facility

A new report by the California Department of Justice found that conditions at immigrant detention facilities in the state have worsened as surging arrests under the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign led to overcrowding and insufficient medical care.

For the 175-page report, which was released Friday, California Justice Department staff, along with correctional and healthcare experts, toured all seven facilities that existed in 2025 (an eighth facility, the Central Valley Annex in McFarland, began receiving detainees in April). The team analyzed internal documents and detainee records, and interviewed detention staff and 194 detainees.

“This is the federal government paying for-profit, private companies to run these detention centers, and they are running these detention centers with inhumane, cruel, and unacceptable conditions, “ California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said at a news conference Friday.

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Lauren Bis, in a statement, defended the treatment of those held at detainment centers.

“No lawbreakers in the history of human civilization have been treated better than illegal aliens in the United States,” she said.

Bis added, “This is the best healthcare many aliens have received in their entire lives. Meals are certified by dietitians. Ensuring the safety, security, and well-being of individuals in our custody is a top priority at ICE.”

The inspections were possible because California enacted a law during the first Trump administration requiring state oversight and public reports detailing the conditions of immigrant detention facilities. Bonta said California is the only state in the country with such a law.

Such detailed reports have taken on outsized significance as the Trump administration has whittled down the Department of Homeland Security’s own oversight mechanisms.

The agency said it would respond later to a request for comment.

Christopher Ferreira, a spokesperson for The Geo Group, said the company’s services are monitored by DHS to ensure compliance with federal detention standards and contract requirements regarding detainees. The company oversees four facilities in California, including the Adelanto ICE Processing Center north of San Bernardino.

“The support services GEO provides include around-the-clock access to medical care, in-person and virtual legal and family visitation, general and legal library access, translation services, dietitian-approved meals, religious and specialty diets, recreational amenities, and opportunities to practice their religious beliefs,” Ferreira said.

He added that of the company’s immigration facilities are independently accredited by the American Correctional Assn. and the National Commission on Correctional Health Care.

CoreCivic operates the California City Detention Facility north of Lancaster and Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego. Spokesperson Ryan Gustin said the company had not been provided a copy of the report or reviewed its findings.

“The safety, health and well-being of the individuals entrusted to our care is our top priority,” Gustin said. He added that the company’s ICE-contracted facilities are “subject to multiple layers of oversight by our government partners” and auditors.

The report notes that CoreCivic did not make requested documents available to investigators, including records on use of force at the California City facility.

“The decision to deny Cal DOJ access to these files was remarkable in light of the serious legal claims that have been made against the facility, which allege that staff routinely engage in abusive behavior and unreasonable use of force against detainees, including deploying pepper spray, hitting a detainee with riot shields and holding him down with their knees on his back, and aggressively pushing a detainee,” the report states.

According to the report, the detainee population in California grew 162%, from 2,300 to more than 6,000 detainees, between site visits in 2023 and those in 2025. Most detainees had no criminal history and were classified as low-security.

Collectively, the facilities have the capacity to hold up to nearly 8,200 detainees.

Six people have died in ICE custody in California since the start of 2025 — four at Adelanto and two at Imperial Regional Detention Facility. In all of the Adelanto cases, family members alleged that the facility’s medical response was inadequate, the report said.

Inspectors found that staffing failed to keep pace with the growing numbers of detainees, particularly at Adelanto and at California City, where they saw “crisis-level healthcare understaffing.”

At Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield, the report says, “Medical care delays, including specialty care and referrals, were widespread and appeared to be caused by delays in approvals by ICE Health Service Corps and canceled or dropped referrals due to transfers between facilities.”

The intake process for new detainees, which includes a medical and mental health screening, is supposed to take place within 12 hours of their arrival. But detainees at several facilities reported waiting days or weeks before receiving their housing assignment and medical screening, the report says. While waiting, some slept on the floor without access to water.

