At a detention center in Homestead, Florida, a group of immigrant teens are packed into cold rooms that can hold 70 to 250 kids, given a substandard education and detained for more than six months, according to interviews done by five legal and child psychology experts.

On Feb. 6 and 7, the team spoke with roughly two dozen children to assess the Homestead shelter’s compliance with the Flores settlement, the 1997 agreement in a landmark lawsuit that outlines child welfare standards in government-run detention centers. They told HuffPost the conditions inside the “temporary” shelter at Homestead are troubling and not suitable for any child, especially over a long period of time.

“These children are in perhaps the most restrictive and least family-like setting possible,” said Neha Desai, the director of immigration at the National Center for Youth Law, in an email to HuffPost. “I spoke with youth that slept in rooms with 100 other kids at night. Some of them have been there for months on end, with no freedom of movement, no privacy, no human contact.”

The Trump administration reopened the facility in February 2018 and in December announced it would almost double the shelter’s capacity from 1,350 to 2,350 children, ages 13 to 17.

Before Homestead’s expansion, most children slept in rooms of 12. But, according to immigration lawyers who visited Homestead last week, the facility recently outfitted one of its buildings to house 17-year-olds in large rooms that sleep 70 to 250 kids.

J.J. Mulligan Sepulveda, an immigration lawyer at the University of California, Davis, School of Law who conducted interviews at Homestead, spoke with teens who said they were sleeping in rooms with 150 to more than 200 kids.

Mulligan Sepulveda, who also received a tour of the facility, told HuffPost the bunk beds in these large rooms were in “perfect, neat, 12-by-12 rows” and that children were packed in “like sardines.” “[There’s] just enough room to walk by [with your] shoulder skimming the bunk beds on each side,” he said. “[It] really hits home how inhumane it is.”

Mary Bauer, the deputy legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project, says that, though kids should never be detained, the government shelters should at least be “small, home-like settings.” “A facility [with] a thousand kids is not appropriate for children,” Bauer said. “The idea [of] now moving to a 2,500-bed facility is very, very concerning.”

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declined to provide HuffPost with a comment.

The Homestead facility is considered a temporary shelter and should be used only to accommodate an influx of immigrants. But the number of children crossing the border hasn’t increased significantly, and experts say there are high numbers of detained immigrant kids only because the government is unnecessarily keeping them in shelters for record-long periods of time.

As a temporary shelter, Homestead isn’t required to follow Florida’s child welfare regulations when it comes to issues such as staff training, education and recreation time, unlike permanent Office of Refugee Resettlement shelters. Nor was Tornillo, a tent city that had the capacity to house 3,800 immigrant kids in the Texas desert, which was shut down in January amid public outcry.

The Homestead complex, which was opened by the Obama administration in 2016 for a 10-month period, is on federal land beside Homestead Air Reserve Base in Miami-Dade County. The campus, made up of buildings and tents, is surrounded by chain-link fences with guards at every entrance. Children are not allowed to leave the facility, despite regulations in the Flores settlement specifying that children’s shelters must be non-secure, and they must wear wristbands that track their movements.

Desai says the shelter is “very militaristic” and “highly regimented.” The children wake up at 6:30 a.m., spend most of the day in school, save for roughly an hour of outdoor time, and go to bed at around 10 p.m. They walk in single-file lines and eat at the cafeteria three times a day. They can only call their parents twice a week for 10 minutes.