Amid mounting concerns of increased immigration enforcement in Nevada, a cohort of Latino lawmakers visited the state’s largest immigration detention center, describing conditions as sanitary and well-organized but raising concerns that detainees were not receiving proper due process. 

The nearly two-hour Thursday visit to the Nevada Southern Detention Center, a privately owned facility in Pahrump, was led by the facility’s administration. Lawmakers observed that detainees had access to medical services and working phones, and that the majority of individuals were housed in shared dormitories rather than individual cells. Detention staff, employed by the private company CoreCivic, however, were not allowed to answer detainees’ questions about their cases with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Latino Legislative Caucus leadership said. 

“We have been hearing about the really inhumane conditions of migrants during this time, the lack of being able to locate them, the lack of transparency, so we wanted to see things for ourselves,” Assm. Cecelia González (D-Las Vegas), chair of the Latino Legislative Caucus, told The Nevada Independent in an interview. 

González said state legislators are in a difficult position given the federal nature of immigration enforcement. This session, González and other Latino lawmakers passed several bills to place additional guardrails around immigration enforcement — such as a bill to curtail enforcement at schools —  but were ultimately vetoed by Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo. 

The visit comes just weeks after the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department entered a formal partnership with ICE in June and as some local businesses have shuttered or slowed down amid fears of being targeted during immigration enforcement activity. 

Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term and his subsequent immigration crackdown, the Pahrump facility’s population has ballooned. There were 458 ICE detainees in the facility during the lawmakers’ visit, more than double the 200 ICE detainees there in October 2024. Meanwhile, reporting from the New York Times found that between late January (when Trump took the oath of office) and mid-June, Nevada saw a 289 percent increase in ICE arrests compared to the same time period in 2024 — the 11th-largest year-over-year increase in the U.S.  

Detention center staff told lawmakers that ICE detainees make up about 40 percent of the facility’s population, which also includes approximately 631 U.S. Marshal detainees — individuals arrested by any federal agency. As of June 2025, a little less than half of ICE detainees did not have a criminal history outside of illegal presence in the country, according to ICE datasets. In October 2024, close to 60 percent of the facility’s ICE detainees had criminal records. Unauthorized presence in the U.S. is a civil infraction, not a criminal offense.

All the ICE detainees at the facility in 2024 and 2025 were male, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security. Officials also did not provide additional information to lawmakers on where female ICE detainees or children were being held. 

The visit did little to clarify the number of detained Nevada residents versus out-of-state individuals. To access that information, immigration enforcement officials told lawmakers that they would have to submit a federal public records request.

The population at the facility is mostly transient, according to what jail staff shared with the lawmakers, with an average length of stay of about 40 days. A group of a dozen detainees the cohort spoke to had lived all over the country, ranging from California to Idaho, with some saying they were taken into custody while riding a bike or even while taking their child to school. 

González said lawmakers spoke to some individuals from Nevada, including one man from Las Vegas who said he was apprehended in an elevator while waiting for his court case. ICE officers told him that he could no longer attend court, he said, and his only option was to self deport. Before, he was struggling to afford an attorney, who would have cost him upwards of $8,000, according to González.

“The reoccurring theme here is the lack of due rights,” she said. 

ICE has long relied on private contractors.

As of 2023, CoreCivic employed about 230 employees at the Nevada Southern Detention Center, according to a company audit, and more than 90 percent of people detained by ICE were held in privately owned facilities, according to 2023 data compiled by the American Civil Liberties Union. 

But lawmakers noted that there was an apparent disconnect between private prison staff and ICE personnel. According to what jail staff shared with lawmakers, ICE officials only stop by at the privately owned facility two or three times a week. 

Latino Caucus members said they were concerned that if detention facility staff do not have a full grasp on ICE processes, detainees could face additional challenges in accessing legal aid and other resources. In many cases, detention facility staff were not permitted to translate for detainees.

“How are people even able to access any resources or able to communicate if they may not know that they're there?” González asked.