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Tag: ice detention centers

  • The Cruel Conditions of ICE’s Mojave Desert Detention Center

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    In November, Prison Law Office joined the firm of Keker, Van Nest & Peters, the A.C.L.U., and the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice in filing a class-action lawsuit against ICE and the Department of Homeland Security on behalf of those detained at California City. As noted in the filing, detainees refer to C.C.D.F. as a “torture chamber” and “hell on Earth.” In fact, Borden says, the conditions at the facility are so terrible that detainees are resigning themselves to self-deportation, instead of pursuing asylum and other immigration cases, and that “people are also trying to take their own lives.”

    In April, 2025, as deportations ramped up nationwide, the for-profit prison company CoreCivic repurposed a decommissioned prison in California City into an immigration detention center after signing a contract with ICE. The company already owned the prison, which had sat unused since 2023, so the contract, which is worth an estimated a hundred and thirty million dollars annually, was a valuable source of revenue for CoreCivic. Additionally, the CoreCivic property has helped address ICE’s growing need for detention space in a state where the agency has turbocharged its immigration-enforcement activities. If fully occupied, C.C.D.F. will be the largest detention center on the West Coast—and one of its most remote.

    C.C.D.F. is situated two hours north of Los Angeles, deep in the Mojave Desert, and about sixty miles from the edge of Death Valley National Park. Temperatures can be below freezing in the winter, and well over a hundred degrees in the summer. “It’s hard for attorneys to get out there,” Mario Valenzuela, a lawyer who represents multiple clients at C.C.D.F, told me. It is a three-hour round trip from Valenzuela’s office in Bakersfield out to California City, and the detention center is so desolate that he often can’t find cell service. He told me, “There’s nothing around, just barren desert, then all of a sudden you come across this facility.”

    The closest town to C.C.D.F. is California City, about five miles away, where about a quarter of residents live below the poverty line, and roughly eighteen per cent are unemployed. As of 2024, CoreCivic is one of the town’s largest employers. But, despite signing a contract with ICE, ongoing litigation alleges that the company has not secured a business license or the proper conditional-use permit for the facility with the municipal government of California City. Since it opened, C.C.D.F. has allegedly been operating in direct violation of A.B. 103, a state law that requires a hundred-and-eighty-day waiting period and two public hearings before a private corporation may repurpose a facility as an immigration detention center. An active lawsuit is currently deciding these claims, but, even if the courts side with CoreCivic, the company seems to have acted in a legal gray zone when opening C.C.D.F.

    On August 27th, CoreCivic began receiving detainees at C.C.D.F. In September, a federally authorized monitor visit by Disability Rights California raised “serious concerns” about the facility’s significant disrepair, caused by the period it sat vacant and the subsequent “rush to open.” That month, five hundred migrants were believed to have been transferred to C.C.D.F. In November, Prison Law Office estimated that eight hundred detainees were being held at the facility, and by mid-January the count was fourteen hundred. C.C.D.F. is projected to reach its full capacity of two thousand five hundred and sixty people in the first quarter of 2026.

    “Any claims there are inhumane conditions at the California City Correctional Facility are FALSE,” the D.H.S. assistant secretary for public affairs, Tricia McLaughlin, said in an e-mail, adding that “ICE is regularly audited and inspected by external agencies” to insure its facilities comply with “national detention standards.” With regard to medical treatment, McLaughlin said that the agency provides “comprehensive medical care.” A representative for CoreCivic added that the company has “submitted all required information for a business license and [continues] to maintain open lines of communication with city officials.”

    Still, as detainee numbers have surged, staffing and basic infrastructure have clearly not kept up. In a letter sent to D.H.S. last month, California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, warned that “the facility does not have enough medical doctors for its detainee population size,” and the staff it does have “appear to be inexperienced and lack basic understanding of civil detention management principles.” On January 20th, Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff toured the facility and spoke with the warden as part of an oversight visit. “Far and away, the biggest concerns were about lack of medical attention,” Senator Padilla told me by phone after his visit. He compared the facility’s conditions to what he saw during a tour of migrant detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay last year, explaining that it can take “weeks or months” for a detainee to receive care, “even for matters that, in my mind, seem pretty urgent.”

