Six people died in California immigration detention centers over the past year as the crowded sites struggled to provide basic medical care, according to a new state investigation detailing conditions inside the facilities.
The 175-page report released Friday offers the most detailed look to date inside the detention centers that are often in remote areas of the state and hard to access for attorneys, families, and advocates.
It documents the highest death toll since the state began conducting inspections of the centers seven years ago. In 2024, there were zero deaths in California detention centers, according to the American Immigration Lawyers Association's list of Immigration and Customs Enforcement press releases tracking them, and the Attorney General’s office.
The deaths occurred as the Trump administration carried out a mass deportation campaign — starting in Los Angeles — that drove up the population inside detention centers by more than 150%.
Eighteen people have died in facilities this year across the country, around one person a week. Since the start of the Trump administration, 48 people have died in detention. A study published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the current rate is nearly seven times higher than fiscal year 2023 levels at 88.9 per 100,000 people.
In California, four of the deaths occurred at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County. Two other people died at the Imperial Regional Detention Facility near the U.S.-Mexico border in Calexico. In all four of the Adelanto cases, families of the deceased allege the facility failed to provide adequate medical care, the report states.
The inspections by the California Department of Justice are required under a 2017 law enacted in response to concerns about conditions. Investigators and medical experts did two-day site visits at each facility and interviewed 194 people from more than 120 countries.
Last year, inspectors focused on lapses in mental health care across the six facilities operating in California in the early months of the second Trump administration. This year, state investigators drilled in on how the dramatic surge in detainee populations strained conditions and access to medical care at all of the facilities now operating across California.
Some detainees described only having beans and bread to eat, which gave them diarrhea, and extremely cold temperatures that caused them to try to turn their socks into extra arm sleeves. At one facility, investigators documented not enough toilets to serve the population, with detainees reporting dirty bathrooms.
Several detainees cried as they relayed the conditions of their confinement in California City to state investigators. Most of the people detained have not been convicted of any crime.
“This is cruel, inhumane, and unacceptable,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta, adding that his office “worked tirelessly to shine a light” on the conditions.
State investigators wrote that the detention centers had not increased medical staffing to match the dramatic rise in the number of detainees. At a new detention center that opened in a former state prison in California City last year, investigators described “crisis-level” medical staffing that contributed to delays in care. At the time, the center had only one physician for nearly 1,000 detainees.
All of the detention centers are managed by private companies under contracts with the federal government. State investigators wrote that the companies and the federal agency are failing to meet their own standards of care.
CalMatters reached out to ICE and the three private prison companies that operate facilities in California.
A spokesperson for MTC, which operates the site in Imperial County, said the company takes the report seriously and is conducting a review of its findings. "Our focus is on the people in our care, the Imperial-specific findings, and the continued work of providing safe, humane, and standards-compliant care," said MTC spokesperson Emily Lawhead.
Christopher V. Ferreira, a spokesperson for the private prison company GEO Group, in a written statement said detainees have access to "around the clock" medical care and other services.
"In all instances, our support services are monitored by ICE, including by on-site agency personnel, and other organizations within the Department of Homeland Security to ensure compliance with ICE’s detention standards and contract requirements regarding the treatment and services ICE detainees receive," he said.
Ryan Gustin, a spokesperson for the private prison company CoreCivic, said "all our immigration facilities where we provide healthcare adhere to federal detention standards, including staffing."
Diminished civil rights protections
State investigators also described in their report how the Trump administration rolled back federal protections for detainees.
Since January 2025, the federal government has defunded legal programs to inform people of their rights, shut down Department of Homeland Security civil rights oversight offices, and stopped protections for transgender detainees, the report states.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement stopped including congressionally mandated data on transgender people in its biweekly statistical reports in February 2025, the report says. The agency also removed from its website a policy memo that committed the agency to creating a safe environment for transgender people.
Loba, a transgender woman from El Salvador who was detained at California City for six months in 2025, told CalMatters she experienced traumatizing sexual harassment and intimidation from guards while being housed in the male dorms. She asked CalMatters to only identify her by her first name because she fears retaliation for speaking about the conditions and for her safety in her home country.
The situation was so stressful, she said, that she finally decided to sign her voluntary departure paperwork to go back home to El Salvador.
“That is absolutely the reason,” she said. “I have been fighting my immigration case for two years, and then after not being around my community and the lack of support for the LGBTQ+ community inside detention centers, and then being a victim of harassment, it was really intimidating. It was very traumatizing.”
The report also looked into other complaints raised by detainees and their families.
During one incident at Adelanto, a person reported to state inspectors that guards deployed pepper spray in a confined room holding about 50 people.
At the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, investigators flagged concerns about strip-searching. The report states Otay Mesa is the only facility in California that has a policy of strip-searching detainees after every visit they have with someone who is not a lawyer.
Women described the searches as “humiliating” and “denigrating” after being searched in front of male officers, sometimes even while menstruating. Both males and females described feeling “violated” by the practice. One person told inspectors they had stopped visiting their family altogether to avoid the searches.
The Central Valley Annex in McFarland on July 8, 2024. Photo by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local
Two new detention centers
At the time of the investigators’ visits, 6,028 people were held in immigration detention in California. That was up 162% from the 2,300 held during inspections in 2023. California has the third highest ICE detainee population, behind Texas and Louisana.
California is also home to two of the seven largest facilities nationwide. Detainees in California were mostly from Mexico, India, Guatemala, El Salvador, China, Russia, Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela, and Honduras.
California Democrats during both of Trump’s terms have adopted policies that were meant to block the detention centers from operating. In 2019, California tried to ban private for-profit detention centers from operating in the state, but GEO Group successfully sued to stop it. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the ban violates the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause by preventing the federal government from conducting immigration enforcement.
ICE opened two detention centers in California over the past year, first the one in California City and then one in McFarland called Central Valley Annex. It began receiving detainees in April 2026 while the report was being finalized, but the state says it will begin monitoring that detention center as well. Both of the sites were previously used to hold state prison inmates under contracts with California’s corrections system.
This year California Democrats are carrying a range of bills to push back against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. One by Assemblymember Matt Haney, a San Francisco Democrat, would tax detention facilities, with the funds going towards immigrant rights groups, effectively making it unprofitable to keep detention centers in the state.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
