Three people held for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at an Indiana detention centre have filed a federal class-action lawsuit alleging that detainees there languish in solitary confinement for weeks, are denied essential medical treatment and are subjected to abuse and racial slurs by facility officials. The lawsuit, filed on Thursday, October 29, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana, says officials' neglect at the Miami Detention Center in Bunker Hill has created a “dangerous medical crisis,” according to a copy of the complaint obtained by The Associated Press.

Source: Associated Press

The case was brought by a civil-rights coalition led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) together with the National Immigrant Justice Center and the MacArthur Justice Center, and it asks a federal judge to force urgent medical care, end prolonged solitary confinement, impose court oversight and require protections for the whole class of detainees at the facility. The Miami Detention Center — the Miami Correctional Facility, a state prison in Miami County around 60 miles (100 kilometres) north of Indianapolis — was a maximum-security prison before the Trump administration converted part of it into an immigration detention facility last year. A 2025 agreement between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Indiana expanded ICE capacity at the site by about 1,000 beds.

Source: Particle News summary of the complaint

What the lawsuit alleges about medical care

The plaintiffs say officials deny detainees medical treatment for severe conditions, leaving some people in agony and crisis. Cynthia Acevedo, a Guatemalan national arrested by ICE in July, suffered multiple seizures a week after officers at the facility switched her to a medication less effective at treating her epilepsy, and officials often failed to give it to her regularly, according to her attorneys. Acevedo also alleges she was sexually assaulted soon after arriving at the facility, and that officials waited days to take her report and never provided her with a rape kit, an HIV test or medication. A man who could barely walk because of inflamed leg wounds also received no care despite multiple requests for help, the complaint says. None of the three named detainees has ever been convicted of a crime in the United States, according to the complaint.

Source: Associated Press

Sergei Vasenin, a Ukrainian-born man who has been detained at the facility for more than a year, was once held in solitary confinement for around nine weeks, according to the complaint. He “spent up to 23 to 24 hours per day in a tiny, frigid cell,” his lawyers wrote; he talked out loud to himself “to stay sane” and contemplated suicide multiple times, they added. The complaint also says that recently, one man attempted suicide after other detainees “begged” officers to help him for days; officers instead locked him in a cell and failed to remove a cable that he then used to hang himself, the attorneys wrote.

Source: Associated Press

Kemoye Muslar, the third named plaintiff, alleged his cell flooded with sewage water for three days, which he spent trying not to “slip and fall into human waste,” his attorneys wrote. They said staff wear masks to keep out the smell of blood and faeces on the floor and from clogged toilets. Solitary cells are described in the complaint as “smaller than an average parking space,” with one small window slit, and so cold that some detainees stuff toilet paper into the vents to block the frigid air; detainees are allowed out to shower only “every few days.” Officials at the facility use “abusive forms of punishment” and “excessive force bordering on torture,” the attorneys wrote, and state staff direct racial slurs at detainees, have told them to go back to their country and have referred to them as a “plague.”

Source: Associated Press

Two deaths at the facility, and a troubled record before ICE arrived

Two people have died at the Indiana facility this year — Tuan Van Bui, a 55-year-old Vietnamese man, and Lorth Sim, a 59-year-old Cambodian man, the AP reported. Sim's son sued ICE in August, saying the agency withheld information about his father's death. The complaint ties the alleged abuses to the rapid expansion of ICE detention at the site and builds on earlier litigation over conditions at the same prison, including a roughly $1.2 million settlement over earlier “dark cell” abuses. As a state prison, the facility already had a record of inhumane conditions, violence and inmate deaths before its conversion, the AP noted. Nationally, at least 37 people have died in ICE custody this fiscal year, the most in the agency's history, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

Source: Associated Press

Why this matters beyond Indiana

Immigration detainees are held in civil custody, not as a criminal punishment, and the complaint stresses that its named plaintiffs have no U.S. criminal convictions — even as the administration says its crackdown is focused on immigrants with criminal records, while recent data cited by the AP shows most of those arrested have no convictions. For immigrant families across the Midwest — including Indiana's growing Punjabi and Sikh community and the long-haul truckers who cross the state daily on Interstates 65, 70 and 80/90 — the case is a test of what medical care and limits on solitary confinement the Constitution requires inside the fast-growing network of state prisons now holding people for ICE. A ruling imposing court oversight at Bunker Hill would be closely watched at similar converted facilities in other states.

What happens next: the case now goes before a federal judge in the Northern District of Indiana, who will decide whether the suit proceeds as a class action covering detainees at the facility as a group and whether any emergency orders on medical care and solitary confinement are issued while the case is heard. ICE and the Indiana Department of Correction will have to respond to the complaint in court. Awaaz Punjab will follow the first hearings and any response DHS files.