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    Oren Peleg

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  • Portland Prepares for Invasion

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    In early October, Keith Wilson, the mayor of Portland, Oregon, visited 4310 South Macadam Avenue, an address that has thrust his city back into the national spotlight—and into the crosshairs of President Donald Trump. Since June, this site, the local headquarters for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), had been the focus of daily protests, with activists rallying against the Trump Administration’s immigration policies, often clashing with MAGA counter-protesters. Although the demonstrations were colorful—a carnivalesque atmosphere, with people wearing inflatable frog suits and other costumes—the ICE facility itself, a former data-processing center for a regional bank, with boarded-up windows, was about as incognito as the masked, armed federal officers who guarded it from the rooftop.

    To the public, what was going on inside the building largely remained a mystery. No media, beyond Trump-friendly right-wing influencers, had been allowed in. But Wilson was “summoned” to the building, in his words, to meet with Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, who came to town after Trump announced, on Truth Social, that he was authorizing “all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland.” Wilson hoped to persuade Noem that there was no need for federal intervention—that the city had its protests under control. But, after visiting the building, he reached the conclusion that ICE itself lacked any discipline or control. “It’s dishevelled,” he told me, of the conditions inside. “It’s unkempt. It’s disorganized.”

    It was a warm day, around eighty degrees, and the first thing Wilson noticed when he entered the facility was how hot it was inside. “The H.V.A.C. system was broken,” he said. During his visit, he saw overflowing dumpsters. He saw tired, agitated officers. In otherwise empty offices, he saw crowd-control munitions and body armor strewn about. “You can just see they’re making it up as they go,” Wilson, a former C.E.O. of a trucking company, said. “There’s no plan. And, if there’s no plan, you don’t know the objective. Without an objective, you’re just wasting time and money—and they’re wasting time and money.”

    Noem’s visit to Portland didn’t quite go as planned. The apparent purpose of the trip was to bolster the Administration’s case that the city was overrun by left-wing insurrectionists, but, during a rooftop photo op, Noem surveyed the site of the daily protests, presumably the most war-torn part of the city, only to find the street below empty. The Portland police, in accordance with its policy when dignitaries visit the city, had cordoned off the area. A smattering of demonstrators stood on the periphery, including a man in a chicken costume. Another protester blasted the theme from “The Benny Hill Show,” mocking Noem’s visit. In a video circulating online, Noem is expressionless—this probably wasn’t the war zone she’d come to capture. When she met with Wilson, he further shattered the plot, asking her to reconsider sending in troops. “She took issue with that,” he told me. “They’re trying to create a narrative. It’s a falsehood. It’s got no legs.”

    I’d seen this split screen before. When I covered the last wave of high-profile protests in Portland, back in 2020, I discovered that the Trump Administration’s characterization of the situation didn’t always match what was happening on the ground. This time, the contrast appeared even sharper. I arrived in Portland last Monday—the same day that a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the White House can federalize the Oregon National Guard to deploy in the city. Residents seemed on edge, the mayor included. Was there a sense of anxiety about potential troops on the streets, I asked Wilson. “Every day,” he said.

    Trump has been preoccupied with Portland since at least 2018, when he publicly scolded then Mayor Ted Wheeler for allowing “an angry mob of violent people” to confront federal agents. In 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Trump referred to Black Lives Matter protesters as “radical anarchists” and deployed seven hundred and fifty-five D.H.S. officers to Portland to protect the city’s federal buildings, intensifying nightly clashes between protesters and law enforcement.

