California’s Newest Immigration Facility Is Also Its Biggest. Is It Operating Legally?

A new immigration detention facility has quietly opened in California’s Mojave Desert, even though the private prison company that owns it may lack the permits to operate.

The California City Detention Facility in Kern County is set to become the largest immigration detention center in the state, with a capacity of 2,560 beds. It’s part of the Trump administration’s push for a massive expansion of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention nationally.

The reopened prison in California City, a small town 100 miles north of Los Angeles, would significantly increase ICE’s ability to hold immigrants for deportation in the state. For most of the past year, ICE has held roughly 3,600 people a day on average across its six other California facilities.

CoreCivic, the Tennessee-based private prison company that owns and operates the facility, confirmed it has begun receiving ICE detainees but would not say when it started to do so. Lawyers for detained immigrants say they first heard last week that clients were being transferred from other locations to California City.

“We are once again housing federal detainees to meet the immediate needs of our government partners,” CoreCivic spokesperson Ryan Gustin said in a statement. He added that the company was responding “to an immediate need from the federal government for safe, humane and appropriate housing and care for these individuals.”

Yet immigrant rights advocates who oppose the facility claim CoreCivic is operating without proper permits and in defiance of a state law that requires 180 days’ public notice and two public meetings before a local government can issue a permit allowing a private company to run an immigration jail.

CoreCivic built the prison in the 1990s with a capacity of 2,300 inmates. It contracted first with the federal government and then with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which operated it as a state prison. The state ended its contract in 2023 as part of an effort to reduce incarceration. The prison has sat empty since.

‘Significant public health and safety risks’

Grisel Ruiz, an attorney with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in San Francisco, said CoreCivic still needs a city business license and a conditional use permit, arguing that an immigration detention center differs significantly from a long-term prison.

“They are operating unlawfully,” she told the California City Planning Commission at its meeting Tuesday. “We urge the Planning Commission to hold CoreCivic accountable to local municipal code and state law.”

Ruiz was one of dozens of immigrant advocates, business owners, faith leaders and local residents who spoke in opposition to the project at the packed meeting on Tuesday night. Many called on the commission to shut down CoreCivic’s facility for operating without permits.

Chair David Brottlund said commissioners could not act on an issue unless staff presented them with an agenda item, and that he city council could overrule them.

The five-member city council has not had a quorum to function for weeks, after two members stepped down and another has missed meetings. As a result, Mayor Marquette Hawkins said the council has not had a chance to discuss the facility.

The company has applied for a business license, but the application is still pending. In an Aug. 5 Planning Commission report, city planner Anu Doravari noted: “Business license will be considered for approval once Fire & Building Dept. requirements and inspections are met.”

The facility failed a fire department inspection in late July.

In a July 29 letter to CoreCivic describing the deficiencies, City Manager Christopher Lopez wrote that the building is unsafe and violates the fire code because its construction prevents radio signals from transmitting from key areas, including the location of the fire alarm control panel, mechanics shop, IT server rooms and some inmate cells.

“Risks to the public’s health and safety are of such significance that the City cannot permit or otherwise allow for the operation of the facility at this time and in its current condition,” he wrote.

Lopez was unavailable for comment on whether the fire safety issue had been resolved and what permits city staff believe CoreCivic must obtain.

Gustin said CoreCivic had addressed all the concerns raised in the letter and had “submitted all required information for the business license.”

Hawkins said in an interview that the city lacks jurisdiction over what a private business does, “as long as they have their ducks in a row.”

“In the case of the immigration processing center, which has the federal layer of protection, there’s even less that we can do as a municipality in terms of how we regulate what they do and whether or not their doors open,” he said.

Hawkins said some residents expressed concern that the CoreCivic facility put too much pressure on the desert city’s water and sewer systems. He acknowledged that those systems are fragile but said the prison was not the source of the problem. The detention facility, he added, is already creating jobs and will augment the city’s tax revenue.