In its statement, the Department of Homeland Security said detainees undergo medical, dental, and mental health intake screening within 12 hours of arriving at each detention facility, a full health assessment within 14 days of entering ICE custody or arrival at a facility, and access to medical appointments and 24-hour emergency care.

Gustin, the CoreCivic spokesperson, said its facilities adhere to detention standards on staffing and medical care. Emergency care is available 24 hours a day, he said, and the facilities work closely with local hospitals and providers for specialized care.

Ferreira, the Geo Group spokesperson, said detainees have access to teams of medical professionals and off-site specialists, imaging facilities and emergency services.

At the Adelanto facility, detainees said water coolers remained empty for hours. Justice Department staff saw murky drinking water come out of the tap in the women’s housing unit.

At the Golden State Annex in McFarland and at Mesa Verde, detainees said they spent at least $50 per week on commissary items so they wouldn’t go hungry. Across most facilities, detainees reported undercooked food, a lack of dietary or allergy accommodations and irregular mealtimes.

Basic necessities are also an issue, according to the report. At the California City facility, detainees said they got so cold that they cut the ends off socks to make improvised sleeves and covered the air vents in their cells with sheets of paper.

According to the report, Otay Mesa is the only detention center in California with a policy requiring that detainees be strip searched after being visited by anyone other than their attorney. Detained women recounted being told strip in front of male officers, even when menstruating, the report said.

Gustin said CoreCivic follows federal detention standards regarding searches of detainees.

The report did highlight some improvements, including at the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico, which inspectors said appeared better staffed with medical and mental health care providers compared to their 2023 visit. Still, the review “identified concerns regarding the facility’s management of detainees with severe mental health issues, including two detainees who experienced extended stays in restrictive housing of over 200 days.”

Emily Lawhead, a spokesperson for Management & Training Corp., which oversees the Imperial facility, said the company takes the report seriously. She noted that the report also highlights prompt responses to sick-call requests, meaningful access to programming and recreation and expanded attorney access through 36 private phone booths.

But Lawhead said the company will examine the concerns raised in the report.

“If our review identifies gaps, delays, or missed standards, we will address them,” she said.

The state law requiring the detention facility inspections expires next year. A bill by state Sen. María Elena Durazo (D-Los Angeles) would make the inspections permanent. Another state bill, by Sen. Steve Padilla (D-San Diego), would prevent the excessive markup of products sold at detention center commissaries.

ORLANDO, Fla. — Environmental groups say that the timing of the expected closure of an immigration detention center in the middle of the Florida Everglades, likely in the next month or two, is no accident because it will come as their lawsuit challenging its existence returns to a federal judge who had previously ordered it shut down.

A federal appellate court decided last month to keep open the detention center nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz,” for the time being, blocking a lower court decision ordering it to wind down operations. But the case was sent back to the lower court judge who now gets jurisdiction over the lawsuit as the litigation over the facility’s fate continues.

“Knowing that the same district judge who previously enjoined the operation would soon reassume oversight — the defendants are now effectively waving the white flag,” said Paul Schwiep, an attorney for the environmental groups that had sued, saying the facility’s construction hadn’t undergone a required environmental review.

When asked about the future of the state-run facility and its costs on Wednesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said that he hadn’t gotten any “official word” that federal authorities are going to stop sending detainees to the center.

But vendors who supply and help run the facility have been told that the closure could be as soon as next month, according to reports Tuesday by the New York Times and CBS News Miami. The Florida Department of Emergency Management, which operates the detention center, didn’t respond to an emailed inquiry on Wednesday. The Republican governor’s press secretary, Molly Best, referred questions about the facility to the state emergency management agency.

“We didn’t build any permanent facilities down there because we knew it was going to be temporary,” DeSantis said Wednesday at a news conference in Titusville, Fla.

