California Senators Visit Immigration Jail Ahead of Looming ICE Funding Bill Deadline

California’s U.S. senators expressed grave concerns about conditions at the state’s newest and largest immigration jail, and said they will not support an upcoming bill to further increase funding for immigration enforcement, after a visit Tuesday.

Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff spent four hours inside the California City Detention Facility, a privately-owned former prison about 100 miles north of Los Angeles, where they met with the warden and spoke with a number of detained immigrants.

They came away with stories of people in detention struggling to access health care for serious conditions — including a diabetic woman who was denied her medication for two months, Schiff said.

“The most frequent feedback we got was the inadequacy of the medical care they are receiving,” he added. “That’s frightening.”

The immigration detention facility, owned and operated by the private, for-profit prison company CoreCivic, currently holds about 1400 people, the senators said, but it has a capacity for 2,560 detainees. It opened in late August, under a two-year, $130 million contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The detainee population has grown steadily, and CoreCivic has said it expects to fill the place early this year.

Previously, California leased the facility for use as a state prison, until ending its contract in 2024 as state efforts reduced the incarcerated population.

While much attention has been focused on the Trump administration’s increasingly violent deployment of ICE officers in American cities, the conditions inside ICE detention facilities are a hidden side of the immigration crackdown, Schiff said.

“These indiscriminate immigration raids — the heartbreak, the families separated from one another, the loss of life, as we saw in Minneapolis — that’s one trauma. When you walk inside these walls, you experience a different trauma,” he said. “I am most particularly concerned about the medical issue, because that can be life or death.”

Deaths in detention continue to rise. Last year, 32 people died in ICE facilities, a level not seen in more than two decades. And in just the first three weeks of 2026, ICE has reported that six more people have died.

Padilla noted that immigration detention is a form of civil detention, typically used to hold people while their deportation cases play out in immigration court. It is not intended as a punishment for a crime and ICE itself defines the custody as “non-punitive.”

However, the deficient conditions — including adequate nutrition, medical attention and mental health care — add up to a punishing environment, the senator said.

“I’m leaving here even more concerned than I was when I arrived,” Padilla said.

Brian Todd, a spokesman for CoreCivic, rejected charges of inadequate food, water, blankets and other basics. And he insisted that health care access is not a problem for detainees.

“Our clinic is staffed with licensed, credentialed doctors, nurses and mental health professionals who meet the highest standards of care,” he said. “All detainees have daily access to sign up for medical care and mental health services.”

ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

Democratic lawmakers want to visit ICE facilities

California’s attorney general and a state watchdog group, Disability Rights California, have both issued reports calling conditions at the California City facility “dangerous.” Earlier this month, Bay Area Rep. Ro Khanna made his own oversight visit and announced he was “horrified” by what he found.

Like Khanna, the senators scheduled the visit more than a week in advance, following a recent requirement imposed by ICE. By law, members of Congress have a right to conduct oversight of immigration facilities unannounced.

However, representatives have repeatedly been turned away from visiting detention centers over the past year, including three Minnesota representatives earlier this month. A challenge brought by several Democratic lawmakers in July is currently making its way through the courts.

Padilla said Democrats shouldn’t be the only ones taking a hard look at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, especially given the rising in-custody deaths.

“The Republican majority in Congress, in the House and the Senate, is failing, absolutely failing — or refusing — to live up to their oversight responsibility to hold a separate but co-equal branch of government accountable,” he said.

ICE funding clash looms over massive spending bill

In July, as part of a reconciliation package known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Congress gave ICE an unprecedented $45 billion to expand detention over the next four years, effectively quadrupling ICE’s annual detention budget.

Those funds facilitated a swift expansion from 39,000 people in detention a year ago to roughly 70,000 today. They could potentially enable ICE to scale up to as many as 135,000 detention beds, analysts say.

In the coming days, Congress is poised to take up a massive appropriations bill that includes additional resources for the Department of Homeland Security, as well as funding for other agencies.

The bill is aimed at averting a funding lapse by a Jan. 30 deadline, months after the longest government shutdown in U.S. history last fall.

Many Democrats have stated that they would reject any funding bill without restrictions for ICE, after an officer shot and killed Minneapolis protester Renee Macklin Good on Jan. 7. After their visit, Padilla and Schiff said they also opposed additional funding for DHS without restraints.

“I don’t plan on supporting it because … I have yet to see any additional guardrails or protections [on] all the DHS activity that I’ve seen [is] out of control,” Padilla said. “We want to rein it in, and I haven’t seen that yet.”

Schiff added that the agency needs more oversight, not more money.

“ICE has been given, in that reconciliation bill, tens of billions of dollars,” he said. “They have more money than the militaries of a lot of countries around the world.”