In November, Prison Law Office joined the agency of Keker, Van Nest & Peters, the A.C.L.U., and the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice in submitting a class-action lawsuit towards ICE and the Department of Homeland Security on behalf of these detained at California City. As famous within the submitting, detainees seek advice from C.C.D.F. as a “torture chamber” and “hell on Earth.” In reality, Borden says, the circumstances on the facility are so horrible that detainees are resigning themselves to self-deportation, as an alternative of pursuing asylum and different immigration circumstances, and that “people are also trying to take their own lives.”
In April, 2025, as deportations ramped up nationwide, the for-profit jail firm CoreCivic repurposed a decommissioned jail in California City into an immigration detention middle after signing a contract with ICE. The firm already owned the jail, which had sat unused since 2023, so the contract, which is price an estimated 100 and thirty million {dollars} yearly, was a beneficial supply of income for CoreCivic. Additionally, the CoreCivic property has helped deal with ICE’s rising want for detention area in a state the place the company has turbocharged its immigration-enforcement actions. If absolutely occupied, C.C.D.F. would be the largest detention middle on the West Coast—and one of its most distant.
C.C.D.F. is located two hours north of Los Angeles, deep within the Mojave Desert, and about sixty miles from the sting of Death Valley National Park. Temperatures may be under freezing within the winter, and effectively over 100 levels in the summertime. “It’s hard for attorneys to get out there,” Mario Valenzuela, a lawyer who represents a number of purchasers at C.C.D.F, advised me. It is a three-hour spherical journey from Valenzuela’s workplace in Bakersfield out to California City, and the detention middle is so desolate that he usually can’t discover cell service. He advised me, “There’s nothing around, just barren desert, then all of a sudden you come across this facility.”
The closest city to C.C.D.F. is California City, about 5 miles away, the place a couple of quarter of residents reside under the poverty line, and roughly eighteen per cent are unemployed. As of 2024, CoreCivic is one of the city’s largest employers. But, regardless of signing a contract with ICE, ongoing litigation alleges that the corporate has not secured a enterprise license or the right conditional-use allow for the power with the municipal authorities of California City. Since it opened, C.C.D.F. has allegedly been working in direct violation of A.B. 103, a state regulation that requires a hundred-and-eighty-day ready interval and two public hearings earlier than a personal company might repurpose a facility as an immigration detention middle. An energetic lawsuit is presently deciding these claims, however, even when the courts aspect with CoreCivic, the corporate appears to have acted in a authorized grey zone when opening C.C.D.F.
On August twenty seventh, CoreCivic started receiving detainees at C.C.D.F. In September, a federally licensed monitor go to by Disability Rights California raised “serious concerns” in regards to the facility’s vital disrepair, attributable to the interval it sat vacant and the following “rush to open.” That month, 5 hundred migrants had been believed to have been transferred to C.C.D.F. In November, Prison Law Office estimated that eight hundred detainees had been being held on the facility, and by mid-January the depend was fourteen hundred. C.C.D.F. is projected to achieve its full capability of two thousand 5 hundred and sixty individuals within the first quarter of 2026.
“Any claims there are inhumane conditions at the California City Correctional Facility are FALSE,” the D.H.S. assistant secretary for public affairs, Tricia McLaughlin, stated in an e-mail, including that “ICE is regularly audited and inspected by external agencies” to insure its services adjust to “national detention standards.” With regard to medical therapy, McLaughlin stated that the company supplies “comprehensive medical care.” A consultant for CoreCivic added that the corporate has “submitted all required information for a business license and [continues] to maintain open lines of communication with city officials.”
Still, as detainee numbers have surged, staffing and fundamental infrastructure have clearly not saved up. In a letter despatched to D.H.S. final month, California’s lawyer basic, Rob Bonta, warned that “the facility does not have enough medical doctors for its detainee population size,” and the workers it does have “appear to be inexperienced and lack basic understanding of civil detention management principles.” On January twentieth, Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff toured the power and spoke with the warden as half of an oversight go to. “Far and away, the biggest concerns were about lack of medical attention,” Senator Padilla advised me by telephone after his go to. He in contrast the power’s circumstances to what he noticed throughout a tour of migrant detention services at Guantanamo Bay final yr, explaining that it will probably take “weeks or months” for a detainee to obtain care, “even for matters that, in my mind, seem pretty urgent.”