DeSantis’ administration opened the facility in July to support the immigration crackdown by the administration of President Trump, who visited the detention center last summer. An attorney for two detainees has accused guards of severely beating and pepper-spraying detainees. Other detainees have said worms turn up in the food, toilets don’t flush and mosquitoes and other insects are everywhere.

“This monument to cruelty, waste and environmental and tribal lands abuse should have never been built,” U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Democrat from Florida, said Tuesday.

Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity sued state and federal officials a short time after the facility opened, claiming the remote airstrip site in the Everglades wasn’t given a proper environmental review required by federal law before it was converted into an immigration detention center. U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams in Miami agreed and ordered in August that the facility must wind down operations within two months.

The appellate court blocked the order, saying the Florida-run facility wasn’t under federal control and didn’t need to comply with federal law requiring an environmental impact review.

But the appellate court made clear that once Florida got federal reimbursement for the facility, it would have to comply with the federal environmental law, Schwiep said.

DeSantis said Tuesday that the state expected to be reimbursed by the federal government for $608 million, which has already been approved by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“There’s no negotiations on that,” he said.

Schneider writes for the Associated Press.

The Wende Museum of the Cold War announced on Saturday that it plans to build a $16-million expansion in Hawthorne.

The Culver City museum has purchased a historically significant midcentury modern building in Hawthorne, which it plans to transform into a research institute and interactive storage facility for its collections — a “living archive,” as it’s calling the facility.

The Wende plans to debut the space in spring 2028.

“In the museum world, there’s typically public space and storage space — meaning dead storage,” Wende founder and Executive Director Justin Jampol said in an interview. “And this living archive is a hybrid that combines both. It houses the collections and makes them accessible for discovery.”

The 24,000-square-foot building was erected in 1965 by shopping mall pioneer and developer Ernest Hahn to serve as his corporate headquarters. It was designed by movie theater architect George Nowak, who also designed the Writers Guild Theater.

The Wende plans to renovate the building, adding a 7,000-square-foot extension, with flexibility to further expand in the future. The facility will include state-of-the-art, climate-controlled storage for the museum’s more than 250,000-object collection of paintings, sculptures, photographs, tapestries and Cold War-era ephemera from the Soviet Union, East Bloc, China and other countries.

Interactivity, however, is the goal: so there will be spaces for “respite and inspiration,” Jampol said, such as a “scholar’s garden,” reading rooms and a library with a community learning lab and free coffee for visitors.

“The idea is to make it as engaging and comfortable as possible,” Jampol said. “Most archives are places that are very uncomfortable and uninspiring — think fluorescent lights blinking in a basement. The idea here is to open this up in a way that makes people want to be here. And focus on the content and not the space itself. We’re trying to create an experience that makes visitors want to go on an adventure.”

The Glorya Kaufman Community Center at the Wende Museum debuted this past fall.

(Stella Kalinina / For The Times)

The Wende’s Collections Department will be headquartered in the new building. The facility will also house a conservation center for endangered objects and paper archives, and will feature a digitization and imaging lab that will make the collections available online, free of charge.

It will also include reading rooms and research offices for up to 100 visiting scholars or artist fellows annually.

“The collections, instead of being hidden in a box, will be on full view,” Jampol said. “When you walk through, you won’t see boxes. You’ll see vases, tapestries, ceramics and more.”

Construction on the building, at 2311 W. El Segundo Blvd., starts May 15. Funds for the project came from the Arcadia Fund, the Kaufman Foundation and the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, among other capital supporters.

The Wende Museum in Culver City opened its doors in 2017 inside a former 1949 atomic bomb shelter. It now draws about 25,000 visitors annually, who come to take in four exhibitions and more than 60 public programs. Admission is free.

Rapid expansion has been a hallmark of the Wende of late.

In September, it debuted a $17-million culture and wellness center offering free yoga, meditation, sound baths and therapy. The 7,500-square-foot facility was made possible with funding from the late philanthropist Glorya Kaufman who died a month before the building opened to the public. It’s called the Glorya Kaufman Community Center.