    In recent weeks, Trump has reignited his fight with the largest city in Oregon. “I don’t know what could be worse than Portland,” he said in October, during a White House roundtable on the supposed dominance of Antifa in America. “You don’t even have stores anymore.” (There are more than three thousand retail businesses in the city.) “When a store owner rebuilds a store,” he said at a news conference, “they build it out of plywood.” (In four days of driving around the city, I was unable to spot a store constructed of plywood.) “Portland is burning to the ground,” he claimed, on multiple occasions. (I couldn’t find any fires, either.)

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    James Ross Gardner

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  • The Last Columbia Protester in ICE Detention

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    She eventually reunited with her mother in 2016, when she entered the U.S. on a visitor visa. In Ramallah, she had studied fashion design; in the U.S, she enrolled in English-language programs on an F-1 student visa. Her mother, who is a U.S. citizen, filed a family-based petition for her to start the process of obtaining permanent residency, which was approved in 2021. While waiting for a green card, Kordia withdrew from school, voluntarily giving up her student status. According to court documents, a teacher had led her to believe—falsely, it turned out—that she was already a lawful permanent resident. In the years that followed, she cared for her mother, worked as a waitress, and helped look after her half brother, who is autistic. Paterson, which has a large Palestinian and Arab community, began to feel like home.

    Since Israel launched its war on Gaza, following Hamas’s attacks on October 7, 2023, Kordia has lost more than a hundred and seventy-five relatives in the Strip. “My mind was all about Gaza, nothing else,” she said. The stories she heard from family members were horrifying. They were continuously displaced from one city to the next, fleeing for safety, only to confront more immediate dangers. Kordia, feeling “heartbroken,” didn’t know what to do. “To feel helpless—this is one of the most awful feelings in the world,” she said, adding that one of her aunts had already lost her home during Israeli bombardments in 2021. “There is no safe place in Gaza.”

    As Kordia watched loved ones going hungry or being indiscriminately killed, protest became her only lifeline. She was accustomed to going to New York, a forty-five-minute train ride from Paterson, to visit museums and stroll the city’s streets. On April 30, 2024, as Columbia students erected encampments in solidarity with Palestinians, attracting international attention, she joined a demonstration outside the university’s gates, calling for an end to the violence. Police ordered the crowd to disperse. “Something you only see in movies,” she said of the display of force. Kordia, who felt lightheaded, sat on a sidewalk and was swept up in the arrests; she was handcuffed and shuttled by bus to police headquarters, where she was forced to remove her hijab for a search. The next morning, she was released with a notice to appear in court. The charges were later dismissed. She assumed that was the end of it.

    When Kordia was arrested in March, the government accused her of terrorism. In a public statement issued shortly after her arrest, the Department of Homeland Security mistakenly identified her as a Columbia student. “It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live and study in the United States of America,” Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security Secretary, said. “When you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country.” According to a report by the Associated Press, the N.Y.P.D. had turned over evidence of her arrest at the student demonstrations to ICE.

    The government claims that money that Kordia sent to her family in Gaza—a few thousand U.S. dollars in total—is evidence of material support for Hamas. According to court documents, the money came from her waitressing job and from contributions from her neighbors. In late June, a federal judge concluded that Kordia’s detention likely violated her constitutional right to due process and recommended her release. No convincing evidence linking her to terrorist activity had been brought up. In response, the government contended that she posed a flight risk. Her petition is now pending in federal court alongside a separate asylum proceeding. “It breaks my heart to be labelled as something that I have nothing to do with,” she said.

    In early October, the Trump Administration helped broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which included an exchange of hostages and prisoners. “Together we’ve achieved what everybody said was impossible,” President Trump said. “At long last we have peace in the Middle East.” Kordia, meanwhile, is the last remaining campus protester still in detention from the Trump Administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrators in the U.S. At Prairieland Detention Facility, in Texas, she is fighting for her release while living in constant fear of deportation. She holds a passport from the Palestinian Authority, a travel document that offers no protection if she is deported to Israel. Such deportation, her legal team contends, would send her into the custody of the same Army that has killed dozens of her family members. Both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority have targeted those accused of being affiliated with Hamas. Photos of Kordia have circulated widely online. Her lawyers say that the gravity of the allegations against her have compelled her to seek asylum. “I’m not just scared—I’m terrified,” Kordia said. “I’m terrified of being subjected to jail, torture even. It could get to the point of getting killed.”

