts, serious mental illness and symptoms of depression to solitary confinement, worsening their despair.

Far from being a 'last resort,' experts and detainees say solitary is the primary tool detention facilities use to manage mental health crises.

Detainees and advocates told the Star that Eloy officers' practice of pepper-spraying detainees in crisis — including pepper-spraying people caught attempting suicide — also reflects detention centers' inability to adequately care for vulnerable people.

Immigration detention isn't designed for people dealing with trauma and mental illness, and isolating those detainees is a 'quick fix' that ignores their treatment needs and the harmful effects of confinement, said Luis Suarez, senior field advocacy manager for the nonprofit Detention Watch Network, which conducts research on ICE facilities with the goal of exposing abuses and ending immigration detention.

'A lot of those mental health issues are created by the immigrant detention centers, by the poor conditions,' he said. As those issues are left unresolved, and the root causes ignored, 'that's how you get segregation used as a quick fix.'

Eloy Detention Center is owned and operated by private, for-profit prison company CoreCivic. But medical and mental health care is provided by ICE's medical arm, ICE Health Services Corps, which had a $421 million budget in fiscal year 2024.

ICE and CoreCivic both deny using 'solitary confinement,' instead using the term 'segregation' to describe the isolation of detainees in individual cells, which can be punitive, or for detainees' or staff's protection.

'Segregation' is not traditional solitary confinement because detainees 'retain full access to courts, visitation, mail, showers, meals, all medical facilities and recreation,' CoreCivic spokesman Ryan Gustin said in an emailed statement.

Detainees say that's false: In solitary, they often can't purchase food at the commissary and can be restricted from using communication devices. They're only allowed to shower three times a week, several detainees told the Star. And they're held alone in a cell for 23 hours a day — or 24 hours a day for suicide watch — meeting the widely accepted definition of 'solitary confinement.'

Liz Casey, a social worker with Arizona legal advocacy group Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, considers 'mental health segregation' to be the most harmful form of solitary confinement, especially the 'suicide watch' Dehghani experienced.

'The inhumanity of it — having to eat with your hands, naked on the floor, you're not allowed a mattress sometimes,' she said. 'This is what most people complain about to us, just how absolutely degrading it is.'

Florence Project advocates have witnessed the decline of detainees who already had serious mental health issues and were put into 'mental health watch,' in which they're checked on every 15-minutes, or suicide watch, in which detainees are observed continuously, she said.

'They completely deteriorate because they're isolated, because they're locked in a cell, because they're given finger foods and are forced to eat with their hands,' she said.

One person was in mental health watch for more than six months in 2022, she said.

'He deteriorated to the point where he pretty much was nonverbal and sitting naked in his cell,' she said. 'He was playing with feces, and he was not doing any of that before segregation.'

No meaningful oversight

Eloy is one of the nation's largest ICE detention facilities, currently holding about 1,330 detainees, and it has the fourth-highest number of solitary placements: A Lee Enterprises analysis found Eloy has held about 1,000 detainees in isolation since April 2024, when ICE started reporting monthly segregation data.

An October 2024 report from the Detention Watch Network, Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project and Trans Queer Pueblo found that Eloy's use of segregation is 'excessive,' especially for people with serious mental illnesses.

'ICE and CoreCivic are unwilling and/or unable to humanely care for anyone detained in Eloy,' the report said. 'The repeated deficiencies — especially in medical care and suicide prevention — pose an immediate and life-threatening risk to those held in custody.'

The report calls for the permanent closure of Eloy, calling it the 'deadliest immigration center in the U.S.'

At the time, Eloy had 16 reported deaths, five of them suicides. Since then, two more Eloy detainees have died, both in 2025. One man interviewed for this series attempted suicide in solitary confinement at Eloy in late April.

Experts fear detainees' lives are even more at risk under President Donald Trump's administration, which has dramatically expanded immigration detention while gutting staff at watchdog agencies that oversaw facilities.

