The Brief

Covid-19, mumps, and chickenpox outbreaks. Contaminated water, moldy food, and air ducts spewing black dust.

These health threats have been documented inside privately run immigration detention facilities in California through lawsuits, federal and state audits, and complaints lodged by detainees themselves.

But local public health officers who routinely inspect county jails and state prisons say they don’t have the authority under state law to inspect detention centers operated by private companies, including all six federal immigration centers in California.

State Sen. María Elena Durazo (D-Los Angeles) wants to close that loophole with legislation that would allow county health officers to conduct inspections at the facilities if health officers deem them necessary.

Durazo said that many detainees live in substandard conditions and that communicable diseases sweeping through these facilities could pose a risk to surrounding communities.

“Unfortunately, our detainees are treated as if they’re not human beings,” she said. “We don’t want any excuses. We want state and public health officials to go in whenever it’s needed.”

It’s not clear how much authority local health officers would have to implement changes, but public health experts say they could act as independent observers who document violations that would otherwise remain unknown to the public.

The state Senate passed the bill, SB 1132, unanimously in late May. It is now under consideration in the state Assembly.

Immigration is regulated by the federal government. GEO Group, the country’s largest private prison contractor, runs California’s federal centers, located in four counties. Together they can house up to 6,500 people awaiting deportation or immigration hearings.

While campaigning in 2020, President Joe Biden pledged to end for-profit immigration detention. But more than 90% of the roughly 30,000 people held by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency on any given day remain in private facilities, according to a 2023 analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union. Congress members in both chambers have introduced legislation to phase out private detention centers, while other lawmakers, including at least two this month, have called for investigations into substandard medical and mental health care and deaths.

Lawmakers in Washington state passed a law in 2023 to impose state oversight of private detention facilities, but the GEO Group sued and the measure is tied up in court. California lawmakers have repeatedly attempted to regulate such facilities, with mixed results.

In 2019, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed a measure banning private prisons and detention facilities from operating in California. But a federal court later declared the law unconstitutional as it related to immigration detention centers, saying it interfered with federal functions.

In 2021, state lawmakers passed a bill requiring private detention centers to comply with state and local public health orders and worker safety and health regulations. That measure was adopted at the height of the covid-19 pandemic, as the virus tore through detention facilities where people were packed into dorms with little or no protection from airborne viruses.

For instance, at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, one outbreak at the start of the pandemic infected more than 300 staff members and detainees.

The Health Officers Association of California, which represents the public health officers for the state’s 61 local health departments, supports Durazo’s legislation.

“These investigations play a pivotal role in identifying and addressing health and sanitary concerns within these facilities, thereby mitigating risks to detainees, staff, and the surrounding communities,” according to a letter from the association’s executive director, Kat DeBurgh.

Under the measure, public health officers would determine whether the facilities are complying with environmental rules, such as ensuring proper ventilation, and offering basic mental and health care, emergency treatment, and safely prepared food.

Unlike public correctional facilities, which local health officers inspect every year, private detention centers would be inspected as needed, to be determined by the health officer.

GEO Group spokesperson Christopher Ferreira and ICE spokesperson Richard Beam declined to comment on the measure.

American Public Health Association Executive Director Georges Benjamin said public health officers are well positioned to inspect these facilities because they understand how to make confined spaces safer for large populations.

Even though they likely can’t force the detention centers to comply with their recommendations, their reports could provide valuable information for public officials, attorneys, and others who want to pursue options such as litigation, he said. “When the system isn’t working, the courts can play a very profound role,” Benjamin said.

The federal system that monitors health care and the transmission of communicable diseases inside immigration detention centers is broken, said Annette Dekker, an assistant clinical professor of emergency medicine at UCLA, who studies health care in these facilities.

Inspections of detention centers are typically conducted by ICE employees and, up until 2022, by a private auditor. In a paper published in June, Dekker and other researchers showed that immigration officials and the auditor conducted inspections infrequently — at least once every three years — and provided limited public information about deficiencies and how they were addressed.

“There’s a lot of harm that is happening in detention centers that we are not able to document,” Dekker said.

