ADELANTO, CA.The Adelanto ICE Processing Center is filling up so quickly that it is rekindling long-standing worries about the safety conditions inside the facility as federal immigration authorities undertake huge raids throughout Southern California.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California said Wednesday that the number of detainees in the huge compound, located approximately 85 miles northeast of Los Angeles, has increased from roughly 300 at the end of April to over 1,200 in less than two months.
Adelanto, California’s largest detention facility, has long been the subject of complaints from inmates, lawyers, and state and federal inspectors regarding poor mental health services, excessively stringent segregation, and insufficient medical care.
However, detractors, including some employees, now caution that the working environment has gotten more hazardous and filthy. They claim that the prison is dreadfully unequipped to deal with a significant rise in the number of inmates.
Speaking on condition of anonymity because they did not want to lose their jobs, a longstanding employee of the Adelanto detention center told The Times that it is unsafe. We don’t have enough experienced employees or any staffing for this. They’re simply taking far too many shortcuts, which compromises everyone’s safety.
U.S. Representative Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park) and four other Democratic members of Congress from California visited Adelanto on Tuesday as concerns over the facility’s fast rising inmate population and worsening circumstances grew.
Following a nearly two-hour facility inspection, Chu stated at a news conference that the institution’s manager must obviously change how these detainees are treated.
According to Chu, some detainees told lawmakers that they were detained inside Adelanto for ten days without towels, underwear, or a change of clothes. Others claimed that despite constantly completing documents, they had been refused access to a phone so they could talk to family ones and attorneys.
Chu told The Times, “I was just really shocked to hear that they couldn’t get socks for ten days, and they couldn’t get a change of underwear.” They are unable to obtain the PIN for a phone call. What about their legal rights? What about the opportunity to communicate with their relatives? That is cruel.
The Times asked about staffing and conditions within the Adelanto detention center, but neither Immigration Customs and Enforcement nor GEO Group, the private prison business based in Florida that oversees the institution, responded. Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at Homeland Security, was also questioned by the Times, but she did not respond.
Interviews with members of Congress, immigration lawyers, and current detention center staff revealed that during the past two weeks, new detainees have been made to sleep on the floors of common areas without blankets or pillows and have been in the facility for days before being given clean clothes and underwear. Some inmates have expressed dissatisfaction at being served food as late as 10 p.m., not having access to medicine, and not having drinking water for four hours.
Jennifer Norris, a staff attorney at Immigrant Defenders Law Center, stated that when a detainee’s family attempted to bring in his high blood pressure medication, it was denied. She claimed that in certain instances, inadequate medical attention has resulted in crises. For example, last week, a Vietnamese man passed out after personnel failed to give him his prescribed prescription.
According to Norris, Adelanto just lacks the personnel to keep up with the vigorous enforcement that is currently taking place, as evidenced by the ramp up in enforcement. It’s strange. Millions of dollars being spent on ICE detention, yet they are unable to even provide the new immigrants with basic essentials.
Adelanto employees were concerned about understaffing and hazardous circumstances as the center processed new inmates well before Trump administration officials announced in May that they were establishing a new national goal of arresting 3,000 undocumented immigrants each day.
Only three people were housed in the facility at the conclusion of the previous year. The ACLU of Southern California said the figure had risen to 1,218 as of Wednesday.
Only a portion of the increase can be attributed to the recent increase in immigration raids by ICE agents.
Since 2020, when human rights organizations filed a class-action lawsuit requesting a major reduction in the number of persons detained at Adelanto on the grounds that they faced a severe danger of getting a serious illness, the 1,940-bed Adelanto facility has been operating at a drastically reduced capacity. COVID-19. The correctional facility was ordered to release inmates and forbid further transfers and intakes by a federal judge.
However, as federal immigration officials disperse throughout neighborhoods and workplaces, the facility has been able to fully reopen thanks to a number of federal court rulings this year, the most recent of which was issued in early June.
“They just started slamming people in there as soon as the judge lifted the order,” an Adelanto employee told The Times.
Nearly all of the people detained at the Adelanto prison had no criminal history before to their arrival, according to Eva Bitr, director of immigrant rights at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.
However, Bitrn stated that no one should be made to spend ten days in the same undergarments, regardless of their criminal history or whether they were already in criminal detention before being taken to the ICE prison. No one should be subjected to rotten food or unclean bathing.
Numerous people ended up in Adelanto, including Mario Romero, an Indigenous Mexican worker who was arrested on June 6 at the Ambiance Apparel warehouse in downtown Los Angeles.
