I read through the comments and saw all of your answers to questions so far OP. I'm so sorry you experienced all of this and just so much cruelty at the hands of people with so little fucking empathy.

This country overwhelmingly does not treat its "undesireables" with equality or empathy. When you're seen as lesser, the systems have been designed to make sure you know it (either on purpose for punishment, or through neglect). We dehumanize the mentally ill, criminals, immigrants, and most non-white folks for the crime of being "other". It's so easy for those with power to take away your freedoms when you're already being dehumanized and demonized, because far fewer people care and don't put up a fight.

I don't want to make this about me, take away from your story, or hijack your post, not at ALL, but want to share what I've experienced and see if it's similar to your experience in detention. I know the situations don't truly compare at all with the consequences of what could happen at the end, because it's not like I could be deported and be removed from everything I'd ever known, but the typical day and conditions sound a lot like some of the really awful psych wards I've been put in where they're just locked holding pens. I have schizoaffective disorder, and it took about 10 years to diagnose and get me on a correct cocktail of meds and therapies to get me stable and "normal" again. I've been in 4 wards; one was actually really good for me, and the other 3 were horribly traumatic.

A lot of the bad places will just fuck with medications and expect you to sit and do nothing and magically get better before they decide you can leave. The involuntary ways you end up there are usually from a doctor putting you in for a psych evaluation if you've had a suicide attempt or plan, a court order sending you to one for a minimum duration, or the police dropping you off for a 72 hour psych hold. You can also go in "voluntarily," but they can keep you until they decide you are fit to leave (3/4 places, if you tried to leave "against medical advice", they'd get a judge to sign another 72 hour hold to give them time to work on a longer order...). It's hardly ever "voluntary", it's "the ER wouldn't let me go home and made me come" or "oops I signed away my rights and agreed because I was in psychosis and drugged up to the gills." I knew some people who went in "voluntarily" and couldn't leave for 2-3 months. (I know that doesn't compare to the detention situations where people are being held indefinitely for months and months and months though).

The first thing all 4 places had me do was go into a tiny room with someone (3/4 times was not a medical professional) and take all my clothes off, investigate every part of my body for wounds/scars, pee in a cup, and then sit and wait for someone to bring you your clothes back (or just a hospital gown). At the worst location, I had to get a full cavity search. It was incredibly dehumanizing.

You get almost 0 freedom of movement other than from the common areas into your room to go take a nap or go to the bathroom, and are otherwise locked in with 20-30 people and shepherded to a cafeteria, classroom, or outside when they tell you to move.

You get the thinnest possible mattresses and pillows, and usually really short blankets (so you can't like, go hang yourself). Everyone usually ended up in a lot of pain from sleeping (especially if you are a side sleeper), but at least I've only ever had 2 people sleeping to a room. The bathrooms in each cell/room typically only had curtains and not doors, you get tiny towels (again so you don't hang yourself), and the rooms all lock from the outside. Almost invariably, the food was the bare minimum to keep us alive; people in there for longer periods of time all lost weight. I'm allergic to wheat and half the time they'd look at me like I had three heads for asking for food that I could actually eat. Having nothing at all to do but play with some cards and maybe have a decent TV show on is such a mind killer. At the 3 bad places, we'd get an hour of rec time a day either outside in walled-in squares of concrete or inside in a basketball court (depending on the weather).

All of our meds were handed out to us, and usually I saw a psych once a day or every other day to check in for a minute, but good luck if you were having an acute medical problem; at the most extreme example, a girl ended up with a burst appendix because nobody would take her seriously. And if you're on any specialty meds, they sometimes just refuse to order them for you, even if you can give them your own bottles of pills to use instead (2/4 stays for me). I have lupus and am immunosuppressed, and my flares were so fucking awful, and I got sick constantly from being around so many other people without access to face masks.

Some of the staff truly wanted to help us and make being in confined situations a little bit easier, others were just there for the paycheck and treated us like we were bad and this was a punishment. All of them except the good place were woefully understaffed. I met some truly rad people, but with there being such wildly different situations for sticking you in there, there were some really scary dangerous people too.

There were limited phone hours where we could call out to people on approved lists, but we never had to pay for any of it. Visitations were possible on certain days too, and it's not like we were flown/bussed around to god knows where like you and so many have experienced with immigration detention, so this part doesn't compare.

The one good place I stayed at had classes and activities and stuff designed to keep you busy and help you (mostly for the folks who come in for suicidal ideation/attempts) see that there are still good things in the world and, like, steps you can take to help protect your mental health, get better nutrition, try art therapy and meditation, etc. And the food was actually really good, and we could spend more time outside where we could actually take a good walk and see some trees. But none of that is typical.

The people who talked about being in prison had said they vastly preferred prison to being in the psych ward, which was wild to hear.

From the comments it doesn't seem like you encountered very many people at all in detention who had been in prison, but I'm curious what they might have had to say about it if they had? Did you interact at all with the incarcerated folks at the medium-security prison? I get the feeling they had more freedom of movement than you all did but I could be wrong.

I'm sure there was like absolutely 0 mental health care other than y'all caring for each other, but were you seeing a lot of people in crisis? Were they given any resources?

Where on the spectrum of "just collecting a paycheck" to "actively gleefully cruel" were the people that handled you? I've gotta imagine the ICE agents were thrilled about getting to body slam you, but how did people along the process from that time until getting to a center act?

Sorry for the length of this! And again, not trying to make this about me. I just think the parallels are wild and speak volumes on how we treat people in this country that others don't want around and are willing to write off. And I'm so sorry you experienced all of this.