'Dogs Live Better Than We Do': Belarusian Asylum Seeker Reveals Life Inside Virginia ICE Detention Centre

A Belarusian asylum seeker held by ICE in Virginia says he is being denied critical medical care for a growing tumour, months after US immigration officers allegedly tried to force him onto a plane back to the country he fled.

For context, 35-year-old lorry driver Aliaksei Shcharbachenia has spent nearly a year in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody at the Farmville Detention Center in rural Virginia, a facility now run by private prison giant CoreCivic. He arrived in the US in 2021 after fleeing political persecution in Belarus, and says he sought asylum only to find himself trapped in a system where guards control everything from his food to his access to a doctor.

The tumour on his right arm, which he describes as 'the size of an egg', has been growing and now causes pain when touched. Speaking with The Intercept, he said he has lost feeling in his fingers. According to complaints he filed with the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General, he first requested to see a specialist last December. As of last week, he told the publication, he still had no diagnosis, no imaging and no specialist consultation.

Shcharbachenia's allegations sit within a much wider expansion of ICE's detention and deportation machine. Earlier this month, Congress approved around $70 billion for immigration enforcement. A previous package, the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, set aside more than $170 billion over four years for the same purpose. Advocates say that money is fuelling a rapid build-out of detention capacity, including more privately managed centres like Farmville, with little sign of improved oversight.

ICE Detention At Farmville: 'Dogs Live Better Than We Do'

Farmville Detention Center has a track record that immigration lawyers and campaigners would politely call grim. The facility, which opened in 2010 under previous operator Immigration Centers of America, was initially sold to the local community as almost a 'summer camp environment.'

FOIA documents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement show that in 2015 a guard pepper-sprayed a detainee who was already in full restraints and confined to a medical isolation cell. In another case from the same records, a man was strapped to a bed and chair for more than four days. ICE did not sanction the facility for the use of force.

The one time the detention centre took a financial hit was when detainees found 'white worms' in their food. ICE imposed a one-off deduction on the facility's monthly invoice, not because of the contamination itself, but because the company had posted a memo threatening anyone who 'attempted to degrade the reputation' of the centre, something the government interpreted as an attempt to intimidate complainants.

Then came Covid. In 2020, Farmville experienced the worst coronavirus outbreak of any immigration detention facility in the US, with more than 80 per cent of its roughly 300 detainees testing positive after the centre accepted a large transfer of new arrivals. Detainees launched a hunger strike, demanding release as infections spread through cramped dorms. Guards reportedly responded with pepper spray. In August that year, a 72-year-old Canadian man, James Hill, died after contracting the virus inside.

CoreCivic bought Farmville in 2025 for $67 million. If anything, migrant rights lawyers say, conditions have deteriorated.

'Things since [the facility] moved to CoreCivic have only gotten worse,' said Sophia Gregg, senior immigrants' rights attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia. 'Medical services are difficult to get for individuals, if not impossible.'

She accused ICE of weaponising detention itself. The agency, she argued, is using poor conditions 'as a way to get people to relinquish their rights to remain in this country,' inducing detainees to give up their cases and accept deportation. In Gregg's view, if the political goal is removal at speed, there is no incentive to make detention humane.

Shcharbachenia's own account fits that pattern. In May, he was caught sharing 'know your rights' information with new arrivals and says guards responded by putting him in solitary confinement for two weeks, shackling his hands and feet whenever he was allowed out of his cell.

CoreCivic flatly rejects that description. Spokesperson Brian Todd said the American private prison operator does not use solitary confinement, insisting instead that it employs 'restrictive housing,' a term used in detention standards to describe holding a person apart from others. He denied any retaliatory treatment of Shcharbachenia.

In a later written statement, Todd argued that Farmville adheres to all federal detention standards and that 'the safety, health and well-being of the individuals entrusted to our care is our top priority.' He said Shcharbachenia had been seen several times by onsite medical staff, but said he could not comment on whether he had been examined by a specialist or given a formal diagnosis. Todd also rejected claims about dirty ventilation, 'undrinkable' water and lack of translation, saying staff use the same water and ventilation systems as detainees and that translation services are available.

ICE Flight To Belarus Ends In Violence And A Loop Back To Farmville

The most harrowing part of Shcharbachenia's story unfolds thousands of miles from Virginia, in a chain of airports stretching from the US to Turkey and Azerbaijan.

On 20 May, shortly after his stint in isolation, he was moved by ICE to a facility in Chantilly, Virginia. According to a complaint he later filed with the DHS Joint Intake Center, an officer asked if he was ready to fly to Belarus.

He says he was taken onto an ICE flight to Turkey, where he tried, in broken English, to beg officers not to send him back. He showed them printed documents he had collected on human rights abuses in Belarus and warned that he could be killed, leaving his two daughters without a father.

The plane carried on to Azerbaijan, where, for the first time during the journey, he was able to speak to immigration officers in his native Russian. There he refused to board the connecting flight to Belarus. Shcharbachenia claimed that US and Azerbaijani officers began arguing. Because he did not have his passport, he could not leave the airport, and ICE ultimately returned him to Turkey, where he was held in an airport cell.

What happened in that cell, he says, is what still wakes him up at night.

'They took out of their backpacks some white plastic collars, like dog collars,' he recalled of the US immigration agents. As he begged a Turkish police officer for asylum, one ICE agent allegedly hit him on the back of the head, knocking him unconscious.

He says he woke up on the floor with an officer choking him so hard he could not breathe, then blacked out again. When he came to, his arms and legs were bound with the plastic 'collars.' These claims appear in three separate complaints he filed with DHS oversight bodies and were repeated in his interview.

He was eventually returned to Farmville. According to his account, he received no treatment for the head injury he says he sustained in Turkey. CoreCivic's Todd said that neither an assault nor a head injury appears in the man's medical records.

Back at the detention centre, the arm tumour that first alarmed him last year has continued to grow. He says he has repeatedly filed grievances asking for a specialist appointment. At first, he was told it would be arranged within a month. Then, he says, the responses stopped.

Inside Farmville, he claimed 'dogs live better than detainees.' Whether that is literally true is almost beside the point. It is the kind of thing you say when you feel that, to the people with the keys, you barely count as human at all.