A previously confidential report obtained by NPR continued to find horrific abuses at California’s Adelanto Detention Center—an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility operated by private prison profiteer GEO Group—including keeping detainees in solitary for long periods of time and poor medical care that probably contributed to further injury and even death. Adelanto should be closed, and new state law aimed to do that. Instead, officials have not only rushed to keep it running, but to expand it.
“Despite the report's findings—and repeated, scathing criticism of the facility from the federal government's own internal watchdogs—ICE decided at the end of 2019 to renew and expand a contract to keep the Adelanto facility open,” NPR reports. “The report dates to late 2017, but attorneys and advocates say the problems identified in the report have persisted. ICE declined to respond to specific findings in the report.”
That report, released by the Department of Homeland Security's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and obtained by NPR through the Freedom of Information Act, found that one detainee was held in a Special Management Unit, more commonly known as solitary, which is torture, for 426 days. "No detainee should be held in the SMU for this amount of time,” the report said. “Isolation alone can create physical safety concerns and can result in mental decompensation.” Investigators also continued to expose deficient medical care that was apparently causing more harm than good.
“In 2015, CRCL clearly warned Adelanto that clinical leadership was not competent and that negligent medical care was occurring as a result,” the report continued. “In 2017—two years later—no correction was made to address this critical failure. It is more likely than not that the failure to hire an effective, qualified clinical leader led to the inadequate detainee medical care that contributed to medical injuries, including bone deformities and detainee deaths, and continues to pose a risk to the safety of other detainees at [Adelanto].” Further disturbing trends since have included investigators finding nooses in more than a dozen cells during a surprise 2018 inspection.
The 2017 report recommended that if improvements could not be quickly carried out, “that ICE pull detainees from this facility until the medical care can be brought into alignment.” Instead, GEO Group and ICE rushed to sign new contracts just days before a new law banning private immigration detention centers in the state went into effect, with Adelanto’s agreement expanding the facility by more than 700, NPR reported. GEO Group, which gets a majority of its revenue from mass jailing immigrants, has also sued the state over the law.
NPR further reported that while a version of this Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties report was released by a watchdog group last fall following a public records lawsuit, “the government had more heavily redacted critical findings and recommendations,” raising fears about what other kinds of abuses officials are keeping secret from the public. "It's kind of confounding why they withheld some of this information [from us]," Nick Schwellenbach of Project on Government Oversight told NPR.