It's Saturday morning and the women of the Contreras family are busy in Montclair, California, making pupusas, tamales and tacos. They're working to replace the income of José Contreras, who has been held since last June at Southern California's Adelanto ICE Processing Center, a privately run immigration detention center.
José's daughter, Giselle, drives around in an aging minivan collecting food orders. First a hospital, then a car wash, then a local bank.
Giselle's father crossed from Guatemala more than two decades ago, without authorization to enter the U.S. He worked in construction until agents picked him up and brought him to Adelanto.
Giselle says her father languished there for three months without his diabetes medication. Now, she says, the guards give it to him at odd times during the day and night. And, she says, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents took his eyeglasses so he can't read legal documents or write letters.
"My aunt tried to take in glasses for him but they don't allow for us to give them anything," Giselle tells me as she steers the minivan. "They tell us that they give them everything they need." When I ask if her father has glasses now, she says, "No, he doesn't. He doesn't have glasses."
Giselle says her father, who is 60 years old, is terrified of being deported, and she says the regimented world inside Adelanto is driving him into a deep depression.
"His conversations now have become shorter," she says. "He doesn't talk to us and ask, 'How's your day? How you been?' He's always looking down at the ground; he doesn't want to make eye contact for the same reason that he's so depressed."
José's sister, Maria Contreras, visits her brother every Saturday. She's urged him to see a psychologist at Adelanto, but he tells her that even though he filled out a medical request, he doesn't get any help. "No response, or anything," Maria says.
Adelanto sits on a desolate stretch of road in the high desert about an hour north of the city of Riverside. Nearly 2,000 men and women are held here. Some arrived recently during the surge in border crossings. Others lived in the U.S. — undocumented and undetected — for years. In the visiting room, where detainees are brought in wearing blue, orange or red baggy pants and tops, a sign on the wall reads, "Don't give up hope."
The facility, run by a federal contractor, GEO Group, a for-profit company based in Boca Raton, Florida that runs private prisons has a troubled past. During an unannounced visit last year, federal inspectors from the Department of Homeland Security's Office of the Inspector General found "nooses" made out of bed sheets in 15 out of 20 cells. The inspectors found guards overlooked the nooses even though a detainee had committed suicide using a bedsheet in 2017 and several others had attempted suicide using a similar method. The government audit concluded GEO Group guards improperly handcuffed and shackled detainees, unnecessarily placed detainees in solitary confinement and failed to provide adequate medical care.
A separate investigation of Adelanto and other immigration detention facilities in California released in February by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra found similar health and safety problems and concluded that detainees were treated like prisoners, some kept in their cells for 22 hours a day, even though they have not been charged with a crime. A state law passed in 2017 directs the state to inspect and report on the treatment of immigrant detainees held in California.
In a March 27 letter to GEO Group, Adelanto City Manager Jessie Flores informed the private prison operator that the contract would expire in 90 days, KQED reported.
