The Brief

The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights announced a new lawsuit Monday against federal immigration agencies for claims of inhumane conditions at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County.

The organization claims people detained in the Adelanto facility lack drinkable water, healthy food, clean clothes, places to sleep and access to medical care. Failing to provide these basic necessities, CHIRLA says in court documents, amounts to punishment — violating detainees rights to due process.

“ We are really at a moment where we are seeing a human rights crisis right before our eyes,” CHIRLA policy director Jeanette Zanipatin said at a news conference Monday. “And the detention centers, especially the one at Adelanto, is where we are seeing it unfold in real time.”

Immigrant Defenders Law Center, Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP and Public Counsel are assisting in the case against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security.

 ”We're asking both that the judge force Adelanto, the detention facility, to ensure that basic medical care is being provided, that basic hygiene and sanitary conditions, food and water are provided, and that oversight is conducted over the facility,” said Alvaro Huerta, director of litigation and advocacy at Immigrant Defenders Law Center.

ICE and Homeland Security have not responded to LAist about the case or claims in this article.

A question of constitutional rights

When CHIRLA announced the lawsuit on Monday, Zanipatin said there has been “a long history of unsafe and abusive conditions” at the Adelanto facility. She referenced a July 2025 report from the nonprofit Disability Rights California that found conditions at the facility were “dangerous and inadequate for all people, especially for those with disabilities.”

Court documents filed by CHIRLA also reference previous reports that found issues at the facility, including a 2018 report from the DHS Office of Inspector General that found “a number of serious issues that violate ICE’s 2011 Performance-Based National Detention Standards and pose significant health and safety risks at the facility.”

Those issues included findings of nooses in detainees’ cells, improper use of disciplinary segregation and inadequate medical care.

“Based on interviews with detainees and medical staff and a review of independent reports,” the report states, “we concluded that detainees do not have timely access to proper medical care.”

CHIRLA claims in their lawsuit that Adelanto leadership rejected the findings of the inspector general report and took no corrective action.

The concerns raised by CHIRLA as they announced the lawsuit closely resemble the findings of Disability Rights California, which also claimed detainees were not provided adequate medical care, food, water or clean clothing. The organization also reported that some people had limited access to communication with their loved ones.

Huerta claimed that the conditions in the Adelanto facility are poor by design.

“ Adelanto, like most ICE prisons, is engineered to be so punishing, so relentlessly soul crushing, that people abandon their rights and accept deportation even when they have strong asylum claims or a clear pathway to legal status,” Huerta said.

He said 32 people died while detained by ICE nationwide in 2025, and at least 6 more have died in January. Two people died at Adelanto last fall, Huerta said.

Family members speak out

Mariel Garcia told LAist she would call her father, Gabriel Garcia-Aviles, nearly every day. That ended when he was detained by immigration agents in Costa Mesa on Oct. 14.

Garcia-Aviles had a work permit, his daughter said, but he was detained and taken to Adelanto. She said she tried many times to ask the facility staff to allow her to call her father, or even to get an update on his condition, but she was never able to talk to him again.

Worried, she said she got a call from the staff at Adelanto.

“ They called me the day he was passing away,” Garcia told LAist, “They're like, go tell your family and friends to come and say their last goodbyes because your father's in critical condition.”

Her brother, Gabriel Garcia, said that when they arrived at the hospital their father was intubated and “lifeless." Still, he said, there were law enforcement officers standing outside the hospital room.

Garcia-Aviles died Oct. 23 at age 56.

Jose Ayala also talked about the loss of his brother, Ismael Ayala-Uribe, while he was detained in the Adelanto facility.

“ He was there for about a month and we knew nothing of his condition,” Ayala said at Monday’s press conference, “just that he was sick and that he wasn't getting any help when he asked.”

Ayala said his family learned of his brother’s death when the police came and knocked at their door. He said staff at Adelanto did not tell them Ayala-Uribe had been hospitalized or that he needed a surgery, which ICE said in a news release was for an abscess.

Ayala told LAist that he was able to talk with his brother over the phone a couple of times when he was detained, and Ayala-Uribe was joking with him about the poor conditions of the facility causing him to lose weight.

“ One of the last things he told me,” Ayala recalled, “was, ‘We'll see who comes out skinnier.’”

He said his brother was 39 when he died on Sept. 22, 2025.

CHIRLA alleges in court documents that staff at Adelanto were aware Ayala-Uribe was having a potentially life-threatening medical emergency three days before his death, but he was taken back to his cell after being seen by the facility’s medical team.

An ICE news release said Ayala-Uribe “was evaluated by an on-call medical provider Sept. 18, provided medication, and returned to his dormitory,” but did not mention the severity of his condition.

The cause of both deaths remain under investigation, CHIRLA said in an accompanying news release.

The second deadly shooting of a U.S. citizen by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis is raising the prospect of a partial government shutdown at the end of the week.

Senate Democrats say they will not vote to fund the Department of Homeland Security without new guardrails for immigration enforcement.

But that opposition may also torpedo the larger $1.3 trillion spending package needed to keep large swaths of the federal government operational past Friday night.

