The Cruel Conditions of ICE’s Mojave Desert Detention Center

On September 18, 2src25, Karam stopped eating. Nearly three weeks earlier, he had been transferred to the California City ICE Detention Facility, a remote facility deep in the Mojave Desert, from Mesa Verde, another ICE detention center, in downtown Bakersfield. At Mesa Verde, Karam, who has a chronic stomach ulcer, had been receiving regular medication, was frequently kept on a liquid diet as prescribed by a doctor, and was able to see medical staff routinely. (Karam is a pseudonym, as he remains detained by ICE and fears retaliation.) Karam had even been approved to see a gastrointestinal specialist for his condition, but he was transferred before the appointment.

When Karam arrived at California City, he informed a nurse who was conducting his medical intake about his ulcer, liquid diet, and the medications he takes daily—some of them multiple times a day. Yet, during his first twenty-four hours at the facility, he received no medication, and later, when he finally began to receive anything at all, they were the wrong pills and were provided with wild infrequency.

As his health declined and his numerous requests for medication went unanswered, Karam decided to go on a hunger strike. By September 22nd, nearly a week into the strike, he was vomiting blood. The next day, he fainted, which triggered a “code blue”—a life-threatening medical emergency—that brought him to the medical clinic. There, according to Karam, he was kept for two or three hours as a health-service administrator named Ms. White took his vitals, and told him that it would be another two weeks before he could see a gastroenterologist for his condition. For the next three days, multiple staff members at California City told Karam that he would only get his medication if he ended his hunger strike.

About a week later, Karam ended his strike, and staff assured him that he’d be able to see a doctor and receive his proper liquid diet. But it would be more than a week until he finally saw that doctor, who not only told Karam that there would be no appointment with a G.I. specialist but that he should “go back” to his country to get the medical care he needs.

In the three months since, Karam’s medical condition has continued to worsen and remains untreated. He told me that he has developed mouth ulcers, still vomits blood, and has blood in his stool. Karam has gone on three additional hunger strikes since September.

After speaking with several current and recently released detainees from the California City ICE Detention Facility (C.C.D.F.), I have learned that Karam’s experience of medical neglect there is pervasive. These detainees reported adequate care at other ICE detention and processing facilities they were previously held at, and described the California City facility as unique in its mistreatment of those held in its custody. Time and again, detainees told me that they experienced extremely delayed appointments with health-care professionals, the denial of medications and treatment, experiences with unsafe and unsanitary living conditions, and a general antagonism by medical staff toward detainees.

“California City is extraordinarily isolated, it is extraordinarily brutal and cruel, it is extraordinarily deprived of adequate medical care,” Tess Borden, an attorney at the California nonprofit Prison Law Office, explained to me.

In November, Prison Law Office joined the firm of Keker, Van Nest & Peters, the A.C.L.U., and the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice in filing a class-action lawsuit against ICE and the Department of Homeland Security on behalf of those detained at California City. As noted in the filing, detainees refer to C.C.D.F. as a “torture chamber” and “hell on Earth.” In fact, Borden says, the conditions at the facility are so terrible that detainees are resigning themselves to self-deportation, instead of pursuing asylum and other immigration cases, and that “people are also trying to take their own lives.”

In April, 2src25, as deportations ramped up nationwide, the for-profit prison company CoreCivic repurposed a decommissioned prison in California City into an immigration detention center after signing a contract with ICE. The company already owned the prison, which had sat unused since 2src23, so the contract, which is worth an estimated a hundred and thirty million dollars annually, was a valuable source of revenue for CoreCivic. Additionally, the CoreCivic property has helped address ICE’s growing need for detention space in a state where the agency has turbocharged its immigration-enforcement activities. If fully occupied, C.C.D.F. will be the largest detention center on the West Coast—and one of its most remote.

C.C.D.F. is situated two hours north of Los Angeles, deep in the Mojave Desert, and about sixty miles from the edge of Death Valley National Park. Temperatures can be below freezing in the winter, and well over a hundred degrees in the summer. “It’s hard for attorneys to get out there,” Mario Valenzuela, a lawyer who represents multiple clients at C.C.D.F, told me. It is a three-hour round trip from Valenzuela’s office in Bakersfield out to California City, and the detention center is so desolate that he often can’t find cell service. He told me, “There’s nothing around, just barren desert, then all of a sudden you come across this facility.”

The closest town to C.C.D.F. is California City, about five miles away, where about a quarter of residents live below the poverty line, and roughly eighteen per cent are unemployed. As of 2src24, CoreCivic is one of the town’s largest employers. But, despite signing a contract with ICE, ongoing litigation alleges that the company has not secured a business license or the proper conditional-use permit for the facility with the municipal government of California City. Since it opened, C.C.D.F. has allegedly been operating in direct violation of A.B. 1src3, a state law that requires a hundred-and-eighty-day waiting period and two public hearings before a private corporation may repurpose a facility as an immigration detention center. An active lawsuit is currently deciding these claims, but, even if the courts side with CoreCivic, the company seems to have acted in a legal gray zone when opening C.C.D.F.

