The Brief

As California officials try to block immigration facilities across the state, the Trump administration is deploying a new strategy to secure detention capacity on the West Coast. It’s buying up the real estate outright.

The Department of Homeland Security’s $1.5 billion purchase of the Otay Mesa Detention Center and the California City Detention Facility from the private prison company CoreCivic is a direct response to the state’s political resistance to new and existing ICE detention facilities, government officials said.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Jason Sweeney said in a statement that California detention centers are “crucial to ICE’s detention network on the West Coast.”

“Unlike in states like Florida and Oklahoma, ICE can not rely on local state and county partners for detention space in California,” Sweeney said. “The state’s sanctuary politicians continue to push legislation to outlaw or make private prisons financially infeasible.”

The conflict dates to the last Trump administration, when California Democrats raced to adopt policies that would counter his first deportation push.

Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2019 signed a law aiming to phase out all private for-profit prisons and immigration detention centers by 2028. Private prison operator GEO Group and the federal government sued, arguing the law violated the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, which bars states from interfering with federal authority. They won, with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2022 striking down the ban on privately run immigration detention facilities.

Since then, California lawmakers have pushed newer measures, such as imposing heavy taxes on private detention centers to make them financially unviable.

The federal government’s purchase of CoreCivic properties comes in the middle of a showdown between California Attorney General Rob Bonta and the Trump administration over the controversial construction of new ICE offices near Gilroy, a former farm town south of San Jose. The city has grown to about 60,000 people and is ringed by garlic fields and vineyards in south Santa Clara County.

The state argues the land has been designated exclusively for agricultural uses since 1967.

“ICE’s plans to construct a facility near Gilroy violate multiple federal laws,” said Bonta, arguing ICE failed to examine the potential environmental consequences before beginning construction.

Federal contracting records show in 2025 the General Services Administration leased the property for 20 years from Beverly Hills-based ECG 6 LLC for a total of $26.5 million.

The federal government agreed in July to pause construction on the 26-acre site while the lawsuit proceeds.

California officials are using another law dating to the first Trump administration to demand entry and inspect detention centers. Bonta sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security in December highlighting “dangerous and inadequate living conditions” at the California City Detention Facility. In San Diego County, local health inspectors are in a legal feud with CoreCivic over inspections of the Otay Mesa center.

Selling the properties to the federal government likely will shield them from California health inspections, said Claire Trickler-McNulty, who was a senior ICE official in the Biden administration.

“It gives them protections from state and local laws, especially from zoning and environmental requirements,” Trickler-McNulty said.

Sales reveal a new strategy

A year ago President Trump signed a spending bill with a huge windfall for immigration enforcement. It gave ICE $45 billion for detention capacity, and the administration had a plan to build new sites all over the country.

The purchases of Otay Mesa and California City mark a significant reversal, according to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.

That plan, laid out in early 2026 in a document known as the ICE Detention Re-engineering Initiative, centered on converting warehouses into mega-centers designed to hold 7,500 to 10,000 people — each larger than any correctional facility built in the U.S. since Japanese internment during World War II.

Reichlin-Melnick described the system as one that was never thoughtfully planned out. Todd Lyons, then-acting director of ICE, at the 2025 Border Security Expo in Phoenix said he wanted deportations to run “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”

“At no point did anyone sit down to intelligently design the ‘Amazon Prime for human beings,” Reichlin-Melnick said.

The Detention Re-engineering Initiative has largely collapsed, undone by lawsuits, an unrealistic timeline, and national shortages of correctional staff and prison healthcare workers, Reichlin-Melnick said.

But that leaves billions of dollars that ICE needs to spend before the money expires.

“We expect them to buy other facilities,” said Reichlin-Melnick.

One former senior Department of Homeland Security official said conditions for immigrant detainees in ICE-owned facilities could be an improvement.

“ICE taking over an actual facility is maybe better than warehouses or putting people in soft-sided facilities or the privately run facilities,” he said.

A detention officer waits outside the main entrance of the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego on Feb. 20, 2026.

