Imperfect Paradise: Rotten food, disease, isolation – what we know about conditions at the Adelanto ICE detention center

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Welcome to Imperfect Paradise.

I'm your host, Nadei Zamoreno.

As large-scale immigration raids and protests continue nationwide, the numbers are revealing.

Iceras tripled last year here in Los Angeles.

The number of people who have died in ice custody across the U.S. have reached its highest

levels in decades.

As the Trump administration pushes to expand attention facilities, there are serious questions

about the conditions inside these immigrant prisons, the treatment of detainees, and

the accountability of federal immigration officials.

This week on Imperfect Paradise, we continue our immigration coverage and take you to a

federal ice facility in Adelanto, California, where multiple people have died in custody,

the latest death just last week, with activists describing the center as a concentration camp.

LAAS reporter Julia Barajas has been following the effects of President Trump's immigration

policies on Southern California communities.

She has been looking into the Adelanto Ice Processing Center and is here with us now.

Hey, Julia.

Hey, Nadei.

Julia, help give us a better sense of where this detention center is located and what

it's like there, what do we know about Adelanto?

Yeah, so Adelanto is located in SoCal's Mojave Desert, about 85 miles away from downtown

LA or in the inland empire.

The campus is made up of two facilities, including the Adelanto Ice Processing Center and

the Desert View Annix.

And according to the most recent data released by ICE, there are about 2,000 people being

held in those facilities.

The place has been making headlines because in recent months, at least four people have

died after being detained there.

On Saturday, hundreds of people from across greater LA will stage a huge protest at the Adelanto

Ice Detention Center, Julia Barajas has more.

You reported on a big protest outside of Adelanto last month, right?

What was it like there?

Our colleague, Libby Rene and I, accompanied a caravan heading out there to Adelanto

from Pasadena.

Tell us why folks are gathered here this morning and what the plan is for today.

So today we have faith leaders, we have immigrant rights advocates, we have community members.

It was a very diverse crowd.

And it was one of many caravans, the protesters from greater LA.

Most people went out in buses, but many also went in carpools.

And the event was organized by the National Day Labor Organizing Network and Sister Groups

in Southern California.

The event took place on a Saturday morning and there were about 300 people there.

We talked to people from Southeast LA, from Oxnard.

And they were really people kind of just from all walks of life, a lot of different race

on ethnic groups.

A lot of people brought their children, some people even brought their pets.

And I remember it was like a super windy day, but people stuck it out.

They were out there for several hours up until I want to say sunset.

And some of the people that we spoke to said that they were out there because they had

been personally impacted, maybe one of their loved ones had been detained or even deported.

But a lot of people were there because they said they wanted to express solidarity with

their neighbors or with just immigrant families in general.

OK, so some people were there not because they had any kind of personal state, but just

because they wanted to support their community.

Tell us more about the protesters' goals.

The purpose was kind of too old, so participants started to protest conditions inside the Attention

Center.

But they also told me they made a trek to let the people who are inside and know that

they have not been forgotten.

And so in addition to like that March and Arali.

Everyone loves my neighbor and the sweaty to take.

The protesters also staged a concert just outside the facility to serenade the detainees.

Some of the participants made speeches, and the musicians also played a range of music,

things like folk songs, but also like more upbeat genres like Wombian, Guam Radita.

I meant to kind of like uplift the spirits of the people on the side.

And one of the people we spoke to was Jack Santana.

Their father is a day laborer, a father of five, and he's been detained since last November.

I'm letting these eyes officers know, hey, you guys are fucking up real badly right now.

You guys are just profiling people and kidnapping them off the streets.

You guys say that you're after criminals, but in reality, you're just taking innocent

people, taking fathers, mothers away from their families, taking children as well.

What are some other concerns that you heard from the protesters?

The protesters were talking to me about just like what they've heard from current and

former detainees.

They say conditions are completely inhumane.

For example, they say that people do not get sufficient food or clean drinking water,

and that the food they do get is often spoiled.

Detainees have also reported on sanitary conditions.

They say it's the place where a disease and illness run rampant, largely due to a lack

of access to proper medical care.

I want to take a moment to talk numbers here to help us understand the bigger picture,

specifically the number of arrests and separately the people who have died in ice custody.

Let's start with arrests.

Federal immigration officials arrested more than 14,000 people in 2025.

Just according to the latest reporting and analysis from our colleagues, LEU and Jordan

running, who looked at new data from the deportation data project.

The majority of those detained had no criminal record, and in the case of Adelanto, I think

it's worth noting that about a year ago, there were only three people detained there.

But after President Trump's domestic deportation project kicked in last summer, the federal government

began detaining large numbers of immigrants at Adelanto.

