Lawsuit seeks to block expansion of California's largest ICE detention facility

A coalition of immigrants’ rights groups has filed a lawsuit vying to halt the rapid expansion of California’s largest ICE detention center, which now detains nearly 750 people since opening in August.

The Hail Mary attempt to block operations at the remote ICE facility in the Kern County desert follows repeated allegations of inhumane conditions reported by detained individuals who say they’ve been delayed medical attention and placed in solitary confinement. Two individuals detained in California City have attempted suicide, according to the lawsuit and previous Bee reporting.

“It wasn’t ready to open, plain and simple,” Jehan Laner, senior staff attorney with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, co-counsel in the lawsuit, told The Bee Tuesday morning.

The lawsuit against the city of California City and CoreCivic alleges the private prison operator illegally opened the California City Immigration Processing Center in late August without the necessary conditional use permit and business license.

California City failed to enforce its own municipal code and hold public hearings as required by state law before the facility opened, the lawsuit alleges.

The lawsuit was initially filed in Kern County Superior Court in mid-September by John Doe, a current detainee within the California City ICE facility, and the Dignity Not Detention Coalition, a group of two community-based organizations defending immigrants’ and detainees’ civil rights. The complaint was moved to the Eastern District Court of California in early October.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Kirk E. Sherriff will hear arguments on the proposed temporary restraining order. Plaintiffs seek to pause the intake of detained individuals until the company secures its city permits and the 180-day public hearing process is complete.

“If the Facility is allowed to continue populating further, current detainees’ conditions of confinement will worsen as more people are packed into the substandard Facility, ” according to court filings.

Christopher Chestnut, the facility’s warden, said in a declaration submitted to the court that the California City detention center housed 746 individuals — 595 male and 151 female — as of Oct. 25.

California City officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Reached for comment, Ryan Gustin, senior director of public affairs for CoreCivic, referred The Bee to its court filings.

CoreCivic said in court filings that the lawsuit seeks to “freeze the operation of a federal immigration detention facility and disrupt enforcement of our Nation’s immigration laws because of alleged permit and licensing infractions.” CoreCivic denied the allegations and said it’s running the facility with a valid conditional-use permit and has operated in California City for more than 25 years with the approval of local and state officials.

In early October, CoreCivic announced a $130 million contract with U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to run the 2,560-bed California City Immigration Processing Center through August 2027.

The facility previously served as a privately-operated state prison until March 2024.

Warden addresses California ICE detention center conditions

The rushed opening of the facility before its permits were secured has implications for the conditions and safety of the individuals housed there, according to the lawsuit.

John Doe, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said in a declaration that he was transferred to the facility around Sept. 1, and was “immediately locked in a cell and left there for eighteen hours.”

The plaintiff also said he had been denied medication to manage his diabetes, received no medication for flu-like symptoms, and was subject to “physically invasive, prison-style searches.” He also said there isn’t enough seating for everyone in communal dining spaces, among other concerns, such as a lack of privacy when using the restroom.

Chestnut, the warden, said some of the allegations in the lawsuit are “not accurate” and that the facility is filled at one-third of its total capacity.

“Even if the facility were operating at full capacity, the physical plant is designed to accommodate the full population without crowding,” he said.

He also said an allegation by the plaintiff that there was no hot water at the facility during the first few weeks of September is not accurate. Each housing unit has its own hot water heater, and temperatures are tested weekly, Chestnut said.

“Since reactivating the facility, we have experienced a few isolated times when an individual hot water heater stopped working. On each such occasion, we brought a contractor onsite and promptly fixed the issue within an hour or two,” he said.

He also submitted photos with images from inside the facility.

‘It wasn’t ready to open’

The California City facility quietly opened in late August.

“It was a pretty big shock,” said Laner, one of the attorneys representing plaintiffs in the suit.

For months, ILRC lawyers had attended city council meetings and urged the city to schedule a formal public meeting item to discuss the facility’s opening in accordance with SB 29, a 2017 state law that outlines rules for municipalities where a private prison operator plans to open a federal immigration detention center.

“Because the city wasn’t really working with us or following California law, we sued both the city and CoreCivic,” Laner said.

The problem isn’t just that the city didn’t follow this state law, Laner said. It didn’t follow its own municipal and zoning rules, she said.

“You didn’t do anything that you would have done for a restaurant to open in California City,” she said.

For months, Mayor Marquette Hawkins has publicly stated that there’s little the city could do to halt the facility’s opening — though he acknowledged that the facility opened despite the city’s pending review of its permits.

The Dignity Not Detention Coalition’s lawsuit argues the facility needs a new conditional use permit because its existing permit from 1998 was zoned for a prison facility. Civil detention centers used to hold immigrants pending an immigration hearing are not prisons, the lawsuit says.

ICE detention space expansion nationwide

Detention expansion is a major priority of the Trump administration as it seeks to carry out the largest deportation campaign in history. In July, President Donald Trump announced an unprecedented $165 billion for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and Border Patrol, as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The accelerated pace of this expansion has been met with legal battles across the country.

CoreCivic was sued in May by the city of Leavenworth, Kansas, in an attempt to block a former prison from being converted into an ICE detention facility. The city accused CoreCivic of gross mismanagement before the facility’s closure in 2021, including failure to report crimes and at least one inmate death for days, repeatedly stonewalling police investigating reported sexual assaults and other serious allegations, and destroying evidence, according to a report by Kansas City Star.

However, the U.S. Department of Justice through its support behind CoreCivic in its legal battle with Leavenworth after the private prison company has suffered a string of legal defeats in Kansas state court in recent months, the Star reported. The company was also recently awarded a $60 million contract to operate a 1,033-bed facility.

Conservation groups and the Miccosukee Tribe sued the federal and state governments in June over the Florida Everglades’ makeshift immigration detention center, Alligator Alcatraz, accusing them of failing to follow federal environmental rules during the construction of the temporary tent detention center in the Big Cypress National Preserve.

A district court issued a preliminary injunction to stop new construction at the detention site and to shut down operations within 60 days. In September, the Tenth District Court of Appeals granted the state’s request to pause the lower courts’ decision while they argued for an appeal, according to a report in the Miami Herald.

Last week, the lawsuit was put on pause due to the government shutdown, the Herald reported.

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