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Adriana Heldiz

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CalMatters

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Prices eclipse assessment rolls

County assessor records show the federal government paid a premium on the real estate. In San Diego County, the Otay Mesa property’s assessed value for the current tax year is $164.9 million. DHS paid $739.2 million for it, or about 4.5 times the assessed value. In Kern County, the California City facility was assessed at $171.5 million; DHS paid $732.6 million or 4.3 times the figure.

A former senior ICE official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, questioned whether the price tag matches the actual security need. “So, $1.5 billion just for the facilities and how many migrants are ever going to come in and out of there who are national security and public safety threats? The people that we actually do need to keep off the streets,” the former official said.

A spokesperson for Gov. Newsom, Anthony Martinez, called the administration’s deportation agenda a “reckless and cruel misuse of taxpayer money,” and accused the federal government of pouring billions into contractors while avoiding transparency over conditions inside their facilities.

San Diego County Supervisor Paloma Aguirre connected the purchase directly to CoreCivic’s political spending, noting the company’s $500,000 donation to the Trump’s inaugural committee. That preceded what she called a “billion-dollar taxpayer-funded windfall” that will help erase the company’s debt while letting it continue running the facilities. She said the arrangements treat detained immigrants as revenue streams rather than people.

CoreCivic said the “valuations for the facilities were established through the federal government’s required appraisal process, which is designed to determine objective fair market value.”

“CoreCivic has contributed to presidential inaugural events across multiple administrations, including Democratic ones. The federal appraisal process is conducted independently of any political contribution,” said Steven Owen, the vice president of communications for CoreCivic.

He added that under California law, the assessed values of the properties may differ greatly from their market value. He pointed to California’s Proposition 13, which prohibits most property reassessments outside of sales.

“California's Prop. 13 limits annual increases in assessed value, which means assessed values for commercial properties can diverge significantly from current market value over time. The two figures are not directly comparable,” said Owen.

The company also expects to earn $130 million a year to run the California City detention center, according to its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Will feds buy more detention centers?

What’s next? Former ICE official Trickler-McNulty said the abandoned plan to buy 24 warehouses under former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem could hold some hints to the agency’s plan under Secretary Markwayne Mullin.

An internal roadmap obtained last year by the Washington Post reveals at least 10 “turnkey” facilities originally targeted under Noem.

They include the California City facility, but not Otay Mesa. The rest of the facilities are in Texas and Oklahoma.

The purchase of an immigration detention facility eliminates risk for both the private prison companies and the Trump administration’s deportation program, said R. Andrew Free, an immigration lawyer and writer, pointing to divestments California’s two biggest pension funds made from CoreCivic and GEO Group in 2019 that contributed to the companies’ spiraling liquidity crunch and cratering stock prices five years ago.

If private prison investments become politically toxic on a national scale, Free said, federal purchases of the detention facilities safeguard the companies and the detention space itself from divestments and the kind of environmental reviews that have ended similar projects in other states.

“This is a big upfront cash award from the federal government,” Free said.

Local governments and the state will be essentially locked out of the facilities, but will still have some contact with the people inside, Free said.

The detention centers are “still going to need police and fire, they’re still going to need coroners,” Free said, but noted that the majority of traditional inspections from the state are probably over.

Free said there are two ways to look at ICE’s detention expansion. One is, to him, optimistic: They’re simply gifts from a friendly government to their valued contractors. The other is more cynical.

“The cynical view is this definitely will be used to hold people who are not migrants,” Free said. “That it will be used to hold U.S. citizens.”

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

For decades, the Los Angeles Metro Board, which runs the countywide public transit system that sees more than 1 million daily riders, has operated without a member of the public who regularly rides trains and buses among its members.

Now, calls to change that are growing. On Thursday, the Metro Board is set to vote on what the future make-up of the governing body should look like, and there are several options on the table:

• Allow politicians who select Metro Board appointees the flexibility to appoint transit riders or subject matter experts to the Metro Board — a recommendation from Metro staff. 
• Reserve two seats for transit riders and expand the board from 13 to 14 voting members — a proposal from L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and three of her colleagues on the Metro Board. This option would not allow for the so-called flexible appointments recommended by agency staff. 
• Create an additional Metro Board seat guaranteed to be held by a transit rider — a proposal from L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn.