The number of detainees quickly swelled from three to about two thousand, and critics

say that because the population grew so quickly, staff haven't been able to keep up.

I have reached out to the geogroup, a private company that is contracted by ICE, and runs

a facility for comment, and I have not received a response.

What about the number of deaths?

So 2025 has been the deadliest year for ICE since 2005, nearly three dozen people died

in ICE custody last year, and so far this year, at least 14 people have died nationally.

The latest was José Guadalupe Ramos Olano, a Mexican immigrant who died in Adelanto last

week.

He was the fourth Adelanto detainee to die since September.

Coming up on Imperfect Paradise, we go inside the Adelanto Ice Processing Center, and

look at the inhuman conditions the detainees say they're forced to live through.

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Welcome back to imperfect paradise.

I'm Nere Zamoreno, and I'm talking with LAS reporter Julia Barajas about a nice detention

center in Adelanto and the controversy around living conditions and treatment of detainees

there.

Julia, you spoke with someone who was detained at Adelanto.

What is his story?

Yes, when we went to the protest, we met a man named Abe.

He was detained at Adelanto in February for about three weeks.

He asked Elias not to share his last name.

I was going to a yearly check-in, and the ICE officer just decided to remove my deportation

will withholding a removal, and they decided to try to deport me to a third party country.

Abe wasn't able to share too much of his story with me because the details are sensitive,

but he is one of hundreds of people on Southern California who have gone in for a routine

immigration check-ins and ended up at the detention center.

And what was life like inside of Adelanto for Abe?

Abe corroborated a lot of the allegations I've seen in sworn declarations from current

detainees.

He complained about the food, and he was especially worried about the lack of access to medical

care.

All the food was pretty much like processed canned food, nothing was fresh.

As far as medical issues is really horrible, anytime you need medical attention, you have

to write a slip, but you don't get the attention within three days, or maybe sometimes

a week.

Abe told me that one of the men he shared a cell with was in really bad shape with a really

nasty cough, and Abe said he was worried about catching whatever he had, of course, but

that he was especially sad to see that he was not getting the support he needed.

What ended up happening to Abe?

So he has been released from detention with the help of his family and friends who fundraised

to pay his legal fees.

Another thing that's worth noting is that Abe's detention wasn't usually short.

He was released after just three weeks, and many detainees are helped for months, and

some have been in there for years.

At the protest, Abe, his brother, and Abe's wife were distributing groceries.

Abe said he knew that a lot of the people in Adelanto were the breadwinners and their

families, and he wanted to help anyone who might be struggling to put food on the table.

And what else can you tell us about what happens inside of Adelanto that gives us a sense

of ICE's operations and how people are being treated there?

I've started looking into solitary confinement numbers at Adelanto after hearing from detainees

and California Attorney General Robonta that isolation is being used as a punitive tool,

but I have not been able to verify this myself.

What it can share is that Adelanto seems to have a consistently high number of people in

solitary confinement, at least compared to other facilities, and also exploring why people

are being held in isolation, and so far, the cases I've seen involve people with medical

issues and also people who were clearly in need of mental health support.

And what is I said about the conditions of its detention centers?

I put out a statement about the most recent death of a detainee in late March, and it says

ICE is committed to ensuring that all those in custody reside in safe, secure, and humane

environments.

Comprehensive medical care is provided from the moment individuals arrive and throughout

their stay.

ICE also says that at no time during detention is a detained alien denied emergency care.

Julia earlier you mentioned that at least four people had died after being detained at

this facility.

What do we know about them?

All of the men who died were born in Mexico, but some of them had been living and working

in the U.S. for decades.

Most of them were fathers of U.S. citizens, and they ranged in age from 39 to 52.

My colleague Jordan running attended a news conference in January where families of people

who've died at Adelanto spoke out.

Here's Jose Ayala talking about his brother Ismail Ayala Uribe, who died in the Adelanto

facility last September.

It was very difficult when we found out he was there for about a month, and we know nothing

of his condition, just that he was sick, and that he wasn't getting any help when he asked.

We found out of his passing in early morning when the police came knock at our door that

he had passed away in the hospital.

We had no idea he was hospitalized, we had no idea that he had a scheduled surgery.

There was no information given to us by Adelanto.

Jordan also spoke with Maria El García, she's the daughter of Gabriel García Abiles, who

died in Adelanto last October.

He was in there for like 10 days, I would call every day, and they just told me the

first day that they had sent him to the medical center, they didn't want to give me any

updates.

They called me that day he was passing away like around 9.30 to go to the hospital, they

are like all tired family and friends to come and say they're less good-bye sister

fathers in critical conditions.