"The appalling murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis must lead Republicans to join Democrats in overhauling ICE and CBP to protect the public," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., wrote on Sunday. "People should be safe from abuse by their own government."

Democrats were already raising alarms about the conduct of immigration officers before the latest killing in Minneapolis on Saturday.

Last week, all but seven House Democrats voted against the funding bill covering homeland security, which includes money for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.

At the time, a few Senate Democrats also pledged to vote against the funding when it reached them this week, though the response across the Capitol was far from the near-unified opposition in the House.

That is because the House sent the DHS funding over to the Senate tied together with billions in spending for defense, health, transportation and other federal agencies, in part to expedite the process as Congress races to meet a Friday deadline to keep the government fully open.

"The hard truth is that Democrats must win political power to enact the kind of accountability we need," Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the top Democrat on the Senate appropriations committee, wrote in a statement last week saying she would vote for the total package.

After Pretti's shooting on Saturday by a Border Patrol agent, Murray said she would join her Democratic colleagues in opposing the funding.

Congress faces Friday deadline to avert a partial shutdown

The timeline was already tight once a winter storm delayed the first Senate votes of the week until Tuesday night. But the renewed debate over immigration enforcement is complicating the task more.

Schumer wants to cleave the DHS measure from everything else. The other remaining spending measures have overwhelming bipartisan support. Democrats want to continue negotiating the DHS funding bill without shutting down large parts of the government.

The funding measure needs to reach a 60-vote threshold to pass, meaning some Democratic support is needed for it to clear the Senate. But disentangling different parts of the legislation requires buy-in from Republicans, and so far, GOP leadership has not indicated that they are willing to separate the funding bills.

Flowers, signs and mementos are seen Monday at a makeshift memorial in the area where Alex Pretti was shot dead by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis. On January 24, federal agents shot and killed Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, while scuffling with him on an icy roadway.

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Senate Majority Leader John Thune's communications director, Ryan Wrasse, wrote on X on Monday that the Senate will proceed as planned to consider all the funding bills together.

"A government shutdown, even a partial one, does not serve the American people well," he wrote. "Hopefully Senate Democrats, who are actively engaged in conversations, can find a path forward to join us before this week's funding deadline hits."

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the appropriations committee chair, told The New York Times over the weekend, "I'm exploring all options. We have five other bills that are really vital, and I'm relatively confident they would pass."

Collins, who is up for reelection and whose state is also a target of immigration raids by the Trump administration, is among the Republicans who have expressed fresh concerns about the tactics, calling for an investigation.

A handful of Republicans have called for congressional hearings or offered sharper criticism.

"My support for funding ICE remains the same," Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., wrote in a statement. "But we must also maintain our core values as a nation, including the right to protest and assemble."

Even if Democrats could convince Republicans to agree to separate DHS funding from the rest, that would mean the legislation needs approval again in the House, which is on recess until Feb. 2. It is unlikely that House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., would call members back to Washington early, increasing the risk of a partial shutdown.

Why Democrats are willing to risk another shutdown

Before this weekend, few lawmakers expressed appetite for another shutdown after a record 43-day one this fall. For weeks, Democrats withheld their votes from a short-term funding measure to reopen the government without a deal to extend expiring health insurance subsidies.

Eventually, a handful of Democrats joined with Republicans to reopen the government, with the promise of a vote on the subsidies. That vote failed in December. The deal included the passage of three bipartisan spending packages for veterans, agriculture and other areas through the end of September 2026 and a short-term extension for everything else through Jan. 30.

Congress has already passed several more full-year funding bills through September, but the measures still awaiting final passage in the Senate account for 75% of annual federal discretionary spending.

But even Democrats who ultimately voted with Republicans to end the last funding stalemate now say they will vote against the DHS funding despite the risk of another shutdown.

"We have bipartisan agreement on 96% of the budget," Sen. Catherine Cortez-Masto, D-Nev., wrote in a statement. "We've already passed six funding bills. Let's pass the remaining five bipartisan bills and fund essential agencies while we continue to fight for a Department of Homeland Security that respects Americans' constitutional rights and preserves federal law enforcement's essential role to keep us safe."

Federal agents look on as demonstrators gather near the site of where Alex Pretti was fatally shot by.

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Holding up the DHS funding bill would not halt the administration's immigration crackdown. Last summer, Congressional Republicans allocated $75 billion for ICE over four years in President Donald Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill."

Democrats say they do not want to give ICE the roughly $10 billion base funding that is on the line now. But more so, Democrats see this as rare leverage in the minority to extract policy changes.

Democrats already negotiated to include $20 million in funding for officer-worn body cameras, plus more funding for oversight and a reduction in funding for enforcement and removal operations and detention bed capacity. But most Democrats said this did not go far enough.

Democrats want more sweeping reforms to reign in the tactics, such as prohibiting ICE from deploying excessive force and explicitly preventing them from raiding places of worship, hospitals and schools. Republicans previously rejected these demands.

The DHS funding bill also includes funding for the Transportation Security Administration, the U.S. Coast Guard and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

But Democrats are betting that the American public is on their side. A recent New York Times poll found that a majority of respondents said the federal immigration tactics have gone too far.