He referred questions about licensing to the city manager and city planner— neither of whom responded to KQED’s requests for comment by press time.

‘Incarcerating farmworkers and nannies’

Jonathan Montes Diaz, a 33-year-old California man detained at the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield, said he had first-hand experience of what he called the “poor infrastructure” at the California City facility when it was operating as a state prison.

“It’s up there with some of the worst time I’ve been in prison,” said Montes Diaz, who served a criminal sentence there and said he did not ever want to go back.

In April of 2023, a water line ruptured, cutting off drinking water and the
ability to flush toilets. Montes Diaz recalls a couple of days, before portable toilets were installed, when prison staff issued plastic bags to inmates to relieve themselves.

“I had it better than others,” he said. “I was the main baker and the little water we had was prioritized for the kitchen, so I was able to use the restroom.”

CDCR spokesperson Mary Xjimenez confirmed the break but said staff provided bottled water and portable toilets within 24 hours. She said CDCR “did not issue plastic bags and did not condone this use,” adding that CoreCivic, the building’s owner, carried out the repair.

Montes Diaz said the warden at Mesa Verde told him late last week that some detainees would soon be transferred to the California City facility.

ICE did not respond to KQED’s questions, including whether it had inspected the facility prior to housing detainees there and why it was placing people at a facility that is so far not licensed to do business in California City.

Under state law, the California attorney general has authority to inspect conditions at privately-owned immigration detention facilities in California.

Nina Sheridan, a spokesperson for Attorney General Rob Bonta, said in an email that these reviews “remain especially critical in light of efforts by the Trump Administration to both eliminate federal oversight of conditions at immigration detention facilities and increase their inhumane campaign of deportation.”

She added: “As we’ve shown in recent reports, conditions at these facilities are already substandard in a number of areas, failing to meet ICE’s own detention standards.”

In April, the federal government awarded CoreCivic a six-month, $31 million contract to prepare and reopen the facility. To date, $13.5 million of that has been spent.

In an emailed statement, an ICE spokesperson who would not identify themself said the agency has “an urgent operational need to house the historic number of arrests and removals.”

Expanding detention is “critical to restoring law and order,” the statement said, adding that ICE is working to “bring online over 60 new detention facilities, to include California City. These contracts ensure ICE has the resources and infrastructure required to detain individuals who violate our immigration laws and to carry out its enforcement mission effectively.”

Some residents of the desert community told KQED in early summer that they hoped that restarting the prison facility would bring new jobs to their struggling town. Others said, while they voted for President Donald Trump, they disagreed with ICE tactics of arresting non-criminals and breaking apart families.

In recent years, ICE has had six detention centers in California, all of them privately-owned. The largest until now was Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego County, with a contractual capacity of 1,358 beds. These facilities are becoming increasingly overcrowded, as the White House has pushed agents to meet a goal of 3,000 arrests per day.

ICE is currently detaining more than 61,000 people nationwide, up from 39,000 at the start of the year. Immigration detention is not a criminal sentence — it is civil detention while people await deportation or fight their cases in immigration court. Advocates argue that ICE detention is cruel and unnecessary.

At the Tuesday evening planning commission meeting in California City, advocates warned that once ICE facilities are opened, there’s growing pressure to fill them.

Ruiz, the ILRC attorney, told commissioners: “The decisions being made right now will impact this community for decades to come. Detention centers operate for decades, and we know that California City is better than that. California City deserves to be known as more than a prison town.”

Another speaker was United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta. The 95-year-old Kern County resident waited nearly 90 minutes for her turn at the microphone during public comment.

Standing at the podium, she called Trump’s mass detention and deportation plan a move toward authoritarianism, and decried the $45 billion in new Congressional funding for ICE detention “to incarcerate farmworkers and nannies.”

“Are we going to fight back?” she asked the commissioners. “This is our test … You have to stand up to this prison system here in California City. You can do it. Si se puede.”