ICE and the GEO Group have been the subjects of lawsuits and hundreds of complaints alleging poor conditions inside the California facilities since the pandemic began. Some of these lawsuits are pending, but a significant share of complaints have been dismissed, according to a database maintained by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The most recent lawsuits by detainees allege crowded and unsanitary conditions, denial of adequate mental and medical health care, medical neglect, and wrongful death by suicide.

The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health fined the GEO Group about $100,000 in 2022 for failing to maintain written procedures to reduce exposure to covid. The GEO Group has contested the fine.

“I have experienced really inhumane living conditions,” 28-year-old Dilmer Lovos told KFF Health News by phone from the Golden State Annex immigration detention center in McFarland, Kern County. Lovos has been held there since January while awaiting an immigration hearing.

Lovos, who was born in El Salvador and uses the pronouns they/them, has been a legal permanent resident for 15 years and was detained by immigration officials while on parole.

In early July, Lovos and 58 other detainees from Golden State Annex and the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield started a labor and hunger strike demanding the end of poor living conditions, solitary confinement, and inadequate medical and mental health services.

Lovos described a packed dorm room, clogged air filters, mice and cockroaches scurrying in the kitchen, water leaking from the ceiling, and detainees with flu-like symptoms who couldn’t get access to medication or a covid test when requested.

ICE protocols require testing of detainees with symptoms upon intake into facilities with no covid hospitalizations or deaths in the previous week. In facilities with two or more hospitalizations or deaths in the previous week, all detainees are tested during intake. It is up to each facility’s medical providers to decide when a test is necessary after that.

After Lovos filed a complaint with the GEO Group in June, alleging medical and mental health neglect, they said they were placed in solitary confinement for 20 days without a properly functioning toilet. “I was smelling my urine and feces because I was not able to flush.”

Ferreira declined to address Lovos’ allegations but said via email that detainees receive “around-the-clock access to medical care,” including doctors, dentists, psychologists, and referrals to off-site specialists.

“GEO takes exception to the unsubstantiated allegations that have been made regarding access to health care services at GEO-contracted ICE Processing Centers,” he said.

An unannounced inspection by federal immigration officials in April 2023 found Golden State Annex employees did not respond within 24 hours to medical complaints, which the report said could negatively affect detainees’ health, and did not properly store detainees’ medical records.

Lovos said that no one has addressed their concerns and that conditions have only worsened.

“Please come check these places out,” Lovos said in a plea to local health officials.

This article was produced by KFF Health News, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.

In an effort to put a dent in the state’s housing shortage, California is considering something unprecedented: getting into the construction insurance business.

Last week, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat, and a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers raised the curtain on a long-awaited package of bills meant to push developers toward cost-cutting innovations in construction, with a particular focus on factory-based building.

Building homes in factories and then trucking them to where they’re needed offers a wide array of potential benefits: Faster construction, safer working conditions and lower overall cost that ought to ultimately make housing more affordable.

But despite decades of hope and hype, that promise has never materialized at scale. Boosters of the industry point to regulatory and financial hurdles that stand in the way of cost-effective mass production.

The half-dozen new bills are meant to help the nascent industry clear those hurdles. Most would do so by standardizing or trimming regulation. But one, Assembly Bill 2166, authored by Wicks and Assemblymember Juan Carrillo, a Democrat from Palmdale, is different. Though still light on detail, the bill aims to guarantee insurance payouts for developers and lenders who are interested in factory-based building, but still need a little extra assurance.

Taking on the role of re-insurer — committing to come to the financial rescue at a specific chokepoint in the residential construction process — is a departure from virtually anything the state has done before in its years-long effort to cut the cost of housing in California.

“This is the first time I have seen something like this be suggested, drafted and potentially implemented by a state for housing,” said Tyler Pullen, a researcher at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, who has been providing technical assistance to Wicks and other legislators on the bill package.

He added that though the bill is certainly the “most open-ended and technically complicated” in the legislative package, some version of the idea popped up in nearly every interview he and his colleagues conducted with industry stakeholders as part of a recent Terner report on industrialized construction.

“This could be one of the highest impact things, but it has a lot of open questions,” he said.