Sound complicated? It is. Let’s break it down:

The background

Currently, there are 13 voting members of the Metro Board: the five L.A. County Supervisors, the mayor of L.A. and her three appointees, and four regional representatives from across the county chosen by a selection committee.

There’s no requirement that they have transit expertise or public ridership experience.

At the beginning of this year, the Metro Board formed a committee that convened monthly to discuss how the Metro Board could be reformatted in light of Measure G. That’s the measure L.A. County voters passed in 2024, which expands the Board of Supervisors from five to nine members by 2032 and adds an elected countywide executive.

The make-up of the Metro Board is codified in the state’s public utilities code, so any proposed changes approved on Thursday will need another vote by legislators in Sacramento before they go into effect.

Metro staff’s recommendation and Bass’ competing motion

Based on feedback from committee deliberations, public input and a review of peer agencies across the country, Metro officials in June proposed maintaining the size and geographic split of the Board. 

Under that proposal, they also recommended expanding the pool of people who could serve on the Metro Board to include riders and experts in relevant subjects, like engineering or finance. If ultimately approved, these members could be chosen by the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, the mayor of L.A. or the city selection committee.

In its recommendation, Metro officials notably shied away from adding a seat to the board, saying an extra person would impose “administrative and financial burdens on the agency.”

According to the rules for the Board, members are paid $150 per day they attend “to the business” of Metro up to $600 per month.

Metro’s media relations office did not answer a request for more information on what additional administrative and financial burdens the addition of a board member would impose on the agency.

A competing motion introduced by Bass would not allow the L.A. County Board of Supervisors or the committee that selects the four regional representatives to appoint a transit rider or subject matter expert.

Instead, it would designate one of the mayor’s four seats for a for a transit advocate or rider, and it would add a 14th voting member of the board who would also be a rider.

Currently, all five of the L.A. County Supervisors are guaranteed a spot on the L.A. Metro Board.

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Courtesy L.A. County Board of Supervisors

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A guaranteed seat for a transit rider versus an optional seat

Hahn’s motion does not directly conflict with staff’s recommendation, and similar to Bass’ motion, would add a transit rider to the Metro Board.

Hahn said a dedicated seat for a transit rider would be more powerful than an appointed one.

“I worry that if [the rider] was just an appointed position by an elected official … [the rider] would feel loyalty to the appointing elected official as opposed to loyalty to their fellow riders,” she said in an interview with LAist.

She said it’s clear that there’s a community desire for a guaranteed rider seat on the Board.

During a public outreach period between February and May, Metro gathered input from 1,300 people. The clearest and most consistent piece of feedback was that the public wants to see a “formal rider voice on the Metro Board,” according to a Metro report. 

While the staff recommendation to expand who can sit on the Metro Board would theoretically allow for the appointment of a transit rider, if not several transit riders, some officials have questioned whether elected officials would voluntarily cede political power to a member of the public if that option moves forward.

L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath characterized a future under Metro staff’s recommendation as a “political game of chicken.”

“ Who's going to take the responsibility and give up the power that they hold?” Horvath told LAist.

Why don’t the Metro Board members … just ride transit themselves? 

Michael Schneider, the head of the influential transportation advocacy group Streets for All, warned that reserving a seat for a transit rider on the Metro Board could backfire.

He said adding a seat for a rider, or any interest group, risks creating a situation where Metro Board members defer leadership to the representative.

“The rider experience should be top of mind for all board members,” Schneider said. “If there’s a specific seat for a rider, then board members may decide to not pay as much attention to the rider experience.”

Schneider argues Metro Board members should all be mandated to use Metro at least once a week. It’s a metric that could be tracked using TAP cards, he suggested.

“It’s hard to improve a system that you don’t have experience with,” Schneider said. “Experience is not sitting in a chair in a boardroom. It’s on a train or on a bus or using Metro bike share.”

A large part of the L.A. Metro Board's responsibility is overseeing L.A. County's public transit system.

