Inside ICE's Phoenix Hold Rooms: A Tile Setter's 26 Hours Behind an Unmarked Gate

The white Nissan pickup was found abandoned beside a vacant lot on a west Phoenix street, its trunk still holding a tile saw, boxes of ceramic tile and an open bag of adhesive. Its driver, Ramón Barraza, never came back for it.

Barraza, 60, left the Maryvale apartment he shared with his girlfriend near 43rd Avenue and McDowell Road at about 7 a.m. on the first Monday of January 2026. Christmas lights still hung from some balconies. He had already paid his rent. He was heading to a house near 119th Avenue, roughly a 10-mile drive, where he had spent more than a week laying marble tiles that weighed about 20 pounds each.

A certified public accountant in Mexico, Barraza had spent two decades in Phoenix installing ceramic tile floors, learning to charge by the square foot. He lived in the United States without legal status. Rumors had circulated for weeks, amplified by social media videos, that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was making arrests on streets, at gas stations and in parking lots. He still had to work.

Driving west on McDowell Road, he noticed a white Chevrolet Tahoe with dark windows merge behind him near 47th Avenue. He stopped for gas at 67th Avenue just after 7:10 a.m., greeted friends from construction, filled his tank and poured coffee. Back on the road, the same SUV was soon tailing him closely. Past 75th Avenue it flashed its lights and signaled him to pull over.

"It had no identification of any kind," Barraza recalled. "It was like a ghost car. It wasn't police. It didn't have a light bar. It had nothing."

He turned onto an unmarked street and stopped. The men who emerged were not in uniform, though they addressed him in Spanish. One asked his name. Told it was Ramón Barraza, the man replied that he was the person they had come for, that he had entered on a tourist visa and stayed, and that they were ICE. Barraza said four vehicles took part — one ahead, two behind and one alongside. Handcuffs were tightened around his wrists as traffic continued along McDowell Road.

By 7:35 a.m. the pickup stood abandoned beside the vacant lot. Barraza was placed in the back seat of one vehicle, driven by a woman he said wore a blue uniform. The convoy retraced his morning route past the gas station and the spot where he first noticed the tail, then turned onto 43rd Avenue, where he caught sight of his apartment complex before the vehicles reached the freeway heading east.

"What will become of my life now?" he remembered thinking. When he told the officer the handcuffs were hurting, first in Spanish and then in English, the reply was to wait a moment because they were almost there.

Still handcuffed, Barraza was taken into a building through a rear street. "They took me through a warehouse garage. There was no sign, just a gate behind a house. It was very hidden," he said. A guard met them, and two people at a small table asked him to unbuckle his belt and pants and remove his shoelaces. His phone and wallet were taken. The handcuffs came off; shackles went on his ankles.

The building is at 2035 N. Central Ave., north of McDowell Road. From outside it shows little: a gray facade, rows of windows, some bars and metal shutters. People carrying folders and photographs arrive at the main entrance daily for interviews, fingerprinting and other immigration proceedings.

ICE maintains the site is not a detention center. "It is a processing facility, not a detention center," the agency said in an email. Yet internal ICE records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, published by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by Conecta Arizona, show that 9,276 people were held at the Central Avenue office between Jan. 1, 2025, and March 10, 2026.

The spaces are described in ICE detention standards as "hold rooms" — temporary cells meant for stays of no more than 12 hours, "except in exceptional circumstances." Because the written policy assumes people remain only while awaiting transfer, beds and cots are prohibited. In June 2025, ICE issued an internal waiver extending the limit from 12 to 72 hours for one year. The document acknowledged the earlier limit had already been violated and said the agency "had to resort to holding individuals in holding facilities beyond the 12-hour limit." Even under the extended limit, at least 423 cases exceeded 72 hours during the period analyzed. On June 23, 2026, a federal judge struck down the waiver as arbitrary and capricious, in part because it conflicted with ICE's own national standards.

Before 2008, according to the Global Detention Project, the Central Avenue building operated as a formal immigration detention center. It is now listed on paper as an administrative office, a classification that helps explain why its use as a holding facility draws little public attention.

Barraza spent 26 hours in the cells there while the extended limit was in effect. Beyond the gate, he found no waiting rooms or service counters — only cells. He knew he was still in Phoenix but not exactly where, or for how long. His family had not yet begun looking for him and did not know where he was. Before entering his cell, he could see people in others, including one holding only women. The room had no windows and a door with a small window facing a hallway. It seemed to him only slightly larger than the bedroom of his apartment.