Avoiding a construction doom loop

Construction is a risky endeavor. Developers run out of cash. Costs overrun. Lawsuits abound. Projects fail. A complex array of financial levers exist to help everyone involved, from lenders and investors down to the lowliest subcontractor, to minimize their exposure should things fall apart.

One of the most important of those levers is the surety bond, a financial arrangement in which an insurer, in exchange for an upfront fee, agrees to pay out if, say, an electrical subcontractor fails to deliver.

A bonded project is one that “puts the developers and the lenders at ease,” said Michael Merle, business development director at Autovol, an Idaho-based housing factory. “If any portion of the project fails, they are not going to be holding the bag.”

Depending on the nature of the project and the contract, a bond might cost a factory anywhere from three-quarters of a percentage point to 3% of a contract’s entire cost, he said. For a factory working a large apartment project, those fewer percentage points might add up to a quarter million dollars or more.

But that’s if the factory can even get bonded. Often they cannot. Why not? The text of the bill refers to a “self-reinforcing cycle” that the industrialized construction industry appears to be stuck in.

That doom loop looks something like this:

A developer or project lender is wary of starting a project with a housing factory, a new-ish player in a new-ish industry that has seen some high-profile failures, and so requires a factory to bond the project. The factory would be able to convince a surety company to provide that coverage if it had a track record of financial success. But it doesn’t, because developers and project lenders are wary. No bond for the factory means it can’t attract any business. No business means the factory eventually fails.

Carrillo and Wicks’ bill would have the state insure the insurers. If a project fails and a bond is called upon, the state would cover a portion of the payout in certain extreme circumstances (the size of that portion and what qualifies as “extreme” are still undetermined).

The ultimate hope underlying the legislation is that by making insurance companies more comfortable offering insurance, developers will become more comfortable signing on with factories, factories will have more steady business and, ultimately, they’ll be able to ramp up production, push down costs and start delivering on the long-offered promise of mass-produced housing. Doom loop terminated.

Though the state of California has never taken on a role quite like this before, the idea rhymes with other policies at both the state and federal level.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two federally-sponsored companies, guarantee privately-issued mortgages as a way to boost more plentiful and cheaper lending for American homebuyers. The Small Business Administration guarantees surety bonds for (you guessed it) small businesses. The state of California operates one loan guarantee program for health care facility construction, but none for the housing industry. A bill last year that would have replicated the model for affordable housing projects died without a full vote in the Assembly.

The housing factory surety guarantee idea is “super innovative,” said Jan Lindenthal-Cox, chief investment officer at the San Francisco Housing Accelerator Fund, a nonprofit that directs philanthropic money toward cost-cutting affordable housing projects. “This is what’s needed if you really want to scale the industry.”

Would cash be more helpful than bonding? 

But even some off-site construction proponents are skeptical.

The Carrillo-Wicks bill is meant to push developers who are interested in off-site construction but skittish about its financial viability. That does not describe Mutual Housing California, a Sacramento-based nonprofit affordable development that has committed to use factory-built housing for the bulk of its future projects.

“Who are we incentivizing?” Ryan Cassidy, Mutual’s vice president of real estate, asked of the bill. “We’re incentivizing developers whose only go/no-go is whether the factory stays in business. To me, that’s a developer who is probably not very savvy.”

Likewise, the approach will help new factories with limited experience garner more business, he said. Mutual Housing contracted with Guerdon Modular Buildings, another Idaho-based manufacturer with among the longest track-records in the industry. “I don't think the risk of factory-built housing is whether Guerdon is going to go out of business.”

Cassidy said he would prefer a “more direct” approach of simply giving factory-built projects more money.

Merle at Autovol agreed that the surety bond proposal would likely benefit newer manufacturers. Autovol, another industry heavyweight, rarely has trouble getting coverage when it needs it, he said. And because of its relative financial stability and its list of long-term clients, it can go without bonding more often than not.

“If you’ve only got two or three projects and a couple years under your belt, those are the ones that are required to bond,” he said. But for the same reason, “those are the ones that very much struggle to bond.”

It’s unclear whether other lawmakers will be willing to tie the full faith and credit of the state to an industry that’s still proving itself. The bill is scheduled for its first legislative committee hearing in late April. The total amount that the bill could put state taxpayers on the hook remains an unanswered question. But for lawmakers who are unconvinced, one possible selling point is that the need for this program may be temporary.