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David McNew

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Getty Images North America

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Transit rider appointment just one part of broader conversation 

The debate over a dedicated transit rider on the Metro Board is just one of several thorny questions, some politically charged, that officials are weighing as they decide what the Metro Board should look like.

Here’s what else will likely be discussed on the topic on Thursday:

• How many seats should the city of L.A. have on Metro’s Board? Under state law, if the city’s population falls below 35% of L.A. County’s entire population, then one of the city’s  four seats would be transferred to the other 87 cities. Some, including Horvath and John Fasana, a former mayor of Duarte and previously a longtime Metro Board member, have urged that the threshold be increased to 43.75%. 
• Should the county executive have a dedicated seat on the Metro Board? With the number of county-level seats remaining at five despite an upcoming L.A. County Board of Supervisors expansion to nine seats, some have argued that parts of the county could be underrepresented without additional representation.

The aftermath of last summer’s militarized mass deportation campaign still reverberates in many of L.A. County’s Latino business corridors, this according to a UCLA report published on Wednesday.

The report, rooted in quantitative data and conversations with entrepreneurs countywide, was conducted by UCLA’s nonpartisan Latino Policy and Politics Institute and Inclusive Action for the City, a nonprofit based in Boyle Heights.

The participants include people who run restaurants, bakeries, hair salons, childcare centers, auto repair shops, furniture stores and other brick-and-mortar businesses. Most are located in neighborhoods that were most targeted by federal immigration agents. 

In the summer of 2025, L.A. County became the focal point of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. Federal immigration agents carried out operations at commercial corridors that serve as important economic hubs for Latino communities, as well as in residential areas and public spaces. Amid roving patrols and large-scale raids, the federal government deployed thousands of National Guard troops and hundreds of Marines to support these efforts, further militarizing the region.

The institute's report found that, since then, many entrepreneurs are still struggling to keep their businesses open. Some have taken on debt and made other sacrifices to stay afloat.

Amada Armenta, one of the lead researchers and director of the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute, underscored that the consequences of the raids go beyond economics.

In April, she and her colleagues conducted a series of focus groups for the report. And, “without fail,” Armenta added, at least one participant would end up in tears.

The entrepreneurs cried about the effects the raids had on their businesses, she said. They also cried about the toll they took on their health and on their families.

How the researchers calculated economic loss  

First, the researchers identified nine places that were subject to enforcement actions, with the goal of sampling a wide breadth of neighborhoods across L.A. County. Ultimately, they landed on businesses in:

1. Cypress Park
2. the Fashion District
3. Huntington Park
4. Pacoima
5. Paramount
6. Whittier
7. Ladera Heights
8. the Warehouse District 
9. Westlake

The researchers identified 989 businesses within that half a mile by measuring cellphone data near raids.

After that, “we looked to see how many cell phones visited those businesses in the two weeks after a raid happened, compared to the two weeks before,” Armenta told LAist.

That’s how the researchers determined that, after last summer’s raids, the businesses had 46,000 fewer visits. Then, the researchers estimated the lost revenue. In the two weeks after the raids, they calculated a loss of $3.16 million.

The price of chronic fear and distress 

To learn more about how businesses in those areas have fared since last summer, the research team conducted surveys and focus groups with 75 entrepreneurs.

The participants, Armenta said, shared “stories of tremendous hardship,” describing chronic fear and psychological distress.

In the surveys, the entrepreneurs repeatedly described a sustained sense of fear, anxiety, depression and hypervigilance. The entrepreneurs continue to limit their movement outside work and home; carry identification documents when they leave the house; monitor community reports of federal agent activity; and develop contingency plans for themselves, their families and their employees.

For many, dreams of expansion are gone. The entrepreneurs described having to lay off some of their employees, taking on more hours themselves and consolidating locales.

The stress of mounting bills has also taken a physical toll on the participants. One store owner described relapsing into alcohol use after maintaining sobriety. She attributed the relapse to prolonged feelings of helplessness and loss of control. Another business owner said the stress of seeing her family’s savings dry up caused her so much stress her face became paralyzed.

“We thought this was an important part of the story,” Armenta said. “There's been a couple of other reports that have come out about the way that the raids impact L.A.'s economy or businesses, but none of it has documented [their] effect on entrepreneurs.”

