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WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security has purchased three immigrant detention facilities in Adelanto for $950 million, according to the private prison corporation that sold them.

The sale by the GEO Group, a Florida-based government contractor, follows an initial $1.5-billion sale over the summer of two other California detention facilities by GEO’s competitor, CoreCivic of Tennessee.

The facilities owned by GEO Group include the 1,280-bed Adelanto West ICE Processing Center, the 660-bed Adelanto East ICE Processing Center and 704-bed Desert View Annex.

In total, the federal government has now spent nearly $3.2 billion on detention facility purchases, the majority of them in California. CoreCivic sold off two other facilities, in Minnesota and Kansas, in August.

The sales were made possible by an infusion last year of $45 billion for immigration detention from President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

In its announcement, GEO Group sad it will continue managing daily operations at the facilities under the company’s existing contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is effective through Dec. 19, 2034.

The company said it is engaged in an “active process” with Homeland Security for the potential sale of multiple other facilities. Those sales hinge on GEO Group’s ability to continue managing those facilities under long-term contracts, the company wrote.

“We are pleased with the completion of these important asset sales to the U.S. federal government, and we look forward to continuing to provide high-quality secure support services under our existing long-term contracts with ICE,” George C. Zoley, the company’s CEO, wrote in a news release.

“We are proud of our 40-year public-private partnership with ICE, and we stand ready to continue to assist the federal government in meeting its immigration enforcement priorities,” Zoley added.

During a shareholder call in August, Zoley said ICE was contemplating buying more than 10 facilities, and that number “could continue to grow.”

“We believe we have two types of assets: the buildings and the businesses of providing support services,” he said on the call. “We are pursuing a potential sale of the buildings, but we want to retain the business. We consider ourselves primarily a support services operator, and will place particular importance on our ability to continue our support services at any facility sold to ICE.”

GEO Group said it anticipates receiving $705 million in proceeds from the sales, after taxes and transaction fees. The company wrote that net proceeds will reduce the company’s debt and facilitate the repurchase of company shares.

This story will be updated.

Golfer Phil Mickelson checked himself into a facility earlier this year “seeking treatment for family trauma and addiction,” a representative for the six-time major championship winner said in a statement to news outlets on Wednesday.

Mickelson, 56, reportedly is no longer at the facility. No information about the specifics of his stay or details about his reasons for entering the program have been made available.

In February, Mickelson announced that he would miss the first two LIV Golf events of the year because he and his wife, Amy Mickelson, “need to be present for a family health matter.”

The only tournament the golfer known as Lefty has competed in this year was LIV Golf South Africa, where he finished at 7-under par and tied for 48th place, in March.

The following month, Mickelson announced he was withdrawing from the Masters and that he would “be out for an extended period of time as my family continues to navigate a personal health matter.”

In June, Golf Digest reported that a female member of the staff at the Farms Golf Club in Rancho Santa Fe had accused Mickelson of making “nonconsensual and inappropriate physical contact” with her months earlier.

Mickelson hired defamation attorney Tom Clare, who said video evidence contradicted the allegations.

In response to the Golf Digest report, a Mickelson spokesperson said in a statement: “Any misunderstanding has been cleared up. Phil continues to attend to a family health matter and is uncertain when he will be able to return to professional golf.”

A longtime gambling enthusiast, Mickelson admitted in a 2023 Instagram post that at some point he had “crossed the line of moderation and into addiction” but was “back on track to being the person I want to be.”

“After many years of receiving professional help, not gambling, and being in recovery from my addictions, I’m now able to sit still, be present in the moment and live each day with an inner calm and peace,” Mickelson wrote. “I still have a lot of cleaning up to do with those I love the most but I’m doing it slowly and as best I can.”

Perez Hilton’s website has offered an update on the celebrity gossip blogger’s progress following his apparent August suicide attempt, revealing that he has been allowed to see his children and mother.

“They were first able to spend time together through a few video calls, and since then, Hilton has also been able to see his children and his mom a few times for short, supervised visits at the facility,” according to the site. “Seeing his children in person has meant an enormous amount to Perez. There have definitely been a lot of emotions for everyone, but being able to spend that time together has been incredibly meaningful and healing.”

Hilton, born Mario Lavandeira Jr., experienced a mental health crisis on the night of Aug. 4 in his Miami home and livestreamed himself engaging in self-harm with a box cutter and knife as followers pleaded with him to stop and attempted to contact him.

Hilton spent weeks in the hospital receiving treatment for his physical injuries before being transferred to a residential treatment program, where he could “focus fully on his mental health and recovery,” according to a family statement from earlier this month.

In August, Hilton was granted supervised visits with his children.

However, Hilton’s brother-in-law said on a podcast on Aug. 24 that Hilton had not had any contact with his kids, as “they were not allowed in that section of the facility.”

Tuesday’s update also publicized a GoFundMe fundraiser created for Hilton’s mother, Teresita Lavandeira, and Hilton’s three school-age children. The fundraiser, organized by theater producer Tom D’Angora, who has described himself as a longtime friend of Hilton’s, promised that “none of the money will be used for Perez personally.”

As of Tuesday afternoon, the fundraiser had raised about $14,000 out of its $25,000 goal. D’Angora was not immediately available for comment.

“Like any grandmother who suddenly finds herself responsible for raising three growing children, she’s also taken on significant and unexpected expenses,” the fundraiser website says. “Perez’s family and friends are helping however we can. We also wanted to give the many people who have asked how they can help a way to do so.”