    In the facility, Kordia spends her days reading, praying, writing in her journal, and answering letters of support. She also finds solace and strength in the friendships she’s developed with the other detainees. “They’re beautiful women with dreams. They’re educated. They’re smart. They’re funny,” she said. “These beautiful women made it bearable.” She formed a particularly strong bond with Ward Sakeik, a Palestinian woman whose family is from Gaza. Sakeik was arrested by ICE in February while returning from her honeymoon in St. Thomas. In July, she was released.

    According to court documents filed in August, Kordia has lost a significant amount of weight in detention. The filing noted that Kordia, a practicing Muslim, “has only had a single halal meal on a religious holiday, even though the detention center accommodates the religious dietary needs of other people in custody.” Kordia said the Quran helps her stay strong, especially the verses that remind her that hardships can be a divine test. One reads, “God does not burden a soul beyond that it can bear.” Kordia added, “Allah has chosen me for this, and I should be honored and proud.” ♦

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    Aida Alami

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  • How an Asylum Seeker in U.S. Custody Ended Up in a Russian Prison

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    On the afternoon of August 15, 2024, Leonid Melekhin, a thirty-three-year-old small-business owner from Perm, a Russian city near the Ural Mountains, approached the U.S. border in Calexico, California. The previous winter, he had flown to Mexico, leaving behind his wife and their two small children. He spent the next eight months waiting for a notification in CBP One, an app that the Biden Administration launched in 2023 as an authorized portal to file asylum claims. Now, the app told Melekhin, he had an appointment to present himself to U.S. immigration officers. Wearing a backpack and a black baseball cap, he took a selfie in front of a sign that read “Entrada USA.”

    Melekhin sent the photo to Yury Bobrov, an activist and political refugee who was also from Perm, on the messaging app Telegram. The two men had been in regular contact. Earlier, Melekhin had sent Bobrov another photo, of a small yellow poster hanging from a concrete bridge. Putin, the poster’s text reads, is a “killer, fascist, usurper.” Melekhin said that, on his last night in Russia, he had gone to Perm’s Kommunalny Bridge and attached the poster to the railing. “I couldn’t resist,” he told Bobrov. He had asked Bobrov to “post it somewhere,” because “it would be a shame if no one sees it.”

    Bobrov shared it on Telegram alongside the photo of Melekhin crossing the border. “I felt that he might have wanted to strengthen his asylum case but also that he genuinely didn’t want to leave Russia in total silence,” Bobrov told me. “Was it a strategic move or an impulse of the soul? I don’t know, but I have no reason to doubt his motives.”

    Less than a year later, a journalist in Perm published a story about a local court hearing: Melekhin had been arrested in Russia and charged with justifying terrorism, a crime that carries a potential five-year prison sentence. It was a rare instance of such a case being publicized, in which a Russian was deported from the U.S. to face a prison sentence back home. But little else was known of how he’d ended up there.

    From the border, Melekhin was brought to the Imperial Regional Detention Facility, a holding center in Calexico run by a private company called the Management and Training Corporation. He was placed in a housing unit with dozens of other asylum seekers, including a number of Russians, and waited for his hearing with a judge. Melekhin thought he had a fairly strong case: for years, he had attended protests and volunteered with the Perm field office of Alexei Navalny’s political organization, which is now banned in Russia. “Everyone knows Russia’s problems,” a relative of Melekhin’s, who is still in Russia, told me. “Corruption is rampant. Fair elections are nonexistent.” The relative said, of Melekhin, “If he wasn’t happy about something, he always stood his ground.”

