The Brief

Even with all the industries where Californians went on strike during last year’s “hot labor summer,” some of the most active sites of organizing in the state may well be a pair of private immigration detention centers in the Central Valley.

The Mesa Verde and Golden State Annex facilities, operated by The GEO Group, a Florida-based federal detention contractor, have been a hotbed of activism since the pandemic. But it’s not The GEO Group’s staff agitating for better pay and working conditions.

It’s their detainees — immigrants awaiting the outcomes of deportation cases or asylum claims, many of whom also work where they’re jailed, scrubbing bathrooms and cutting hair for $1 a day.

Detainees in the two Kern County facilities said this month they started the second labor and hunger strike in two years to protest poor working and living conditions. Two years ago, they sued over the program’s wages.

And during the 2022 strike, they prompted California workplace safety regulators to inspect the Golden State Annex facility and issue a citation to The GEO Group — showing how far the state is pushing the traditional boundaries of labor rights.

The case, alleging a “willful and serious” violation of state labor laws meant to prevent the spread of COVID-19, has turned heads. Labor and immigration policy experts believe it is the first time the state has treated detained immigrants as employees who benefit from workplace safety protections. The case is before a three-member appeals board of Cal/OSHA — the state’s occupational safety and health agency — as California grapples with whether to expand labor rights to state prisoners, including a proposition on the November ballot.

Even more novel: The state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health in May sent the U.S. Department of Homeland Security a request not to deport seven complainants for at least two years, under a Biden administration program to temporarily protect immigrant workers who are assisting with labor investigations.

“Cal/OSHA cannot properly pursue enforcement action without the cooperation of worker detainees in these situations,” agency chief Debra Lee wrote.

It’s “highly unusual, if not unique” for the state to ask federal immigration authorities to temporarily waive deportation for state witnesses against the immigration authorities’ contractor, said Anastasia Christman, senior policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project.

Cal/OSHA spokesperson Erika Monterroza declined to comment on the case as it is being appealed by the company. A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesperson also declined to comment.

The GEO Group’s corporate counsel Spencer Winepol did not respond to multiple requests for comment about detainees’ complaints, the Cal/OSHA citation or the current labor and hunger strikes.

The company, in its appeal of the citation and in prior public statements, has denied that detainees should be considered employees who were exposed to workplace hazards. It also argues the alleged violation was only technical, and has been corrected.

In the complaint, detainees said they weren’t informed of close contacts with others who had COVID-19; the state’s citation alleges the company did not maintain a required written plan for preventing the spread of the virus.

The company “vehemently disputes the notion that any of these individuals are employees,” attorneys for The GEO Group wrote to a Cal/OSHA appeals board administrative law judge in April 2023. “Rather, the named detainees were voluntary participants in a federally established Voluntary Work Program, designed to offer rehabilitation and job skill training.”

If the citation is upheld, it would be a victory for immigrants’ advocates who have pushed unsuccessfully for years to curb private detention facilities in California.

“It is uncharted territory both in terms of worker issues but also uncharted territory overall about what California can and can’t do versus these private entities,” said Hamid Yazdan Panah, advocacy director of Immigrant Defense Advocates, which has backed a ban on private detention in California. “We’ve continuously pushed the envelope on that.”

California fights private detention centers

In one of many moves against the Trump administration, state lawmakers in 2019 tried to ban private immigration detention centers from operating in California.

The for-profit facilities “contribute to over-incarceration” and “do not reflect our values,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement when signing the bill.

Instead, the Trump administration expanded immigration detention beds in California, including with The GEO Group, a global private prison giant that reported $2.4 billion in revenues last year. Under its new contract, the company opened the Golden State Annex facility in McFarland and immigration authorities began sending detainees there in 2020.

ICE pays the company to hold as many as 880 immigrants in its Golden State Annex and Mesa Verde facilities, though the numbers have been far lower, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a regularly updated database of immigration records at Syracuse University.