The premise of the bill is that “the state can support the early adopters while the factory-built housing industry builds up its reputation,” said Pullen at Terner. “This is a problem that could eventually be solved in the private market.”

If all goes well in the industry, private insurers might be happy to offer factories their coverage without a state backstop and developers and lenders may no longer insist upon that extra layer of protection. For now, that remains a big “if.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

A federal judge has knocked down the core of President Donald Trump's executive order barring federal funding for NPR and PBS, saying it violated the broadcasters' First Amendment rights on its face.

A District Court judge has found that a Trump White House executive order to defund NPR and PBS violated the First Amendment and is therefore "unlawful and unenforceable." It wasn't immediately clear what the decision, which could be appealed by the administration, would mean for the future of federal funding of public broadcasting.

In his ruling, Judge Randolph D. Moss of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, said "the First Amendment draws a line, which the government may not cross, at efforts to use government power — including the power of the purse — 'to punish or suppress disfavored expression' by others."

Moss said the president's executive order, "Ending Taxpayer Subsidies for Bias Media" issued in May of last year "crosses that line."

Trump's executive order stated: "Which viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter. What does matter is that neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens." The president's order and materials that accompany it accuse the public broadcasters of ideological bias, in NPR's case due to its news coverage. The networks deny this.

Moss said the order "singles out two speakers and, on the basis of their speech, bars them from all federally funded programs. It does so, moreover, without regard to whether the federal funds are used to pay for the nationwide interconnection systems, which serve as the technological backbones of public radio and television; to provide safety and security for journalists working in war zones; to support the emergency broadcast system; or to produce or distribute music, children's or other educational programming, or documentaries," Moss, who was nominated by President Barack Obama, wrote.

"It is difficult to conceive of clearer evidence that a government action is targeted at viewpoints that the President does not like and seeks to squelch," Moss said.

Under the Constitution, the U.S. government cannot discriminate against people on the basis of the views they express; for news outlets, this extends to news coverage.

Trump's executive order set in motion a series of events that ultimately knocked the Corporation for Public Broadcasting – the congressionally chartered entity through which federal dollars flowed to public media outlets – out of business. For more than a half-century, most federal money for public media has been funneled through the nonprofit Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The president insisted that all of the $1.1 billion that he and Congress had earlier agreed to set aside for public media outlets, including NPR and PBS member stations. The Republican-led Congress acquiesced. The ruling however would enable a future Congress to resume funding public media if it chose to do so. It also establishes the right of local public media stations that take federal subsidies to make their own programming decisions without government pressure – including on whether to take NPR or PBS shows.

Last August, CPB said it would close its doors after serving as a conduit for federal funding to public broadcasting for decades.

In a statement, NPR said the ruling "is a decisive affirmation of the rights of a free and independent press — and a win for NPR, our network of stations, and our tens of millions of listeners nationwide."

"Public media exists to serve the public interest — that of Americans — not that of any political agenda or elected official. NPR and our Member Stations will continue delivering independent, fact-based, high-quality reporting to communities across the United States, regardless of the administration of the day."

NPR's lawyer, Theodore Boutrous, added: "The Court's decision bars the government from enforcing its unconstitutional Executive Order targeting NPR and PBS because the President dislikes their news reporting and other programming," Boutrous said.

In a statement, PBS, said it was "thrilled with today's decision," calling the president's order a "textbook unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination and retaliation, in violation of longstanding First Amendment principles."

Disclosure: This story was written and reported by NPR Correspondents David Folkenflik and Scott Neuman. It was edited by Managing Editors Gerry Holmes and  Vickie Walton-James. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.
Copyright 2026 NPR

A Mexican man died while being detained at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center last week. He is the fifth person to have died either while in custody at the facility or from health complications linked to its conditions since September 2025.

Department of Homeland Security officials said in a statement that guards found Jose Guadalupe Ramos-Solano unconscious in his bunk bed March 25. Onsite medical staff performed CPR, according to the statement, and Ramos was taken to a medical center in Victorville where he was pronounced dead at 9:30 p.m.