On August 27th, CoreCivic began receiving detainees at C.C.D.F. In September, a federally authorized monitor visit by Disability Rights California raised “serious concerns” about the facility’s significant disrepair, caused by the period it sat vacant and the subsequent “rush to open.” That month, five hundred migrants were believed to have been transferred to C.C.D.F. In November, Prison Law Office estimated that eight hundred detainees were being held at the facility, and by mid-January the count was fourteen hundred. C.C.D.F. is projected to reach its full capacity of two thousand five hundred and sixty people in the first quarter of 2src26.

“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, said in an e-mail, adding that “ICE is regularly audited and inspected by external agencies” to insure its facilities comply with “national detention standards.” With regard to medical treatment, McLaughlin said that the agency provides “comprehensive medical care.” A representative for CoreCivic added that the company 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 basic infrastructure have clearly not kept up. In a letter sent to D.H.S. last month, California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, warned that “the facility does not have enough medical doctors for its detainee population size,” and the staff it does have “appear to be inexperienced and lack basic understanding of civil detention management principles.” On January 2srcth, Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff toured the facility and spoke with the warden as part of an oversight visit. “Far and away, the biggest concerns were about lack of medical attention,” Senator Padilla told me by phone after his visit. He compared the facility’s conditions to what he saw during a tour of migrant detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay last year, explaining that it can take “weeks or months” for a detainee to receive care, “even for matters that, in my mind, seem pretty urgent.”

For Yuri Alexander Roque Campos, a thirty-year-old detainee living with a life-threatening heart condition, those factors proved almost fatal. After being transferred from Mesa Verde to C.C.D.F. on September 5th, Roque Campos (who is named in the class-action lawsuit) was denied his heart medications before he even saw an intake nurse, and did not receive aspirin for five days. As a result, Roque Campos suffered what was described by doctors as a “pre-heart attack” and was rushed to the emergency room twice during his first two days at California City for extreme chest pain and paralysis. Roque Campos lost consciousness en route to the hospital during the first trip.

Todd Randall Wilcox, a correctional health-care physician and the former president of the American College of Correctional Physicians, reviewed the medical records associated with Roque Campos’s hospital visits, as part of expert testimony for the class-action suit. “The emergency room doctor expressed serious hesitation to send him back to California City,” Wilcox wrote. The hesitation was justified. When Roque Campos returned to California City, his medical records and a letter from the E.R. doctor explaining his reluctance to discharge Roque Campos were confiscated. Roque Campos was then placed in an isolated observation cell for eight days, where he received medication sporadically. He would not see a doctor for over a month. This ordeal put Roque Campos “at significant risk for sudden cardiac death,” Wilcox concluded in his review, and he was not the only detainee facing this risk.

Fernando Viera Reyes, a fifty-year-old man detained by ICE, had been receiving adequate care at Golden State Annex, an ICE facility in the northern suburbs of Bakersfield, for elevated prostate-specific-antigen (P.S.A.) levels. In March, 2src25, Viera Reyes was seen by a urologist who insisted he get a prostate biopsy to find out whether cancer was present. But, before a biopsy could be conducted, Viera Reyes was transferred to California City, in late August. Despite Viera Reyes showing symptoms like bloody urine, C.C.D.F. medical staff only supplied him with Flomax, a medication used to treat enlarged prostates, on an infrequent basis. When he asked a doctor for pain medication, the doctor gave him Vitamin C. “I am very concerned I have prostate cancer and it is taking a very long time to get it diagnosed and treated,” Viera Reyes wrote in a declaration for the class-action lawsuit in early December.

Between January and October, Viera Reyes’s P.S.A. levels jumped from 6.3 to seventy-four, suggesting a very high likelihood of prostate cancer. Wilcox condemned his treatment. “Mr. Viera Reyes’s treatment as it relates to his prostate condition thus far at California City constitutes a complete dereliction of duty by the medical staff. Every day that this is delayed increases this patient’s risk for metastatic disease.”

Gustavo, yet another detainee at C.C.D.F. who has suffered from inadequate medical attention, spoke to me from inside the detention center, and asked me not to use his last name. He told me he thinks CoreCivic staff aren’t providing adequate medical care because they are basically waiting out the clock. They are acting as if “everybody who’s here is gonna be deported,” Gustavo told me. “That’s why I think that they don’t want to spend any money on medication, because they figure we’re just gonna get sent to Mexico.”

On December 16th, the California City Planning Commission held its second public hearing regarding CoreCivic’s repurposing of its facility. Even though the commission scheduled the hearing a week before Christmas, forty people spoke during public comment. One by one, they invoked Nazi concentration camps, Soviet gulags, and the Japanese internment camp at Manzanar, which had stood only a hundred and ten miles north of C.C.D.F. The public commenters condemned the planning commission for not doing more to stop CoreCivic and ICE. “You guys have blood on your hands already,” one said. “I think you’re in way over your heads. I don’t think you anticipated this happening in this little city,” another said. “I did not anticipate a concentration camp in my town.”