The company and federal government sued over California’s ban. It was ultimately overturned last year by the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which ruled the state was unconstitutionally overstepping on federal immigration enforcement.

But during the COVID pandemic, as outbreaks hit Mesa Verde and other ICE detention centers in California, there appeared to be confusion over whether local health departments had jurisdiction. Advocates called for stricter regulations.

In 2021, Newsom signed a law clarifying the facilities had to abide by local and state health orders. Another provision made them subject to state workplace safety rules.

The Golden State Annex, a U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement detention facility, in McFarland on July 8, 2024.

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Larry Valenzuela

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CalMatters/CatchLight Local

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One of the complainants in the Cal/OSHA case said he was sent to Golden State in late 2021, after being released from a state prison. But the living conditions, such as the food, were worse in the detention centers, he said.

The man, who was released last year after nearly two years in detention, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of jeopardizing ongoing legal cases. He said that he contracted COVID-19 in a dorm room with dozens of other detainees — allegations echoed in the Cal/OSHA complaint.

“I’m not going to say prison is a good thing, but a state prison is far more well-conditioned to be housed in,” he said.

Detainee jobs worse than prisoners?

The jobs were worse, too, the former detainee said, even as most California prison jobs pay less than 74 cents an hour.

ICE requires its detention contractors to provide voluntary work programs that improve “essential operations and services” and reduce the “negative impact of confinement” through “decreased idleness, improved morale and fewer disciplinary incidents.” While the work can take as many as eight hours a day, ICE requires the jobs to pay “at least” $1 a day; its contracts with The GEO Group show that’s how much the company budgets for the program.

Many participants take the jobs to afford food and hygiene products from the commissary, or phone calls to family. (A limited number of calls were free during the pandemic, but that’s recently been revoked, advocates said.) Common assignments include cleaning the dorms and bathrooms, and cutting fellow detainees’ hair.

Some even help care for other detainees. Ever Oropeza-Paz, who has been detained at the Golden State Annex for nearly two years, said he spent several months working as an aide for a dormmate who had a mental health condition. Oropeza-Paz said he was paid $1 a day to assist with basic tasks such as buying items in the commissary, using a tablet to communicate and teaching him how to shower.

“People are forced to work,” said Oropeza-Paz, who does not currently have a job in the facility. “They do it just to have the funds to make a quick call to their relatives.”

Critics of immigration detention have challenged the work program’s legality around the country.

Washington state’s attorney general and a group of detainees sued The GEO Group in 2017, arguing participants should have been paid the state minimum wage, which was $11 an hour at the time. A federal jury decided in 2021 the company owed $17 million in back wages to hundreds of immigrants who had cooked and cleaned.

In a lawsuit challenging the program at The GEO Group’s detention center in Adelanto, California, a federal judge decided in 2022 the detainees should be considered employees because the contractor paid them and dictated their hours and working conditions. The case is on hold as the Washington case is appealed.

And in July 2022, nine detainees at Mesa Verde and Golden State, represented by attorneys at the the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, sued The GEO Group over the work program’s wages.

At Golden State, the advocacy organization also helped file a workplace safety complaint. Detainees there complained of cleaning black mold without protective equipment, black dust in the heating and air conditioning system, and a lack of COVID-19 notification and testing protocols.

“There’s fungus on the bathroom floor, on the shower walls,” said the former detainee who made the comparison to state prisons and who echoed allegations in the Cal/OSHA complaint. “We weren’t given the proper equipment, we weren’t given the proper chemicals … We didn’t even get a small talk of what everything’s for.”

The detainees staged a work stoppage that summer. It ended up lasting nearly a year, into 2023, and escalated into a hunger strike. In a civil rights complaint to the Department of Homeland Security and a 2023 lawsuit, detainees claimed they experienced retaliation, including having family visits suspended and being placed in solitary confinement. They withdrew the suit when they ended the strikes.

The company told KQED in 2022 it didn’t consider detainees “choosing not to participate in a voluntary work program” to be on strike, and told other local media outlets last year that allegations of abuse were “baseless.”