The site’s Tuesday update said there was still no available timeline for when Perez would exit residential treatment.

“Communication with Perez is still limited, and we’re not able to talk to him daily,” the statement read.

But it assured that he was making progress.

“He’s continuing to work with his care team on understanding what led to his mental health crisis, recognizing warning signs, learning better ways to cope, and working through everything that brought him to this point,” according to the site.

Hilton has been a controversial media figure since the mid-2000s, when he launched a celebrity gossip blog called PageSixSixSix. After the New York Post sued him, he rebranded it to Perez Hilton, a play on socialite Paris Hilton’s name.

During its heyday, Hilton’s successful website — on which he would publish mocking posts about Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan and spread conspiracy theories about celebrity deaths — generated about 8 million page views a day, The Times’ columnist Robin Abcarian wrote recently. In 2010, he declined a $20-million offer for his website, according to reporting by the now-defunct outlet Gawker.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has stopped publicly revealing where it is holding thousands of detainees who are subject to final deportation orders, an unannounced move that has made it far more difficult for lawyers and relatives to find them, according to current and former officials familiar with the practice.

ICE removed those detainees from its online detainee locator system on Sept. 15, according to three current and former ICE officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the change. Several lawyers contacted by The Associated Press confirmed their clients vanished from the system this week, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association warned its members about the situation Friday.

The move represents a stark departure from previous practice and highlights the hardline nature of President Trump’s immigration crackdown, leaving thousands of detainees exceedingly hard to trace and potentially unable to exercise all of their legal options.

The practice, which applies to detainees who have received final orders of removal from an immigration court, could speed deportations by making last-minute legal challenges harder to pursue, immigration lawyers said. Nearly 16,000 people who were arrested and booked into ICE detention in July were subject to final removal orders, more than a third of the overall bookings, according to ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project based at U.C. Berkeley and UCLA.

The practice does not apply to detainees held at a detention facility in Adelanto, California or at temporary holding facilities in Minneapolis, New York City or suburban Chicago, the sources said. Judges have ordered ICE to list detainees in those facilities in the online locator promptly upon their arrival, as part of litigation over their detention practices.

Lawyers and relatives distressed by lack of information on detainees

The effort to hide their locations adds to the ways in which the Trump administration has made life harder for detainees and their families as it has increased pressure on them to waive appeals and agree to deportation.

ICE did not publicize the move and in a statement issued to the AP, the agency did not confirm or deny it. The statement said detainees with final removal orders were being prioritized for deportation, even as ICE faces a “historic number of injunctions” from courts stopping individual removals.

As a result of the change, lawyers and relatives lost track of their clients and loved ones without explanation, which is especially concerning because detainees are frequently moved to new facilities before deportation, said Greg Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

“Families are freaking out because they think the person has been deported and they don’t know where the person might be,” he said. “On the attorney side, this has serious implications for the ability to contact their client. It certainly has implications about how it will interfere with the attorney-client relationship.”

The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, has argued that people who are subject to final removal orders have received due process. That usually means an immigration judge has ordered their removal after a hearing, including cases when immigrants fail to show up, and the decision was affirmed on appeal or not appealed.

Detainees with final removal orders still have options to appeal

Still, those detainees have options to challenge their detention and removal, including seeking to reopen the case or by bringing what’s known as a habeas petition asking a judge to release them on constitutional grounds. Federal judges have granted thousands of rulings ordering that detainees be released or granted bond hearings.

ICE detention facilities held more than 65,000 people as of early July, the most recent available data. Around 30% of them likely have final removal orders, said Michelle Mendez, legal director at the National Immigration Project.

More people have been issued final removal orders after failing to show up for hearings in recent months because the administration’s immigration courts have taken steps to make it harder to participate and to reopen such cases, she said.

“To me, it’s just another iteration of disappearing people,” she said. “Why would we do that in the United States of America? It’s something we’d hear about in another country and be concerned about individual rights and due process.”

Some with final removal orders also have legal protections against deportation to their countries of origin based on the likelihood they would be tortured or persecuted. Many of them are facing removal to third-party countries where they have no ties and their disappearance in ICE’s system will make legal challenges harder, lawyers said.

Lawyers say clients have vanished from ICE locator system

ICE initiated the online detainee locator system in 2010 to allow relatives, lawyers and the public to search for people in custody. Previously they had to call ICE regional offices or individual facilities to try to track them down.

Many advocates and lawmakers have complained that the system updates too slowly and contains too much inaccurate or missing information, allowing ICE to shield the locations of detainees for days or weeks. Minors, people who have been held by U.S. Customs and Border Protection for less than 48 hours, and detainees who are being transported are not in the system, among others.

But the exclusion of detainees with final removal orders has no apparent parallel, several immigration lawyers said. Atenas Burrola Estrada, a deputy program director with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, said that “every single one of our clients who has a final order has disappeared from the locator,” including 17 in all as of Monday.

Among those disappeared from the locator system are eight Somali men being detained at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to one of their attorneys, My Khanh Ngo, of the American Civil Liberties Union. She said the change could make it “nearly impossible” for people to challenge their removals in some cases.

“If you can’t find your client, don’t know what’s happening to your client, you can’t get that information to the court to stop their removal,” she said.

Foley writes for the Associated Press.