That's the only day we knew about him, but before that nothing.

And Julia, can you tell us more about the man we mentioned earlier who died at Adelanto

just this last week, Jose Guadalupe Ramos Solano.

On March 25th, Stafford Adelanto found Ramos Solano unconscious and unresponsive.

And in a press statement, I said that he was taken to the Victor Valley Global Medical

Center in Victorville, where he was pronounced dead.

In your reporting, you've talked to protesters who have drawn comparisons between Adelanto

and concentration camps.

And I know that that is a serious analogy that brings with it a very traumatic history.

Why are they making this comparison and what does that tell us?

Libby and I came across multiple people who are making connections between the immigrant

detention centers and some of the darkest moments in U.S. and world history.

I liked the shorts.

As one of those people, she made the trek to Adelanto from the San Fernando Valley.

She told us it felt heavy to be out there.

Because the idea that Americans, however they're here or being held in camps, is something

that I heard about from my mother and my grandmother.

Some of the protesters brought up the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War

II, for instance, others made connections to the detention of Jewish people in Europe

before they were murdered.

Eliza held a sign saying, we've seen this shit before.

As a Jew, I was raised to know that once you are othered, you are in serious danger.

And this language that this administration has started, I mean, I remember hearing this

from my mother when I was a kid.

Other people, once you start to hurt them, you hurt them and you can destroy them.

This is what this is.

Make no mistake.

Shorts told me that she's really worried about the rhetoric coming out of the White House

with regard to undocumented immigrants and about how it's being used to justify their

detention and mistreatment.

Well, that does sound incredibly heavy.

No one should use a comparison to concentration camps lightly, just given what we know from

history.

You talked to another journalist about the significance of this kind of claim.

What was her perspective on this?

Yeah, I spoke with Andrea Pipser.

She is the author of One Long Night, a global history of concentration camps.

So she's been looking at this issue for years.

And she defines concentration camps as the mass detention of civilians without due process

or a real trial on the basis of identity.

And she noted that across time and space, who the tenies are, tends to be more important

than anything they've done.

Pipser said she agrees with the protesters use of their phrase based on her research.

She also said that almost a decade before Nazi Germany adopted the extermination centers,

the early concentration camps that they set up really resembled modern day eye facilities.

Lack of access to medical care, lack of sanitation, not enough food.

And you see brutal treatment by guards.

You see people being kidnapped off the street by a mass gunman.

And a lot of the American public is just accepting this horrific treatment

that if you put some other group in that situation, they wouldn't at all accept, but it's become normalized.

Pipser also acknowledged that people might say that undocumented immigrants

enter the country without permission.

So there is something that they've done.

But she also pointed out that generally speaking and trained the country without authorization

is a civil offense, not a criminal one.

So undocumented people are not serving a sentence.

Pipser also said that when Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh gave federal agents

the green light to continue making stops based on factors like speaking Spanish or speaking English

with an accent and race and ethnicity, that starts to clarify why detentions are actually happening

and why it does fit the definition of concentration camps.

Nazi Germany, for instance, they spent years criminalizing German Jews

so that they literally could not be there legally.

The whole goal was to turn them into effectively illegal aliens.

After the break on imperfect paradise, who can be held accountable for the conditions at Adelanto?

Stay with us.

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Welcome back to Imperfect Paradise. I'm Nireita Moreno and I'm talking with LAS reporter Julia Barajas

about claims of inhumane conditions at the Adelanto Ice Detention Facility.

Julia, let's talk now about potential consequences and accountability for what's happening inside of Adelanto.

In January, our colleague Jordan Running reported on a lawsuit filed by immigrants' rights groups against federal agencies around these claims.

Tell us more about that suit.

So the lawsuit was filed on behalf of current Adelanto detainees and the legal team has collected over two dozen sworn declarations

from people who are detained that really go into detail about all the alleged conditions that we've been talking about.

And the goal is to improve conditions at the detention center.

You talked with one of the groups that filed the lawsuit. Who are they and what did they tell you?

I spoke with Rebecca Brown. She is a supervising attorney at public council.

She mentioned that as the case is making its way through the federal court system, she and her legal team have filed a motion for a preliminary injunction.

That's just basically an emergency court order.

They're seeking immediate improvements to Adelanto before anyone else is harmed.

From our point of view, the facility was not equipped to handle the incoming people.

And what's happened is you've seen conditions so inhumane that we felt we were compelled to bring a lawsuit mold on the walls, unsafe drinking water.

Food is unappetizing and at times spoiled.

Also, we have submitted numerous declarations outlining how folks at Adelanto with different conditions ranging from diabetes to brain tumors, to epilepsy, to pregnancy are not getting the medical care that they desperately need.