A recent inspection of Golden State by the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog office found GEO Group staff were slow to respond to some medical complaints from detainees, and hadn’t fixed leaks that regularly caused pools of water on the floor, “forcing detainees to live in a potentially dangerous setting.”

But the department’s inspector general said the work program didn’t violate any ICE policies.

Detention company resists

Cal/OSHA accuses The GEO Group of resisting state inspections, according to case records obtained by CalMatters through a public records request.

After the agency opened an investigation in June 2022, The GEO Group “refused to produce any documents pertaining to worker detainees, taking the position that worker detainees are not employees” and told inspectors to request documents from ICE, Cal/OSHA senior safety engineer Greg Clark later declared in a court filing. But an August 2022 memo shows GEO employee and facility administrator Minga Wofford told Clark’s colleague that ICE wanted requests routed “through the facility.”

Wofford declined to comment.

When Clark and a colleague visited in August 2022 for a second inspection, Clark said the company “denied us access to worker detainees to conduct interviews with them.”

Cal/OSHA eventually got a warrant from a Kern County judge for the company to turn over documents about the work program and allow inspectors to speak with detainees. An inspector returned to the facility three times in December 2022, and issued citations that month, barely missing the six-month cutoff after which an investigation must be closed.

Among the citations are that the company blocked access to a chemical eyewash station, didn’t properly label chemicals in the barbershop and train workers on their uses, and failed to have a written plan to prevent the spread of airborne diseases such as COVID-19. Because there had been COVID cases, the agency issued that citation as a “serious” violation, bumping the total fines up to over $100,000.

Over the past year and a half, the appeals have centered on whether the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice and other advocacy groups, representing the detainees, can also participate in the legal case.

The GEO Group has pushed back, arguing that several of the detainees involved no longer are housed in the facility and that none were exposed to actual hazards in the work program.

“The citation in question is for a written policy deficiency,” company attorneys wrote to the Cal/OSHA appeals board last October. The detainees’ attorneys and Cal/OSHA disagreed; agency attorney Lidia Marquez wrote that “worker-detainees tasked with cleaning and maintenance assignments found themselves directly exposed to the hazard” of being at a higher risk of contracting the virus.

As those proceedings dragged out, Cal/OSHA asked the federal government to help keep the complainants in the country.

Cal/OSHA first tried in April 2023, and then again in May, this time writing to the Department of Homeland Security that the case will fall apart without witnesses and naming specific immigrants the state hopes can testify. One of the witnesses Cal/OSHA had interviewed, agency director Lee wrote, had already been deported.

“There have already been an alarming number of reports by worker detainees stating they are facing retaliation for cooperating with Cal/OSHA’s investigation,” she wrote. “The loss of one witness is a setback to Cal/OSHA’s enforcement action, which is why immediate protection for the remaining witnesses is critical.”

Homeland Security declined to comment on Cal/OSHA’s request in The GEO Group case, and a spokesperson did not answer questions about the deportation protection program, known as deferred action. Earlier this year, the department said it’s granted more than 1,000 workers involved in labor investigations nationwide such protections.

It’s not clear how the department will handle California’s request. Lisa Knox, co-director of the collaborative representing detainees, said the workers are still in the process of using Cal/OSHA’s letter to apply for deportation protections individually.

Meanwhile, ICE has steadily sent more immigrants to the Golden State center. Records show the detainee population in June was more than 300 people — double the number a year ago.

Twenty years ago, a Los Angeles DJ put out an album that asked a question nobody had quite answered yet: Could the turntable be a lead instrument?

Not just a tool, but the thing carrying the whole record?

Lucas McFadden, also known as Cut Chemist, said “yes.”

His debut solo album, The Audience’s Listening, dropped in 2006 after years of work, sample clearances and a clean break from the group that made him famous. He was a founding member of Jurassic 5, and before that, Ozomatli.

