'You can't unsee it': Congresswoman reveals 'scary' conditions inside ICE facility

A border town congresswoman detailed the conditions inside one of the facilities used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain immigrants before deportation.

"Once you see it, you can't unsee it," Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) told former GOP operative Steve Schmidt on his podcast on Tuesday. Grijalva was talking to Schmidt about the conditions inside several ICE detention facilities in Arizona.

She said the Arizona Removal Operations Coordination Center in Mesa, Arizona, had "completely scary conditions because so many people were shoved into one space," and noted that for the detainees there, it's "the last stop before people are deported."

She described the facility as "overcrowded." One area had a maximum occupancy of 21, Grijalva said, but she counted 47 detainees "packed in like sardines with no airflow, sweating, no real food."

Grijalva said that she was there because she heard "there was a hunger strike" in the facility.

"I could very easily see why," Grijalva said. "I asked everyone to just have a seat. There's no way that they could sit and not sit on top of someone else."

She repeated that the Mesa facility is "very scary" and it's "the only location in the nation where families can be housed together," she added.

"Moms and their children or dads and their sons, they can be housed together at that facility," Grijalva said. "That one is heartbreaking because that was the first time I could really have conversations with multiple families."

According to Grijalva, the staff inside were "hostile," and she was worried that among the staff, "there was one person that spoke Spanish."

Ever since Markwayne Mullin took over the Department of Homeland Security, the staff inside ICE facilities "are reading from a script. They don't deviate. They don't answer a lot of questions," Grijalva said.

DHS has previously denied lawmakers' characterizations of conditions at the facility, calling claims of overcrowding 'FALSE.'"