Yurien Contreras, his daughter, claimed that when her father was shackled by his hands, feet, and waist, transferred to the Metropolitan Detention Center downtown, and then held captive in a van from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. without access to food, water, or a bathroom, she and her family experienced trauma.
We had no idea that it was just the start of the cruel abuse our families would receive, she said.
She claimed that authorities at Adelanto attempt to coerce her father into signing documents without providing him with a lawyer or due process. She claimed that the food was unsustainable, the water tasted like Clorox, and the medical attention was subpar.
When her 61-year-old uncle, Candida, was arrested on June 9 while working at Magnolia Car Wash in Fountain Valley, Lucero Garcia told The Times that she was worried about him.
However, she said that he didn’t want to reveal anything when she paid him a visit on Saturday. He is more concerned about us.
The Adelanto detention facility has previously been the subject of criticism.
Serious infractions were discovered at the institution by federal inspectors in 2018, including excessively stringent detainee segregation and guards’ failure to prevent inmates from hanging braided bed sheet nooses.
Current and former Adelanto convicts sued GEO Group in a class-action lawsuit five years later, claiming the corporation inappropriately used harmful chemicals to clean the detention facility, thereby poisoning inmates. The class-action lawsuit’s assertions have been refuted by GEO Group.
All six of California’s privately run immigration detention centers, including Adelanto, failed to provide adequate mental health care for inmates, medical record keeping, suicide prevention measures, and use of force against inmates with mental health disorders, according to a report issued by the California Department of Justice in April.
However, two employees told The Times that they had never encountered such dangerous circumstances at Adelanto.
They said that staff members are working long hours without breaks due to the recent increase in the prison population, and some of them are even falling asleep while driving home from work and getting into accidents. In the middle of the night, shift duty officers who had no prior security experience were being asked to decide whether to place inmates who felt threatened in protective custody. They were sending officers, including food service personnel, to the hospital to check on detainees who had hepatitis and tuberculosis.
“Everyone is simply overburdened,” a staff member stated.
According to another colleague, officers who worked beyond their designated timetables were frequently exhausted while on duty.
In May, a detainee went into anaphylactic shock and ended up intubated in the hospital, the staffer said, because an officer wasn t paying attention or was new and gave the detainee, who s allergic to seafood, a tray that contained tuna.
At a May meeting, the warden told all executive staff that they needed to come to work dressed down on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the staffer said, because they would have to start doing janitorial work.
According to the staffer, there was a significant security breach on June 2 when a detainee at the Annex facility walked alone from a medical holding area through four locked doors and back to his dormitory.
The staffer stated that he would have been gone if he had desired to flee. Without asking any questions, he simply pressed the buttons to unlock the doors. It seems that the person in charge was either too inexperienced or too exhausted to check.
The detention center was becoming unsanitary, the staffer said, with trash bins not promptly emptied, bathrooms not cleaned and floors not mopped as they should be.
As new waves of detainees flooded into the facility over the last two weeks, the staffer said, the facility was chaotic and lacking basic supplies.
We didn t have enough to provide right away, they said, so we re scrambling to get clothes and mattresses.
Mark Ferretiz, who worked as a cook supervisor at Adelanto for 14 years until April, said former colleagues told him officers were working 16- to 20-hour shifts multiple days in a row without breaks, officers were slow to respond to physical fights between detainees, and food was limited for detainees.
They had five years to prepare, Ferretiz, who had served as a union steward, said of his former supervisors. I don t know the reason why they weren t prepared.
While the supply shortages appeared to ease some in recent days a shipment of clothes and mattresses had arrived by Tuesday, when members of Congress toured the detention center was still understaffed, the current staffer said.
Detainees were being served food on paper clam-shell to-go boxes, rather than regular trays, a staffer said, because the facility lacked employees to wash up at the end of mealtimes.
Trash pickup s not coming fast enough, a staffer said, noting that piles of trash sat outside, bagged up, beside the dumpsters.
In a statement last week, GEO Group Executive Chairman George C. Zoleysaidfully opening the Adelanto facility would allow his company to generate about $31 million in additional annualized revenues.
We are proud of our approximately 350 employees at the Adelanto Center, whose dedication and professionalism have allowed GEO to establish a long-standing record of providing high-quality support services on behalf of ICE in the state of California, Zoley said.
But after touring the facility, members of Congress said officials did not provide answers to basic questions.
When Chu asked officials about whether California immigrants were being taken to other states, she said, they said, We don t know.
