Just down the road from where families sit and eat before jumping on a flight out to go on vacation, dozens of immigrants at a time are being held at a secluded facility at a suburban Phoenix airport. They’ll be there, with no beds or showers, until they board a plane that will either fly them to an out-of-state immigrant detention facility or deport them.

The Arizona Removal Operations Coordination Center, or AROCC for short, is a 25,000-square-foot facility at the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport. It opened in 2010 to little fanfare and can house up to 157 detainees and 79 employees from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to an ICE press release from 2010 .

While larger detention facilities in the state have gotten much more attention, AROCC has avoided the limelight. It

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