Groups challenge conditions at California migrant detention center

WASHINGTON — Civil rights groups filed a lawsuit over conditions at the largest immigration detention center in California, as migrant advocates and Democratic members of Congress have pressed for more oversight of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement expansion.

The complaint in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, filed Wednesday, focuses on detainees at the California City Detention Facility, a previously shuttered state prison in the Mojave Desert that the U.S. has repurposed as an ICE detention facility.

The ACLU and other groups describe a range of inhospitable conditions at the facility that they call unconstitutional, including a lack of access to medical care, insufficient accommodations for people with disabilities and infringement upon religious exercise of detainees.

“Conditions at California City Detention Facility are dire,” the complaint states. “The facility is decrepit. Sewage bubbles up from the shower drains, and insects crawl up and down the walls of the cells. People are locked in concrete cells the size of a parking space for hours on end, and officers threaten them with violence and solitary confinement. Food is paltry and people go hungry.”

Other federal courts have ordered the Trump administration to remedy issues at other immigration detention centers. A federal judge in New York ruled in August the Trump administration must immediately improve the conditions at 26 Federal Plaza, including new limits capacity, greater cleanliness and sleeping mats for detainees.

And a federal judge in Illinois issued a temporary restraining order this month putting the Broadview detention center under court-ordered supervision, citing allegations detainees were forced to sleep in plastic chairs near overflowing toilets.

Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, were among the Democratic members of Congress who sought to visit the Broadview facility and other centers to scrutinize the Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations.

Durbin, in a news release last month, said he and Duckworth “have repeatedly requested to conduct oversight on the conditions inside of the Broadview ICE facility and have been unable to. What does President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security have to hide?”

House Democrats have filed a lawsuit in Washington contending the Trump administration is unlawfully denying lawmakers and their staffs from oversight visits.

Rep. Veronica Escobar of Texas, a Democrat and member of the House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, sent a letter to the Trump administration last week detailing continued concerns about the inhumane conditions at Camp East Montana, including concerns about food and water quality.

“According to detainees that my staff and I have heard from, the drinking water at the facility continues to taste foul, the food quality for detainees has not improved, and some detainees are skipping meals altogether due to a lack of dietary accommodations,” Escobar wrote. “Detainees have shared that their dormitory pods are cleaned only once every eight days, despite pods housing up to 72 people at a time.”

California case

The California City center is now a privately owned immigration center operated by CoreCivic. ICE awarded the company a contract worth $130 million annually to hold up to 2,560 immigrants at the facility, the lawsuit says.

The reconciliation package signed into law by President Donald Trump included $45 billion specifically for the expansion of immigration detention facilities as part of the $170 billion overall boost for border security enforcement.

The lawsuit includes brief stories from each of the seven plaintiffs documenting abuses.

One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Yuri Alexander Roque Campos, has a heart anomaly, but has been denied his heart medications for days at a time, resulting in two emergency hospitalizations for severe chest pain. Another plaintiff, Gustavo Guevara Alarcon, alleges he was threatened with discipline that was excessive, including placement in solitary confinement for asking to finish his shower.

Sokhean Keo, another named plaintiff in the lawsuit, said ICE officials at the facility “treat people like they’re trash, like they’re nothing.”

“Some of the people I’m detained with don’t even have soap — they take showers without soap — and they’re losing weight because they don’t have enough to eat,” Keo said.

The lawsuit seeks certification of a class-action lawsuit for all detainees at the California City Detention Facility as well as a declaration the conditions are unlawful under the First and Fifth Amendments as well as the Rehabilitation Act.

The Justice Department deferred to the Department of Homeland Security and ICE for comments on the litigation, which didn’t immediately respond via an email request.

Christopher Chestnut, a warden at the California City Correctional Facility, defended the treatment of migrants at the center in an op-ed published last week in the Bakersfield Californian.

Chestnut asserted a “number of allegations have circulated that don’t reflect the facts” and officials at the facility “care for each person respectfully and humanely while they move through the legal process,” making sure they have access to visitors, three meals a day and comprehensive medical care available any time.

The response came after an apparent sit-in and hunger strike of detainees in mid-September. As documented in the ACLU lawsuit, detained people organized themselves across multiple housing units and staged peaceful, nonviolent demonstrations in protest of their conditions of confinement.