“And when we think about Latinos, particularly, they didn't just experience this as an attack on their businesses,” she added. “They experienced it as an attack on their communities, on their families, on themselves.”

Disclosure: Julia Barajas is a part-time graduate student at UCLA Law.

Flies, rodents and other pests have been a persistent problem in Boyle Heights and nearby communities as millions of pounds of food rot in a nearby burned-out warehouse. It’s gotten bad enough that L.A. Mayor Karen Bass is asking for action from the L.A. County Department of Public Health.

In a letter sent Tuesday to county Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer, Bass said she’s “concerned with County DPH’s pace in addressing this disaster” and the risks it posed to health and quality of life.

“Possibly the worst manifestation of these risks is the severe infestation of flies in Boyle Heights and neighboring communities,” Bass wrote.

LAist has asked the Department of Public Health for comment and will update this article when they respond.

The back-and-forth between jurisdictions

Bass wrote that the city of L.A., which does not have its own health department, is largely dependent on L.A. County for control of potentially disease-carrying vectors. The city has said elsewhere that its Sanitation Department did set about 250 rat traps in surrounding areas.

Bass’ letter says the county took its first steps to hold warehouse operator Lineage accountable for a fly infestation on July 17, ordering the company to remove flies and mosquitoes from the property.

“Although I appreciate that County DPH has taken this first step, the County’s report only directs Lineage to eliminate flies from Lineage’s own property,” Bass’ letter to Ferrer states.

Bass urged the county to compel Lineage to address pests at neighboring properties “with aggressive measures to eliminate the flies and any other vectors.”

As for L.A. County’s Department of Public Health, a spokesperson told LAist on July 17 that it had itself directed the city and Lineage to address the pest situation.

“Los Angeles County Department of Public Health requested that both Lineage Logistics and the City of Los Angeles develop and implement a vector/insect control plan,” the statement reads.

Lineage’s part

According to Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, who represents Boyle Heights on the L.A. City Council and met with Lineage representatives on Monday, an inspector contracted by the company confirmed that the rotting food at the warehouse is serving as a breeding ground for flies. The infestation won’t go away without addressing the root cause, Jurado reported the contractor as saying.

“Removing waste, adding odor-control equipment, and conducting a pest inspection are important,” Jurado said in a statement. “But residents are asking a more fundamental question: Are conditions actually improving? They deserve evidence, timelines and accountability — not just a list of activities.”

Lineage has not yet presented its pest control plan to the public.

A ticking clock

The first day of instruction for L.A. Unified schools is Aug. 12, three days before the city’s current deadline to clear the warehouse — a deadline Lineage does not appear to be on track to meet.

That’s led many teachers and parents to raise the alarm about smells and pests that may very well still be around when school starts. An LAUSD spokesperson told Boyle Heights Beat that it is prepared to temporarily relocate nearby schools, as they did with summer programs during the warehouse fire.

Lineage meets deadline at last minute

Meanwhile, Lineage also faced a deadline of Tuesday to present a plan to air quality officials on how to address smells of spoiled food, which have been reported from miles away. A South Coast Air Quality Management District spokesperson said that the agency received a response from Lineage at 5 p.m. and is evaluating it.

L.A.’s homeless services agency has not completed any internal audits in years — and one that was started two years ago is still incomplete because management is taking months to provide responses, officials said Monday.

The delayed audit has been looking into why the L.A. Homeless Services Authority, known as LAHSA, failed to spend $7 million in federal dollars it was granted to house and serve people in need. The roughly six-page audit report hasn’t been released because it’s missing LAHSA management responses that were requested over two months ago, officials said.

Internal audits are considered critically important to protecting taxpayer dollars at every level of government. L.A. County auditors, for example, issued about 100 reports in a recent fiscal year.

“ We haven’t gotten anything,” said Erum Shahnawaz, LAHSA’s chief internal auditor, referring to the lack of response from LAHSA management at a meeting of the agency’s audit committee on Monday.

“That’s the only thing that's holding us from issuing the final report,” Shahnawaz said of the underspending audit.