According to DHS, Ramos was arrested in 2025 in Los Angeles county for possession of a controlled substance and theft of personal property and was convicted later that year. Federal Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents arrested Ramos on Feb. 23 during an operation in Torrance and transferred him to Adelanto.

Ramos also received a complete health and physical evaluation during his intake screening at the Adelanto facility on Feb. 24, which identified that he had several medical issues including diabetes and hypertension.

“He received constant medical care while he was in custody, including daily medication to treat his illness,” reads the DHS statement.

DHS said staff immediately initiated life-saving procedures when he was found unresponsive and emphasized their “commitment to ensuring safe, secure, and humane environments” for people in detention.

But according to the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, detainees who called their rapid response hotline the morning after Ramos’ death said that guards didn’t respond until he was unconscious. According to ImmDef, detainees also witnessed Ramos having trouble breathing and witnessed him removing his shirt because he felt he was suffocating.

For years, immigrant and disability rights groups have raised alarms about the conditions inside the Adelanto ICE Processing Center. Ismael Ayala-Uribe died after being held at Adelanto for about a month last year. A few weeks later, Gabriel Garcia Aviles died from cardiac arrest just one week after being transferred to the Adelanto facility. Alberto Gutierrez Reyes and Irvin Cruz Nape both died after being detained there earlier this year.

Hector Pereyra, the political manager with the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice (IC4IJ), said DHS and ICE are depriving people of basic needs.

“What we’re seeing is that people die in immigration detention centers like Adelanto because of the lack of access to medical care,” said Pereyra. “And that’s intentional. The Department of Homeland Security has all the resources in the world to fully fund efficient and comprehensive medical care. And they choose not to.”

Earlier this month, Attorney General Rob Bonta weighed in on a lawsuit against ICE that challenges living and medical conditions at the facility. The ongoing lawsuit seeks to improve these conditions for detainees.

Officials with the Mexican Consulate of Los Angeles said at a Monday press conference that their government is also planning to contribute to the lawsuit and “will exhaust all legal, diplomatic, and multilateral avenues” to ensure accountability.

“We consider it crucial to bring light to this painful reality — individuals who have lost their lives while under the direct custody of immigration authorities and GEO Group,” said Vanessa Calva-Ruiz, a Mexican diplomatic representative. “Nothing justifies immigration processing and detention conditions that result in the deaths of individuals who should have been treated promptly with dignity and humanity.”

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The Supreme Court has ruled that Colorado's law banning conversion therapy "regulates speech based on viewpoint."

At issue was the practice of an evangelical Christian, Kaley Chiles, a counselor who wants to provide talk therapy to teenagers seeking to discuss their sexual orientation or gender identity, including those hoping to "reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions, change sexual behaviors, or grow in the experience of harmony with one's physical body," according to her complaint.

Her lawyer argued that Colorado's law prevents voluntary conversations with minors seeking her help.

The majority opinion states, "the lower courts erred by failing to apply sufficiently rigorous First Amendment scrutiny."

"As applied to Ms. Chiles, Colorado's law regulates the content of her speech and goes further to prescribe what views she may and may not express, discriminating on the basis of viewpoint," the opinion says.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, pointing to precedent on states regulating health care professionals. "Stated simply, the majority has failed to appreciate the crucial context in which Chiles's constitutional claims have arisen," she wrote. "Chiles is not speaking in the ether; she is providing therapy to minors as a licensed healthcare professional."

The court heard arguments on the case in October and appeared to lean toward the therapist at the time.

The case involved a new wrinkle on "conversion therapy." It's generally defined as a treatment used to change a person's attraction to same-sex individuals and to similarly cure gender dysphoria. In whatever form, the therapy has been forcefully repudiated by every major medical organization in the country on the grounds that it doesn't work and often leads to depression and suicidal thoughts in minors.

But during arguments in the fall, Chiles' lawyer, James Campbell, told the justices that the way his client wishes to practice conversion therapy involves no physical restraints or coercion of any kind. Rather, he said her practice involves only talk therapy.

"Ms. Chiles is being silenced. The kids and families who want help — this kind of help that she offers — are being left without any support," he asserted.

The outcome of the case could mean a rollback on conversion therapy bans across the country.

Copyright 2026 NPR