Government and detainees paint clashing pictures of conditions at Adelanto

Recent court filings paint two contradictory pictures about what is happening behind closed doors at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, the privately run immigration detention center 90 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles.

On the one hand, federal officials argue conditions at Adelanto already meet the standards set by U.S. District Court Judge Sunshine Suzanne Sykes. Sykes ordered the government to make immediate improvements at the detention facility on July 16.

And, in any case, they’ve asked the judge to hold off on enforcing her order while they appeal.

Lawyers representing the plaintiffs — people detained at the facility — instead describe routine violations of the court order still taking place today. They argue delaying enforcement will prolong violations of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees due process and fair treatment before the law.

How we got here

The case was filed in January by lawyers representing people detained at Adelanto after two people died at the facility — two more people have died since then.

Here are some key allegations in the lawsuit:

• Problems with access to medical care and disability accommodations
• Contaminated water
• Water unavailable 24/7
• Food that doesn't meet dietary requirements

Sykes found enough evidence to support these claims to require immediate action. That’s where the preliminary injunction comes in.

And that did two things: It ordered some changes to be made right away, like 24-hour access to clean water and healthy food. Then it asked the government to prepare a plan for long term improvements. That’s the plan filed by federal officials late Thursday, July 30, which was short on details and also claimed many of the alleged complaints were invalid.

A July 31 filing by plaintiffs’ attorneys fundamentally disagreed, saying “conditions at Adelanto are not a matter of dispute; they are documented by extensive expert testimony, declarations from detained individuals, and the Government’s own admissions.”

The filing calls the government’s request for a stay a delaying tactic, one that would keep in place “conditions this Court found likely unconstitutional, and in which four people have died.”

Sophia Wrench, an attorney for the plaintiffs with Public Counsel, said the government’s request is full of contradictions.

“This request to hold off on enforcing this injunction represents a pattern of behavior on the part of the government to continually delay implementing court orders,” Wrench said. “They are simultaneously arguing that they’re already doing everything that the court order is asking them to do, but also saying that it would irreparably injure them to continue to implement the order. So meanwhile, the 1,800 plus people at Adelanto still don’t have clean water consistently, still don’t have clean facilities, and still experience mold that has not been remediated.”

Asked for comment about the plaintiff’s most recent filing, The GEO Group Inc., the private company contracted to run Adelanto under a $400 million annual contract through 2029, referred LAist to ICE.

The Department of Homeland Security has not yet responded to a request to comment for this story, but in a previous, unsigned statement, the agency said reports of substandard conditions at Adelanto are false.

Alleged worms in the water

One central area of dispute is over water, both access and quality.

Federal officials say both are adequate. In a declaration filed to the court on July 30, Ryan Smith, an ICE assistant field office director, said conditions outlined in the July 16 court injunction are being met.

Smith’s declaration said the facility already provides clean drinking water 24 hours a day, with access to drinking fountains supplied by the same municipal water company that supplies the town of Adelanto.

Shortly after Smith’s declaration was filed, L.A. Taco reported a man held at Adelanto, Carlitos Ricardo Parias, said he discovered black worms in the drinking water there. An attorney representing Parias said Parias got the water from coolers provided by the facility, and shared the video showing the worms with LAist.

Other people detained at Adelanto complained about the water in new court filings. A declaration filed by Wrench, of Public Counsel, includes reports from four men held inside the facility who all report “significant delays” accessing clean drinking water since the court order.

Water is available from a sink inside the cells and in Igloo jugs, according to the declaration, which also notes those detained said it’s only been since the lawsuit was filed in January that GEO guards instructed them to drink from the sink.

The declaration says that even the water in the jugs “appears to be stale and dirty, with visible black sediment in the water.”

Guards occasionally take the water dispensers away, one plaintiff reported, leading the men in his unit to chant “Agua! Agua! Agua!”

One plaintiff said the men in his unit do not have clean drinking water for four hours at a time nearly every day. He said on July 22, nearly a week after the order, around 25 people in the unit filed a collective grievance and were told by a guard that they could drink water from the sink instead.

While it’s true that the Adelanto Water Department provides water to the facility, Wrench said that doesn’t explain away issues with water cleanliness.

“The city of Adelanto serves water to the entire city of Adelanto. So they are responsible to that point, but once the water is in the detention center, Adelanto is responsible for the storage of the water, the quality of the pipes, the overlay with the sewer system,” Wrench said. “We’re getting things like people saying the water smells, alternatively, like bleach or smells like water, we’re seeing that the water is dark colored. That’s what we’re hearing from folks inside. That doesn’t align with what GEO Group and ICE are telling us.”

Alleged defiance of the order and ongoing staffing issues

The plaintiffs also report in the court declarations that ICE has failed to improve access to healthy food, medical care or exercise in the yard.

According to the declaration, people detained at Adelanto report The GEO Group employees telling them they either have not heard of the order, or that ICE has told them not to make any changes until the appeal is finalized.

One example in the declaration: A detained man who raised the court order with a GEO officer, a captain, reported she told him that she had not seen the order and said that the facility was short-staffed. The next day, the man said that the captain called him into her office to explain that, since the order was being appealed, it would not be enforced.

“She explained that once ICE told them to enforce the [preliminary injunction], they would do so immediately, but that ICE had not told them to enforce it,” according to the declaration.

In their application to delay implementing the July 16 order, lawyers for the federal government explain that there are approximately 52 ICE employees on-site, along with 350 security and operations staff and 100 medical staff employed by GEO Group. There are currently about 1,800 people being held at Adelanto.

Wrench told LAist that staffing appears to be a major issue at Adelanto.

“We are hearing that guards have to work 16, 18 hour shifts, and so they’re burning out quickly, either getting fired or leaving, quitting their jobs,” Wrench said. “Almost every time I go to Adelanto, I’m hearing new people being trained on the job when I’m speaking to different staff. That means they don’t have enough guards to clean, they don’t have enough guards to supervise people in their outdoor time, and so that means they have to cut corners.”

Who is responsible for Adelanto?

In court filings, the federal government has argued that the government cannot address the issues in the court order, because the Adelanto facility is run by GEO, its contractor.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs dispute this reasoning, what the recent court filings call the “defendant’s central gambit.” They claim Sykes was briefed on this argument and rejected it in issuing the order for relief. According to plaintiffs’ filings, ICE has the contractual authority to require GEO’s compliance with any conditions the court orders. “ICE need not physically operate the mop to ensure the floors are clean, it need only exercise the contract provisions that already require GEO to do so,” a filing from July 31 states.

“It’s quite frankly ridiculous that they continue to argue that because GEO is not a direct party to the case, that they don’t have levers of control over GEO to be implementing this order,” Wrench told LAist. “They have a contract with GEO Group to be doing the day-to-day operations for this facility. There is a constitutional duty that the government has whenever they are detaining someone.”

In the latest earnings call, GEO’s CEO and founder George Zoley, who immigrated to the U.S. from Greece in 1953, said the federal government was looking to take direct ownership of immigration detention centers.

“As some blue states are considering more active involvement in oversight of facilities, I think the logical solution to much of that is federal ownership of the facilities,” Zoley said. “They are federal facilities to begin with, in my opinion.”