As the Trump administration scrambles for space to hold detained immigrants, California – the country’s largest sanctuary state – is in the crosshairs.
Last week, a court ruling allowed one of the state’s largest detention centers to resume holding immigrants, reversing a pandemic-era decision that reduced its population to just two people. That ruling came weeks after reports emerged that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) was seeking to establish a new facility in northern California, even as allegations of abuse at the privately run sites continue to accumulate.
The Adelanto Ice processing center, able to hold 1,940 people, halted intake and released many detainees on a judge’s orders in 2020, after Covid broke out at the facility. On Friday, the same judge “temporarily lifted” the order ahead of a final hearing. That hearing could come by March, an ACLU attorney told the Los Angeles Times. The facility is run by Geo Group, a private prison company.
The US representative Judy Chu, a California Democrat, criticized the facility on Thursday. “There is no public evidence available that Geo Group is capable of reversing its long history of neglecting and mistreating the immigrants held at Adelanto, where inadequate medical care, poor living conditions, and even preventable deaths have been the norm,” Chu said in a statement.
In September, Chu and 20 other members of Congress called for the facility’s closure in a letter to the then homeland security secretary.
Ice is currently detaining more than 39,000 people in roughly 110 facilities across the country, according to agency data. Typically, those detained are immigrants who entered the country without proper documents, asylum-seekers fighting their cases to stay in the country or immigrants facing criminal allegations.
California adopted a “sanctuary state” law during Donald Trump’s first term with the goal of obstructing his deportation agenda. The law restricts police from questioning people about their citizenship status and detaining foreign-born residents as well as prohibiting the transfer of certain inmates to immigration authorities.
Still, Ice has six detention facilities in California, all operated by private companies: Mesa Verde, Golden State Annex, Adelanto and Desert View Annex, run by Geo Group, as well as the Imperial Regional detention facility, operated by Management and Training Corporation and Otay Mesa, operated by CoreCivic. The institutions have been plagued by allegations of medical negligence, abusive and retaliatory behavior against immigrants, sexual harassment, poor food and water quality and other dangerous conditions.
The two largest companies, Geo Group and CoreCivic, dominate the immigration detention market, making $1bn and $552m respectively from ICE contracts in 2022. In October, members of Congress called on the federal government to end its contract with Geo Group.
“I remain concerned about the years of reported abuse allegations and retaliatory behavior toward detainees at these facilities,” said the Democratic US representative Zoe Lofgren of California in a statement, adding that there were “more unknowns than knowns at this time for detention facilities in California and across the country”.
But in August, with Joe Biden still in office, Ice issued a request for information seeking to identify potential new centers – public or private – to hold immigrant detainees in Arizona, California, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington.
“ICE has identified a need for immigration detention services within the Western U.S. area of responsibility,” an Ice spokesperson said in a statement, citing a need for “operational flexibility”.
Prison contracts are negotiated by number of “beds” – or the number of detainees facilities can house. Ice’s request for information said it was seeking between 850 and 950 detention beds – up to 20% of them for women – in a facility with segregation units, where detainees are separated from the general population, as well as an infirmary and a nearby general hospital with an emergency room.
Soon after Ice’s California proposal was published, the California department of justice sent a letter to the federal agency, imploring it to refrain from renewing existing detention contracts and initiating new ones due to concerns about substandard conditions faced by detainees.
Citing its inspections of federal immigration facilities, the department, headed by the state attorney general, Rob Bonta, voiced concerns about a “lack of sufficient medical and mental health care”, “excessive … use of force” and a “failure to prevent or address sexual assault and abuse issues”.
The state justice department said the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees Ice, had acknowledged the letter, but had not yet issued a formal response.
During his presidential campaign, Biden promised to end privately run detention centers, for both criminal and immigration detainees. While his administration phased out private federal prisons for criminal detention, Ice never followed suit and continues to rely on a network of for-profit prisons and county jails.
Documents earlier reviewed by the Guardian showed that Ice had been in talks to add bed space in other locations, including New Jersey, under the Biden administration.
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Trump is expected to dramatically expand Ice’s detention capabilities, with his top advisers even promising to enlist the help of the military to construct tent facilities to hold immigrants awaiting deportation. Last week, Trump issued an executive order to open a detention center at Guantánamo Bay able to hold 30,000 people.
Thus far, there has been no indication the Trump administration plans to change course on the new facility, according to the Asian Law Caucus, a San Francisco-based civil rights organization.
Despite the reported evidence and the efforts by members of Congress, in the same month that Ice requested information for detention space in northern California, immigrants detained at the Golden State Annex facility in McFarland, central California, filed a federal civil rights complaint alleging discrimination and sexual abuse and harassment at the hands of Geo Group staff, based on their gender and sexual orientation.
Loba Lovos Mendez, a transfeminine person who has been detained at the Golden State Annex since early 2024, was one of the complainants.
According to the complaint, Lovos Mendez repeatedly informed Geo staff that she identifies as transfeminine and uses the pronouns “she” and “they”. The staff, however, ignored her wishes, she said, and referred to her as “he” and “him”. The complaint said Lovos Mendez had also been subjected to sexually intrusive pat-down searches by male staff, who “would spread her legs open, pin her against the wall, and rub” her breasts and genitals “in an aggressive and sexual manner”, the complaint reads.
“Ever since I arrived here, I have been forced to wear boxers rather than panties. I don’t get no sports bras, so I have to really modify the clothes that they give me to be able to best fit my gender expression,” the 20-year-old Salvadoran native said.
The complaint says that it was only after Lovos Mendez filed a Prison Rape Elimination Act complaint three months into her detention that female staff started conducting the pat-down searches.
The Prison Rape Elimination Act was signed into law in 2003 to eradicate sexual abuse in all types of correctional facilities in the US, but it wasn’t until 2014 that DHS finalized its own formal regulations to implement the law inside immigrant detention facilities.
Another person involved in the complaint agreed to speak with the Guardian through his lawyer, under the condition of anonymity, citing concerns of further retaliation. The complainant had been detained in federal immigration custody in California for more than a year and half after being released from a federal prison.
The person said he had faced “abusive force during a violent raid” in his housing unit around April 2024. Afterward, he said, he was placed in solitary confinement without explanation.
“A couple of days after, I started receiving degrading comments from [a female officer] about my sexuality,” he said, adding that she had made hand gestures suggesting abuse by a male officer.
In late November, DHS’s office for civil rights and civil liberties informed the Asian Law Caucus that it had opened investigations in response to the August complaint alleging sexual abuse in the Golden State Annex detention center.
The investigation “shows that the reports in our complaint involve serious issues of civil rights and civil liberties or that they involve some other type of systemic or egregious issues”, said Lee Ann Felder-Heim, an attorney from the Asian Law Caucus.
“We hope that the fact that these investigations were opened will help show the need for more oversight of these facilities, the inherent abusive conditions in these facilities.”
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Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organizations. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