Two decades later, he's been revisiting that record in a series called Expert of None. It’s an intimate show at Only the Wild Ones in Venice, where he traces the records that shaped him right up to this album. The final installment of the series is scheduled for August 2.

“It's a record that I periodically revisit throughout my life just to kind of see where I've been and to know where I need to go next,” McFadden said. “I always like to do something different from what I've done before. This is the year where I really go back and trace the steps of the building blocks that made that record and who I was as an artist leading up to that.”

The art of mixing

Few fans know the behind-the-scenes work it takes for DJs and producers to track down sounds and then get the permission to use them. McFadden said finding and presenting music are two very different processes.

“I feel like a matchmaker, so to speak, because no one else would take things which are from completely opposite ends of the globe and put them together in the same composition,” McFadden said. “Then, you have to track down the artist to ask their permission. It's very interesting and rewarding when they say yes.”

McFadden walked away from the success of Jurassic 5 to devote his time to a solo career. He said the change gave him increased freedom but also increased pressure.

“It was very scary to leave something so successful and really at its peak to do something where I was responsible for both the failures and the successes on my own,” McFadden said. “I couldn't share that blame with anybody. It was all on me. So, I remember putting a lot of pressure on myself, because I was the one in the spotlight. Then the successes were twice as sweet in that regard as well.”

The result was his debut, The Audience’s Listening, which McFadden says is very much an L.A. record.

“I was raised on L.A. radio,” McFadden said.  "Being from here and being in groups like Ozomatli and Jurassic 5, I feel like those two groups couldn't exist anywhere else. They are such a byproduct of the city, coming from places like The Good Life in South Central. L.A. is such a melting pot, and I feel like my life in music is the same reflection of that as well.”

Revisiting the past to create the present

McFadden has been tracing the records that led to The Audience’s Listening during his "Expert of None" events at Only the Wild Ones in Venice. The immersive listening residency explores musical discovery and crate digging culture, revealing the records and influences that shaped the album.

“It's been incredible,” McFadden said. “There's so many things about my life that I didn't realize until I sat down and thought about them in the context of discovering music.”

McFadden says his younger self would be very pleased with the legacy of The Audience’s Listening.

“People still regard it as an album that’s important to them for the DJ culture,” McFadden said. “When it came out in the mid-2000s, DJs were kind of fading away, at least turntablists were. Another type of DJ was emerging, which was a laptop DJ. That opened the door for a lot of people that in some cases probably shouldn't be DJs, but wouldn't if this technology didn't exist. So, it was a very confusing time to put out a DJ turntablist record. I feel like I did well, and after 20 years of thinking about it and living in that world, I'm happy where it stands.”

Tickets for Cut Chemist’s Aug. 2 event at Only the Wild Ones are currently sold out, but fans can join a waiting list.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A judge ruled Monday that there is enough evidence to put singer D4vd on trial in the killing and dismemberment of 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez after, authorities said, she had threatened to expose their relationship and crater his career.

Los Angeles Judge Charlaine Olmedo decided the evidence prosecutors presented at a preliminary hearing that spanned five days provided probable cause for a trial on charges of murder, continuous sexual abuse of a child under the age of 14 and unlawful mutilation of human remains.

“The people have met their burden on all counts,” Olmedo said. She ordered that Burke continue to be held without bail.

D4vd, the 21-year-old singer born David Burke whose career was steeply rising before the allegations emerged, has pleaded not guilty. He showed no emotion when the judge issued her ruling. Defense lawyers declined to comment outside court after the ruling.

Olmedo emphasized that the probable cause standard for a preliminary hearing like this is much lower than the threshold at trial. However, prosecutors asserted the evidence was overwhelming.

“Based on the mountains of evidence presented,” Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman said, “all of the allegations have been proved way beyond the standard required.”

Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman said outside court that prosecutors are still weighing whether to seek the death penalty. Burke is to be arraigned Aug. 31.