    Even in a midsize city such as Perm, Melekhin wasn’t a recognizable activist. Bobrov called him an “ordinary, average, homespun guy who took an interest in the fate of his country.” When I reached Sergei Ukhov, the former head of the Navalny field office in Perm, who now lives abroad, he didn’t remember Melekhin. But, when he searched his photo archive, he found a picture of Melekhin at a protest in Perm, in 2017. Natalia Vavilova, another former coördinator for the field office, said, of Melekhin, “I can’t say he was a particularly active volunteer or regular presence in our headquarters.” But she, too, had found traces of him: a text exchange from 2018, in which he discussed his plans to volunteer as an independent election monitor during that year’s Presidential race. “That’s definitely civic activism,” Vavilova said. “No doubt about it.”

    In 2021, Melekhin was arrested at a pro-Navalny protest in Perm. Investigators attempted to pressure him to give testimony against others in Navalny’s political organization, but he refused. In 2023, the year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when nearly all protest activity was banned, he went to the center of Perm holding a sign that read “Freedom to Navalny.” He was almost immediately detained. At the station, one officer held his hands behind his back while another punched him in the stomach. Later, the police threatened him with forced conscription into the Russian Army. “He became seized by the idea of moving to the U.S.,” Melekhin’s relative said.

    Melekhin started to study English and to follow the stories of other Russians who had made the journey, including Bobrov. He decided to travel alone. His youngest child was only a year old at the time. “No one knew how long it would take or what conditions he’d be living in along the way,” the relative said. The plan was that Melekhin would secure legal status for himself and then find a way to reunite with his family in the U.S.

    I spoke with a number of Russians who had met Melekhin in the Imperial detention center, none of whom are named out of concerns for their safety. “He was in a positive mood,” one of them, a citizen journalist from central Russia, said. He had launched self-funded investigations into malfeasance by local police and municipal officials, and was detained and questioned multiple times before he decided to seek asylum in the U.S. He and Melekhin met in the exercise yard. They were both optimistic about their cases. “We finally made it, at least this far,” the other asylum seeker recalled them saying. “Surely, they will listen to us, and at the end we will be offered help. All we have to do is wait.”

    Melekhin’s hearing was in December, 2024, four months into his detention at Imperial, and a year after he left his family in Russia. His case was assigned to a judge named Anne Kristina Perry, who was appointed as an immigration judge in 2018. “She is very kind, calm, professional, diligent,” Raisa Stepanova, an immigration attorney in California who has represented several Russian asylum seekers, but not Melekhin, told me. “But her judicial reasoning doesn’t always display a knowledge of how Russian police and law enforcement actually function.” The citizen journalist from central Russia, whose case was also adjudicated by Perry, said, “She acts like a prosecutor more than a judge. She questioned me for three hours; it was a real interrogation.” (I wrote to Perry to ask about Melekhin’s case but received only a general reply from the Executive Office for Immigration Review at the Department of Justice.)

    Melekhin presented his case pro se—that is, without a lawyer. He spoke of his past participation in protests and how, after Bobrov posted the image of his Putin poster, police in Perm had searched his family’s apartment. I obtained a transcript of Perry’s oral decision. She considered Melekhin a “credible witness” and called the evidence that he had managed to gather “plausible, consistent, and detailed.” But she decided that his case did not meet a long-established legal standard, that there was at least a ten-per-cent chance he would face persecution in his country of origin—a benchmark for determining “objectively reasonable well-founded fear.” Melekhin’s previous activism, Perry said, was “quite limited,” and the “description of his participation is vague and lacks specifics.” Melekhin was “not entitled to relief,” Perry ruled. “The Respondent is ordered removed to Russia.”

    “Leonid was angry and frustrated,” another Russian asylum seeker at Imperial said. “In detention, you constantly see people with far less serious cases being granted asylum.” But Melekhin planned to appeal and was confident in his chances. “I tried to offer moral support,” Bobrov told me. He suggested that Melekhin hire a lawyer and launched a fund-raising drive on his Telegram channel to help Melekhin pay for one.

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    Joshua Yaffa

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