Nearly $1.3 trillion in federal funding is at stake

The funding fight over DHS is the latest dispute over funding in Congress. Last year, the Trump administration moved to rescind billions in federal funding appropriated by Congress for foreign aid and public broadcasting — and proposed a budget slashing nondiscretionary funding by some 20%.

Instead, the final legislation keeps federal nondiscretionary spending essentially flat. For example, the administration called for cutting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention budget by 50%. Under the bipartisan health spending bill, the agency's funding would remain roughly unchanged.

Bill Hoagland, senior vice president of the Bipartisan Policy Center and a former longtime appropriations committee staffer, said this is striking considering Congress has mostly followed Trump's lead.

"Congress is starting to show a little bit of backbone," Hoagland said. "I think there is increasing recognition of the need to have Congress exert its power of the purse."

Hoagland also notes that Congress is nearly a quarter of the way into the fiscal year, so once lawmakers greenlight the remaining funding, it will not be too long before the appropriations process begins again.
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The killing of another protester by immigration agents in Minneapolis and President Trump's ongoing threats against Greenland have fueled calls to boycott World Cup matches held in the U.S. this summer — including in Los Angeles.

The suggestion from a former FIFA president and others led some in City Hall to worry that the coming 2028 Olympics could also get the cold shoulder.

"We have a national government who is setting the stage for an environment where we could have a serious boycott," Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson said during a committee meeting on the Olympic Games Monday.

John Harper, an executive with private Olympics organizing committee LA28, said that the organization had not discussed the possibility with the International Olympic Committee and that he was not concerned a boycott would take place in 2028.

City Council members did not seem convinced.

"This conversation around FIFA, that's just a forewarning," said Councilmember Monica Rodriguez. "We need to have a Plan B."

The city of Los Angeles stands to lose if spectators or countries opt out of the 2028 Olympics. L.A. is the financial guarantor of the Games, along with the state of California, and a significant boycott could affect the financial success of the massive sporting event.

"We could be talking about a lot more irreparable harm, financially," Rodriguez said.

Fresh concerns about a boycott also come as anxiety in City Hall has been growing about the role the federal government will play at the Games.

The City Council recently passed a motion requesting that LA28 provide more details on the federal Olympics task force on security that Trump announced last year, citing the ICE agents who have descended on the streets of Los Angeles and other U.S. cities

The Olympics have been a frequent arena of political protest over the decades, including in Los Angeles in 1984 when the Soviet Union led a boycott of the Games.

"We never talk about the boycott of '84, but there was a significant boycott," Harris-Dawson said Monday. "It doesn't mean that you can't figure it out, but it also means we have to face it and face it directly."

The Orange County District Attorney dropped murder charges in a decades-old case tainted by the so-called jailhouse snitch scandal, instead accepting a lesser guilty plea of voluntary manslaughter.

Why it matters

A decade ago, in the wake of the county’s biggest mass murder, the O.C. Public Defender’s Office discovered that local law enforcement had been illegally using informants — sometimes called snitches — to get information and confessions from defendants in jail. The discovery has unraveled close to 60 criminal convictions to date and tainted the reputations of the O.C. District Attorney’s Office and Sheriff’s Department.

What's the backstory?

Paul Smith was convicted of murder in 2010 for stabbing his childhood friend Robert Haugen to death in 1988 and then setting the body on fire in the victim’s Sunset Beach apartment. A decade later it came to light that O.C. law enforcement illegally used jailhouse informants to bolster their case against Smith, and then hid that from the defense, ultimately leading a judge to throw out the conviction and order a new trial.

Now that trial won’t happen. Under a plea deal struck with the current District Attorney’s office, Smith pleaded guilty to manslaughter on Monday and will serve another five years in prison before being released.

‘Reprehensible’ behavior from prosecutors

In a ruling last year, a San Diego judge overseeing Smith’s case said Orange County prosecutors had shown “reprehensible” behavior in pursuit of convicting Smith. He also said Ebrahim Baytieh, a former prosecutor and, now, Superior Court judge, was “not truthful” during court proceedings.

The takeaway?

Current District Attorney Todd Spitzer has repeatedly said his office has implemented reforms to ensure the rights of criminal defendants to a fair trial. He released a statement saying his office has taken steps to reverse the "cheat to win" missteps of an earlier administration and lamented that a murder defendant will now have an easier path to release:

What does the defense say?

Scott Sanders, Smith’s attorney and the former assistant public defender who uncovered the so-called “snitch scandal,” says not enough has been done to reexamine cases in which tainted evidence may have been used to convict people. "Discovering the true expanse of [Judge] Baytieh's damage to fair trials should be an urgent concern," Sanders wrote in an email to LAist. "The clock is ticking on people's lives."

Go deeper:

• Judge rips into OC prosecutors and calls their misconduct 'reprehensible'
• Is the OC snitch scandal over? Why there’s no easy answer
• OC Snitch Case: An Orange County judge is accused of a criminal cover-up
• Jailhouse informants: Has Orange County reformed its ways?