Prosecutors on Monday wrapped up their case by giving a moment-by-moment account of Rivas Hernandez’s last night, showing that after a stream of text messages with Burke, her phone went permanently silent when she arrived at his home.

As she neared his Hollywood home shortly after 10 a.m. on April 23, 2025, in an Uber he had sent to pick her up, she sent her final text: “girly pop i’m almost there open ur door if ur home.”

Prosecutors allege Burke stabbed her to death when she came through the door.

The night before, the two argued via text about his relationship with a woman. She sent him an angry and profane text saying she will tell her dad so many lies about him and “i will end ur career and ur life.”

Prosecutors said that Burke met Rivas Hernandez when she was 11, began sexually abusing her when she was 13 and he was 18, stabbed her to death when she threatened to report him and ruin his career, and cut up her body in his garage with chain saws.

Prosecutors said they have records showing Burke ordered chain saws and wading pools that he used to dismember her body in his garage, and that her DNA was found there on blood stains discovered when police served a search warrant.

They said he then drove around for weeks and even months with the body in the trunk. Her decomposing body was found in the Tesla registered to Burke that was towed from the Hollywood Hills in September, a little more than four months later.

Prosecutors said the car was parked around the corner from his house, and surveillance video will show he was the last person to drive it.

Defense argues there’s insufficient evidence for murder

After the final witness on Monday, the defense argued that the evidence was insufficient and the murder charge should be dismissed.

“There’s no evidence that Mr. Burke harbored a deliberate intent to kill Miss Hernandez,” said Burke’s attorney, Marilyn Bednarski.

She said the communications between Burke and Rivas Hernandez showed “no threat, no evidence of a history of violence” and that he had “the opposite of homicidal malice” toward her.

She argued that a medical examiner ruling that her death was a homicide from two puncture wounds was too vague and inconclusive to be evidence of murder. The defense did not directly give an alternative theory on how she died and isn’t required to.

The defense showed several other texts from Rivas Hernandez threatening him about their relationship, and saying she would go to Burke’s mother, talk to his friends and “leak” information about them.

Under questioning from defense attorney Blair Berk, Farrell said he saw no indication that she ever threatened to go to police or pursue any legal action against him.

The defense also established that she had asked seven times to come to see him in the days before her death, and he reluctantly agreed only after she demanded it, and that she had threatened to kill Burke and to mutilate him.

The defense argued that all of the malice had come from her.

Silverman told the judge that “the defense tried numerous times throughout these proceedings to dirty up the victim” despite her being a child.

The detective also said under questioning from Berk that the parents of both Burke and Rivas Hernandez knew about their relationship, that he had attended church with members of her family and that her parents had given their consent for her to go to London with him for a week.

Prosecution alleges D4vd immediately began covering up the killing

After her phone went silent, Burke sent her several other messages that night asking where she was, and expressing concern. Prosecutors allege those messages were sent as cover after he had killed her.

Prosecutors allege Burke dismembered the body in his garage. A police analyst testified earlier in the hearing that samples pulled from apparent blood stains there matched her DNA.

Her body was found in a Tesla registered to him nearly five months later.

Detective documents sexual abuse

In earlier testimony, Farrell recounted dozens of sexually explicit photos of Burke and Rivas Hernandez and years of text messages that described the same things, along with conversations that indicated she had gotten an abortion in 2024 at 13 after he got her pregnant.

Farrell described the photos that could not be shown in court, material so graphic that it left Rivas Hernandez’s mother in tears and prompted both parents to leave the courtroom on Friday. They were back in court Monday.

D4vd’s career was reaching new heights at time of killing

D4vd (pronounced “David”) became an online musical phenomenon as a teen with a blend of indie rock, R&B and lo-fi pop. He had huge followings on TikTok, Soundcloud and Spotify, where his top songs, including his 2022 breakthrough “Romantic Homicide,” have more than a billion plays.

In 2024 he played the Coachella music festival and released his first full-length album, “Withered,” two days after authorities say Rivas Hernandez was killed.