The Wende’s Glorya Kaufman Community Center includes a century old A-frame theater, an old MGM prop house, for free culture and wellness events.

(Stella Kalinina / For The Times)

In February, the Wende bought a three-bedroom house built in the 1940s adjacent to the museum’s campus that will be used as a live-work space for photographers in residence. It will include a community space for photography workshops and a post-production studio. The Nikita Foundation and the Victor Family Foundation provided funding.

It debuted a tiny home on its campus last fall, nicknamed “The Stevie” after donor Steve Markoff. It’s used for cross-disciplinary artist residencies.

A facility for interactive museum storage and research is not a new concept in Los Angeles.

The Autry Museum of the American West — after merging with the Southwest Museum of the American Indian in 2003 and since stewarding its collection of Indigenous art and artifacts — debuted a $32-million, 100,000-square-foot facility in Burbank in October 2022.

The so-called “Resources Center” was built to house, conserve and care for both museums’ collections in a state-of-the-art, climate-controlled and fire-safe environment. It also serves as a research destination for scholars, artists, tribal representatives and others to study the collections.

Jampol said that the project will enable the Wende to serve a wider swath of visitors, from specialists to the general public, and to venture outside of Culver City to engage other communities.

“It’s about making the collections both safe and accessible,” he said. “We looked to the Autry for inspiration alongside the V&A East in London — they both invite people in from the community, alongside scholars, to explore the collections. It’s the democratization of art — I love the ethos and spirit of that.”

ORLANDO, Fla. — Guards severely beat and pepper-sprayed detainees at a state-run immigration detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Florida Everglades this month, according to a lawyer for two detainees.

The guards targeted Katherine Blankenship’s clients and other detainees at the facility after they complained about not having phone access on April 2, Blankenship said in a court declaration.

The phones, which weren’t functioning, are the primary way for detainees to communicate with family and their attorneys while in the detention center. The guards began taunting the detainees, who were in a cell, then became “more aggressive and were yelling and threatening to enter the cage,” Blankenship wrote.

When one detainee approached a guard, he was punched in the face. The guards then started beating other detainees in the cell. One of Blankenship’s clients was punched in the right eye, thrown to the floor and beaten by several guards. He was kicked in the head and his shoulder and arm were injured. A guard put his knee on the detainee’s neck while restraining him, according to the attorney’s declaration, which included a photo made during a video call almost a week later showing the detainee with a bruised eye.

“The officers beat several people during this incident and broke another detained individual’s wrist,” Blankenship wrote. The detainee whose wrist was broken is not one of her clients.

Phone service was restored the next day without any explanation for why it was cut off.

The Florida Department of Emergency Management didn’t respond to questions emailed Wednesday about the incident.

Blankenship’s declaration was included in a court filing accusing state and federal officials of failing to comply with a federal judge’s preliminary injunction last month ordering detention center officials to provide access to timely, free, confidential, unmonitored and unrecorded outgoing legal calls. U.S. District Judge Sheri Polster Chappell in Fort Myers, Florida also said facility officials must provide at least one operable telephone for every 25 people held in the facility.

The judge’s order came in a response to a lawsuit that claimed detainees’ First Amendment rights were being violated.

State officials have denied restricting detainees’ access to their attorneys and cited security and staffing reasons for any challenges. Federal officials who also are defendants denied that detainees’ First Amendment rights were violated. State officials last week filed a notice that they plan to appeal the judge’s order.

The Everglades facility was built last summer at a remote airstrip by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration to support President Trump’s immigration policies. Florida also has built a second immigration detention center in north Florida.

During a visit last week to the detention center, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida Democrat, said she wasn’t given the chance to talk to detainees. She described conditions at the detention center as “inhumane.”

“The way the detainees are housed is cruel and unnecessary,” she said.

Schneider writes for the Associated Press. AP journalist Gisela Salomon in Miami contributed to this report.