In what advocates call an ominous sign, DHS has shuttered the agency's independent watchdog office responsible for investigating misconduct and concerns about safety, legal access and health care in ICE detention facilities.

In May DHS closed its independent watchdog, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, after reducing staffing to a skeleton crew last year.

Thirty-four ICE detainees died in 2025, triple the figure for 2024, said Michelle Brané, former Immigration Detention Ombudsman.

So far in 2026, at least 18 ICE detainees have died — almost one death every seven days.

'There's no meaningful oversight, and it's clear that there are consequences to that lack of oversight,' Brané said.

'Pure hopelessness'

One year after her stay in solitary confinement, Dehghani said her cellmate at Eloy still has to shake her awake from nightmares.

Dehghani has two master's degrees and ran a yoga and dance studio in Iran, before her active resistance to the Iranian regime became too dangerous.

Authorities targeted her for her protest activity and her refusal to wear a head covering, as an act of civil disobedience. Her bank account was shut down and her vehicle seized. After her kidnapping, rape and violent interrogation by Islamic Republic agents, she fled in 2024.

Last year Eloy immigration judge Michael Schnitzer agreed Dehghani would likely face threats to her life or torture if deported to her home country, granting her 'withholding of removal' to Iran. But Schnitzer denied her asylum claim, not based on the merits of her case, but due to a Biden-era rule denying asylum to almost everyone who didn't use the 'CBP One' app to enter the U.S.

Dehghani is appealing the asylum denial, as CBP One had already been canceled by President Donald Trump by the time she arrived at the border in March 2025. And this May, a district court ruled the Biden rule unlawful and unenforceable.

She said she never imagined facing such inhumane, unjust treatment in the country where she'd sought refuge.

When she entered suicide watch last year, Dehghani was made to undress in front of several guards and put on an 'anti-suicide smock' that was so rough it broke her skin.

There was no mattress, pillow or blanket. She said she lost consciousness repeatedly due to unbearable stomach pain from her untreated ulcerative colitis. Someone watched her through a small window constantly, including when she used the toilet, she said.

Each time she heard the jingle of a guard's keys as they walked by outside, she was transported back to that cold cell in Iran, where she was repeatedly assaulted.

When imprisoned in her home country, 'They put me in segregation, and they came to me to do whatever they want, like rape,' she said. At Eloy, 'every time those officers were passing the door my heart was just pounding, that they're coming to me, just exactly like before.'

She was locked in the cell 24 hours a day, and no one talked to her except once a day, when someone would ask if she was still suicidal. On the third day, she lied and said she was no longer suicidal, in order to get out of confinement, she said.

The threat of being returned to solitary has haunted her for the past 14 months at Eloy, she said.

'The main struggle is whether I can lead a normal life after this experience,' Dehghani said. 'I was mentally down when I left my country, and I was seeking hope. But I arrived somewhere that was pure hopelessness. … I am a dead soul trapped in a solid body.'

Craig Haney, a UC Santa Cruz psychology professor and solitary confinement expert, said using solitary confinement as suicide watch is not only 'inappropriate,' but 'dangerous.' The highest rates of suicide for incarcerated individuals are among those in solitary confinement, he said.

In a 2024 study in France, prisoners were 40 times more likely to die by suicide on their first day being placed in disciplinary solitary confinement compared to prisoners who were not isolated.

Rates of self-harm are also higher in solitary. A 2014 study found that New York inmates were 14 times more likely to engage in self-harm while in solitary confinement.

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That place is not a place you should put a human being. I felt like I was nothing, by the way they were treating me. Like I'm nothing.'

Iranian dissident Narges Dehghani, pictured above in a video call from Eloy Detention Center in November 2025, has now been held in ICE detention for 14 months as she awaits the outcome of her asylum petition.

In this 2022 photo, Iranian dissident and Eloy detainee Narges Dehghani was celebrating a friend's birthday in the countryside, about 40 minutes outside her city of Shiraz, Iran.

CONTRIBUTED PHOTO

Haney