But the central question raised during public comment was procedural: How was C.C.D.F. even allowed to open in the first place if CoreCivic appeared to be in direct violation of California state law and local municipal codes?

“They’re open because they want to be open,” Marquette Hawkins, the mayor of California City, told me a few days after the planning commission’s hearing. “Are we, as a city, to go out there and station our thirteen officers around the building to blockade it? Are we, as the city—am I as a mayor—to go out there and lie in the middle of the street in front of the buses? I mean, what people are asking is not realistic.”

When I pressed Hawkins on the city taking a stand against ICE and CoreCivic, he responded that there is a calculation that must be made, “regardless of what my moral stance is,” adding that “the calculation is the revenue that CoreCivic brings with that facility and the jobs that it brings.” Hawkins acknowledged that the calculus sounds “distant and cold,” but he described himself as a pragmatist and dismissed many of the complaints of mistreatment specified in the class-action lawsuit. “That sounds bad, taking these things in isolation,” he said, but, citing conversations with the warden of the facility and in speaking with employees of C.C.D.F., he added that its possible detainees are “strategically” causing problems “to then go, ‘Well, I have to report on this because this is what happened.’ ”

This failure of municipal government to adequately address federal overreach in immigration policy is a pattern that ICE is relying on across the country to push its agenda forward. CoreCivic appears to be operating C.C.D.F. in violation of municipal code and state law without any consequences, and though it may not be the sole responsibility of Hawkins or the California City Planning Commission to hold CoreCivic, ICE, and D.H.S. accountable for everything that occurs at the facility, municipalities are a primary defense against potentially illegal activity within their city limits.

On December 22nd, after weeks of litigation, ICE and D.H.S. responded to a temporary restraining order filed on behalf of Yuri Alexander Roque Campos and Fernando Viera Reyes, demanding immediate care for the two men in the face of significant harm and potential death. The agencies agreed to send the two men to the necessary specialists within three weeks, and to “ensure timely compliance with all follow-up orders for treatment and medication.”

I reached out to CoreCivic about the health-care conditions at their facility. A company representative responded that “our health services teams follow both CoreCivic’s standards for medical care and the standards set forth by our government partners.” The company added that its staff are medical professionals “who contractually meet the highest standards of care.”

But, in November, the class-action suit alleges CoreCivic’s hiring page had nine open job listings related to medical care at C.C.D.F. By early December, eight of those listings were still open, including physician, psychiatrist, and advanced registered nurse practitioner. Just as the company seems to have rushed to open C.C.D.F. without proper legal approvals, they were still hiring medical professionals months after opening.

But staffing issues do not fully explain the lack of basic medical care at California City. “They do it so you give up,” Julio Cesar Santos Avalos, who was a detainee at California City from September to November, told me. When he arrived at C.C.D.F., Santos Avalos recalls a consistent push by staff for detainees to sign away their rights and self-deport. Instructions for how to self-deport are displayed prominently near phones where detainees communicate with their lawyers. Santos Avalos and many of the detainees and attorneys I spoke to believe the lack of medical care is part of that push. The detention center is aiming to make conditions so terrible that detainees stop fighting and decide to leave. Santos Avalos, who suffers from chronic pain owing to a foot deformity caused by childhood cases of polio and Guillain-Barré syndrome, was denied his pain medication and made to sleep on a top bunk until he broke under the pressure and self-deported to El Salvador.

I asked Julio Cesar Santos Avalos if he knows the next time he’ll be able to see his children, both of whom still live in California. “I can’t return as a permanent resident anymore,” Santos Avalos, who is in El Salvador for the first time since he left four decades earlier, at the age of seven, said. “And for what? Just because some guy says we’re illegal, we’re criminals? Look at Trump’s wife. His wife is a criminal too, then, right?”

In two years, Santos Avalos’s son may be able to apply for a visa on behalf of his father. In the meantime, he told me, “it hurts that I’m not there for them because I was there all the time for them. But, I talk to them every day, and I tell them I love them every day.”

Though all detainees at C.C.D.F. are meant to be held pursuant to laws regarding civil detention, the experience they describe is harsher and more restrictive than that of many criminal prisoners. “It’s important to locate the conditions at California City within this federal Administration’s punitive approach to immigrants,” Borden, the lawyer with Prison Law Office, told me. She cited a post on X, in February, 2src25, by Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, that told immigrants, “Do not come to this country or we will hunt you down, find you, and lock you up.” In August, Noem reiterated those comments when she told CBS News that “overwhelmingly, what encourages people to go back home voluntarily is the consequences.”

Mario Valenzuela views this messaging as the origin of much of the mistreatment in ICE detention. “The officers and everybody that falls below them, they feel emboldened to be aggressive like never before,” he told me. With each passing month, those aggressive tactics test the moral and legal boundaries, only to be met with insufficient resistance, which, in turn, emboldens the federal immigration apparatus to push it even further. “It’s coming from the top,” Valenzuela said, “this feeling that they can do whatever they want. There’s no accountability.” ♦