That audit is examining a repeat problem. A previous, external audit in January 2022 found LAHSA had left $3.5 million in federal grants on the table by not using them.

Shahnawaz flagged management’s delays to the LAHSA Commissioner Justin Szlasa, Szlasa said. He chairs the commission’s audit committee, and has repeatedly called out LAHSA executives’ delays in providing information about taxpayer spending over the past year.

“ I've been trying to intervene and use whatever I can to try to help provide support,” said Szlasa as he described his attempts to get the auditor the answers needed to complete the report.

Szlasa was appointed to the commission by L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger.

 “It shouldn't take us two months to receive a…management response to an internal audit,” Szlasa said at Monday’s meeting. He said the industry standard for internal audits is eight or nine weeks from start to finish. That compares to the two years — and counting — for LAHSA’s federal underspend audit.

“We haven't had a single internal audit completed here in the last couple of years, which is nuts,” Szlasa added. He called for internal audits to happen much more frequently.

Long delays to LAHSA audits also are not new. In November 2024, the county issued a widely-seen audit that included findings that LAHSA was failing to complete internal audits.

Half of LAHSA’s governing commission is appointed by L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and half appointed by each of the five county supervisors. Bass is also the only elected official on the commission. She served on the audit committee for several months last fall. Records show she was absent for all of the meetings during that time.

Janine Lim, LAHSA’s deputy chief financial officer, said management’s responses to the audit on underspending haven’t been provided yet because LAHSA leadership did not have clearly defined roles for who is supposed to coordinate responses to internal audits.

“ We need to work on clarifying that role internally,” Lim said.

 “The last two months have been probably some of the most stress-filled two months that we've had at LAHSA,” said Paul Rubenstein, chief of staff to LAHSA CEO Gita O’Neil, pointing to mass layoffs.

Szlasa said there’s not that much in the audit for management to respond to.

“It's like, six pages or less,” he said.

Szlasa said  another option is to “just say we've asked management for responses and we're awaiting management response. We can publish the results.”

In response, Shahnawaz said that if management doesn't have an updated timeline for a response, then she’ll go ahead and issue the report without the response.

Once they floated that idea, Lim committed to providing the responses by next Tuesday.

LAHSA’s leadership has downsized the internal audit team — dropping from a staff of three to just one in the agency’s proposed budget up for approval Friday.

Delays in getting access to financial records

The delayed responses from management are not the only thing that’s been slowing down audits, Szlasa said at the meeting.

LAHSA policy, approved by its governing commission, says internal auditors are “ authorized to access all organizational records, personnel, and systems necessary for conducting audits,” he said.

But the auditor has faced challenges in actually getting that access, Szlasa said — including delays in being allowed to view LAHSA’s databases that show contracts and financial payments.

 ”We finally were granted access, but it wasn't, it wasn't easy, it wasn't immediate. It was slow,” Szlasa said.

Many failed outside audits

The delays on the internal audit come even after LAHSA failed multiple external audits in recent years, which have found the agency — overseen by city and county elected officials — has neglected to properly track billions of dollars in spending.

Largely in response to earlier audits, L.A. County supervisors pulled funding from LAHSA and are having the county instead oversee it directly. L.A.’s mayor and City Council have continued to have LAHSA manage the city’s homeless spending while the council delays plans to start studying a possible plan to transition away city tax dollars.

Signatures under scrutiny

LAHSA is also in the midst of a different internal audit — expected to finish in late August or early September — examining whether top officials followed requirements when signing contracts and letting others sign. It was launched in the wake of LAist reporting that found LAHSA’s then-CEO Va Lecia Adams Kellum’s signature finalized a $2.1 million contract with her husband’s employer.

LAist also discovered Adams Kellum’s signature, as LAHSA’s CEO at the time, finalized a quarter-million-dollar contract between LAHSA and a longtime service provider she led up until two months earlier.

That contract was signed so soon after she left the service provider — St. Joseph Center — that the contract paperwork still listed her as one of St. Joseph Center’s points of contact and authorized signers.

She is currently under a state ethics investigation into whether her actions were an illegal conflict of interest.