And the goal for this lawsuit is to actually become a class action one so that it will apply to all detainees, not just the folks who are currently listed in the lawsuit.

Julia, what role does the state of California play when it comes to what's happening at Adelanto?

California Attorney General Rob Bonso's office is mandated to monitor conditions inside the state detention centers.

And last month, Bonso filed a brief that really bolsters the immigrant rights groups findings in it.

Bonso said his team has also witnessed a failure to accommodate people with disabilities and a lack of basic necessities.

He also said that detainees had been forbidden from using facility phones for long periods of time and that that prevented them from speaking with their family, of course, but also with their attorneys.

And what other ways can California lawmakers hold a detention center like Adelanto accountable?

State Senator Sacha Rene Perez has introduced a bill to strains in state oversight.

The bill is called the Massuma Khan Justice Act after an Altadena resident originally from Bangladesh who was detained during a routine immigration check-in.

And if implemented, the state would be able to find and revoke licenses of private detention facilities like Adelanto that felt to meet held and safety standards.

This is related to what we've been discussing because, as I said previously, Adelanto is privately run by a company contracted by ICE called a Geo Group Inc.

This company also operates several other detention centers across the country and so if the bill gets passed in California detention center operators like the Geo Group could face a penalty of up to $25,000 per violation,

per day, and even the suspension of their permits.

Multiple people who died in ICE custody, including the four men who died at Adelanto were Mexican nationals.

How is the Mexican government responding?

President Glalia Scheinbaum said the country is going to take legal steps to demand better conditions and accountability for the detainee deaths.

So far this includes filing a brief in support of a federal lawsuit over detention conditions.

And also a Mexico's foreign ministry is planning to raid the issue of immigration detainee depths to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Julia, now that we're having this conversation, when I was preparing for it, I realized that I actually visited one of two detention centers that were in the Chicago area right around this time back in 2017.

It's called McKenry County jail, so that was during President Trump's first term and at the time there were more than 200 detainees being housed there.

And today we're talking about 2,000 people being housed just at Adelanto alone.

So I'm wondering how the Adelanto facility sort of compares to other detention centers that we're seeing around the country.

So my reporting has focused on Adelanto, but I know that there are other similar issues at detention centers and other parts of the country right now.

So there was a detention center in West Texas, for example, where there was a measles outbreak quite recently.

But I'm curious, what did you observe?

Because I actually haven't been able to go inside yet.

I've been thinking with a lot of people who are detained or who have been detained.

Yeah, I mean, like as you can imagine, it was a really controlled environment.

So we had to go through almost months of like trying to get permission to actually go inside and we went through some legal groups that were speaking with some of the detainees who were inside.

So we did get to interview several of them and then we got to follow them sort of as they were going throughout the day.

They had some classes with some interfaith groups.

They were able to sort of make calls to their family members, but we don't know what the day-to-day was like if that makes sense.

What I do know is just that it was incredibly heavy and some of the folks that we spoke to ended up getting deported very shortly after that we interviewed them.

And so I'm curious just what what has stayed with you during this reporting process.

I remember that some of the activists built like a little altar for the people who had lost their lives in an ice custody.

And when I think about that day, to be honest, I think a lot about Eliza Schwartz who we heard from earlier.

She mentioned that she's a descendant of Holocaust survivors and I could just tell that it was really important to her to be out there.

But she talked about how she was like looking at the building where all the people are detained and saying all the people inside her jobs and homes to come home to and now they're there.

And I know she's really alarmed about how they're being treated.

What stayed with me the most is just the sadness she expressed. She made it seem like being out there that day was the least she could do.

Julia, thank you so much for sharing your reporting with us. Of course.

That's L.A.S. reporter Julia Barajas. Special thanks to L.A.S. reporters, Yusra Farzon, Libby Rainey, senior reporter L.A.U.

Watchdog correspondent Jordan Running and climate and environment senior editor Matt Ballinger.

I'm Niri Damorano, James Chow produced and sound design this episode.

Catherine Mailhouse is the executive producer of the show and our director of content development.

Anjali Sastry is our senior producer, engineering mixing and original music by E. Scott Kelly.

Imperfect Paradise is a production of L.A.S.

I'm Brienne Lee, senior producer for community engagement at L.A.S.

It's our goal to take complicated issues and make them easier for you to understand.

Which is why I'm pleased to tell you the L.A.S. voter game plan is back.

We're here to help you navigate your ballot with informed, accurate reporting on the candidates and issues.

Participation and elections makes for a stronger community. Learn more.

Visit L.A.S. dot com slash vote.