Immigration Detention – An Irredeemable System
On July 1, labor strikes broke out across immigration detention facilities in California once again. Weeks later, the labor strike escalated into a mass hunger strike, a follow up to the 35-day hunger strike in 2023.
The strikes are the latest chapter in a multi-year organizing effort to unmask the human rights abuses endemic to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) detention facilities. Detained immigrants have also sued the federal government, and the private corporations who run the facilities, for illegal retaliation and intimidation.
ICE has tried to hold up its grievance process as a way to address these issues. But at best, ICE’s grievance system only offers an illusion of justice, and at worst, it buries complaints and brings further harm to the people who use it.
In 2023, we worked with a brave set of detained leaders to create the California Immigration Detention Database, which tracks the grievances submitted by detained people in each facility, their topic, and their ultimate outcome. Our goal was to produce a record of the abuse that ICE was obscuring. A year after the database was first launched, we have received copies of 485 grievances filed across six immigration detention facilities in California. We are now publicizing those grievances in our new report, Resistance, Retaliation, Repression: Two Years in California Immigration Detention.
Together, the database and report document a persistent and recognizable pattern of abuse that pervades the whole system.
Hazardous Facilities and Inhumane Treatment:
The immigration detention facilities across California are consistently unfit for human habitation.
The most common reason for a grievance was inhumane conditions, as people are continually subjected to sanitation and safety issues. According to the grievances, ICE regularly allows the physical sites to degrade and slide into dangerous disrepair. Black mold runs across the walls of the showers and rots the buildings from the inside. Rusty ventilations systems spit dust and debris onto people’s bedding. Staff allow filth to accumulate in the bathrooms.
ICE and its private contractors ignore the complaints, or slow walk the repairs. Sometimes changes aren’t made until an outside watchdog like the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) writes them up, and even then, the OIG often only captures a sliver of the wrongdoings.
ICE also fails to meet the minimum standards of its own policies, like ensuring people have edible food. People’s grievances show that the detention facilities serve rotten meat and provide rancid water. To supplement their diets, people pay for food out of their pocket, and even then, the products they buy can suffer the same issues.
ICE is also supposed to guarantee outdoor time for people to exercise, breathe fresh air, and receive sunshine. But staff frequently prevent people from doing so, or pen people into bare, fenced-in concrete squares without any recreational equipment.
For more information on the conditions inside ICE’s detention facilities, read Pablo’s story.
Medical Neglect:
Many people held in immigration detention suffer from chronic conditions. Some develop new health problems, sometimes because of hazardous conditions or abusive treatment they experience while detained. Requests to see a doctor are ignored. If a medical appointment is made, follow-up is sporadic. ICE and facility staff leave medication unfilled, or otherwise disregard the prescribed treatment.
It is abundantly clear that the government cannot guarantee that its immigration detention centers will meet non-negotiable human rights standards.
The ACLU and others have sued ICE and its private contractors for refusing to take basic precautions to protect people from COVID-19. During the pandemic, ICE showed a remarkable indifference to the safety of the people it detains. ICE packed people into congregate settings where social distancing was impossible and refused to provide masks or sanitation supplies. People who tested positive were often left in rooms with others who were not yet infected. The virus predictably spread like wildfire across the facilities, infecting immigrants and staff alike, who, at that point, were unvaccinated. More recently, ICE has withheld potentially lifesaving treatments, like Paxlovid, from people who contract COVID.
These experiences are reflected in the data. We’ve received 94 grievances related to inadequate medical care, lack of COVID-19 protections, and denial of medication.
For more information on medical neglect in ICE detention, read Hector’s story.
Retaliation:
ICE answers people's complaints by instructing them to file a grievance. But when people do, they quickly find that their life inside the facilities gets much worse.
The grievances we’ve received include 56 complaints of bullying and harassment, 15 complaints related to sleep deprivation, 13 complaints related to sexual assault, and 59 complaints related to other forms of retaliation.
If people use the grievance system, they’re labeled as troublemakers. Facility staff may verbally taunt them and physically assault them. The grievances reflect numerous incidents of unnecessary pat-downs that are clearly intended to be sexually violating and degrading. When people object, they are told jeeringly to file another grievance. If they do, the harassment grows. Those who are most outspoken are placed in solitary confinement, some for a prolonged period of time which can constitute a form of torture under the United Nations’ standards.
In recent years, people in detention have reported that the retaliation by ICE and its contractors intensified once the strikes began. Strike leaders, in particular, face severe violence and intimidation that have left them with long-term health problems.
For more information on retaliation in ICE detention, read Jose Ruben’s story.
An Irredeemable System:
The ACLU and its partners have long warned that immigration detention is unnecessary. The data shows that immigrants who have legal counsel show up to their court hearings nearly one hundred percent of the time.
The data also shows that immigration detention is cruel. The hundreds of complaints detailed in our report illustrate, ICE cannot be trusted to care for the people it detains. Its history of negligence, brutality, and resistance to reform is well documented, and the database further confirms the record.
The same principle is true for GEO Group, CoreCivic, and Management and Training Corporation, the for-profit companies contracted by the government to run detention facilities. As private corporations, they cut corners and squeeze their facilities for profit. Addressing issues costs money, and it is obvious that ICE will not penalize them for their many misdeeds. Instead, they work together to hide injustices.
Existing oversight mechanisms are inadequate. When the Office of the Inspector General visited the Golden State Annex in April 2024, it found problems with providing timely medical care, sanitation, recreation opportunities, and recordkeeping. But the report did not once mention retaliation and harassment, which the database shows are among the most serious issues at the facility. Likewise, there are numerous other issues represented in the grievances that detained people have shared with us that the OIG did not mention, such as spoiled food and lack of COVID-19 precautions. Nor did the OIG mention the disturbingly high number of grievances that ICE wrongfully dismisses as unfounded. The OIG imposed no consequences on ICE for failing to meet their policies outside instructions to correct the recorded issues.
The checks in place are not up to the task, and the people trapped inside detention facilities don’t believe that the grievance system will offer them justice. They’ve seen firsthand how the grievance system often makes things worse for those it’s supposed to help. So, instead of relying on ICE, they took the matter into their own hands by sharing copies of the records with the outside world.
It is abundantly clear that the government cannot guarantee that its immigrant detention facilities will meet non-negotiable human rights standards. The very design of the system incentivizes and guarantees abuse. Immigrant detention is not something that can be fixed - it must be discarded.
