On Friday morning, California Attorney General Rob Bonta stood in front of cameras and used three words that government officials don’t usually put in writing. He called the conditions inside California ICE detention facilities “cruel, inhumane, and unacceptable.”
He was reading from his own department’s report.
The 175-page document, released Friday by the California Department of Justice, is the fifth such report the state has produced since 2017. It is also the most damning.
Between September 2025 and March 2026, six people died inside California ICE detention facilities — more than in any previous reporting period since the state began this work. The year before, in 2024, zero people had died.
The reason for the change is not a mystery. The report makes it clear. The Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign has crammed more people into the same buildings, with the same staff, the same medical resources, and the same food, and the result has been exactly what anyone could have predicted.
People are dying.
The Numbers
State investigators inspected all seven ICE detention facilities operating in California in 2025 — Otay Mesa in San Diego, Adelanto in San Bernardino County, Imperial Regional in Calexico, the newly opened California City facility in Kern County, Golden State Annex in McFarland, and two others.
They reviewed records. They interviewed staff. They sat down with 194 people held inside the facilities and listened to what they had to say.
Between site visits in 2023 and 2025, the detainee population in California grew by 162 percent — from roughly 2,300 people to more than 6,000. The facilities, the people who run them, and the federal agency overseeing them did not scale up to match.
A new eighth facility, the Central Valley Annex in McFarland, began receiving detainees in April 2026, while the state was still finalizing the report.
Every single one of the seven facilities was found to be violating ICE’s own internal detention standards. Not California’s standards. Not advocacy group standards. The federal agency’s own rules.
What “Inhumane” Actually Looks Like
When officials describe detention conditions in formal language, the details aren’t always clear. They need to be understood by all Americans.
Here are some of the things state investigators documented.
Detainees:
Six people died inside these facilities in the space of seven months. Behind each of those numbers is a family that received a phone call. Each death was someone’s son or daughter or mother or brother.
Several of them were being held in remote facilities deliberately placed in parts of California where attorneys, family members, and reporters cannot easily reach them.
The federal Department of Homeland Security responded to the report by claiming, in a statement to reporters, that “no lawbreakers in the history of human civilization have been treated better than illegal aliens in the United States.”
The department went on to say that detention is “the best health care many aliens have received in their entire lives.” This is what the federal government is now saying out loud about facilities where six people DIED.
Side Note:
We desperately need to stop accepting blatant lies from this administration. When we fail to hold officials accountable, it triggers a dangerous chain reaction:
- It misleads the public: People take the statements at face value, unaware they are being deceived.
- It rewards bad behavior: Officials feel emboldened to keep lying when there are no consequences.
- It normalizes deception: We inadvertently teach the government that it’s acceptable to lie to the people they serve.
- It destroys future trust: It sows deep societal distrust and signals to future administrations that they can get away with the same behavior.
Private Companies, Public Money
Every one of the California facilities is operated by a private company under federal contract. The California City facility, for example, is run by CoreCivic. The Adelanto facility is run by the GEO Group.
CoreCivic and GEO Group are publicly traded corporations whose profits are tied directly to how many people they can keep locked up. The goal of for-profit corporations is to increase profits. With private prisons and detention centers, there are only two ways to maximize profits: lock up more people and operate as cheaply as possible.
Update: On May 7, the California Senate passed legislation that limits profiteering in immigration detention centers.
This is the part of the story that rarely makes it onto the evening news. When the federal government detains a person on immigration charges, that person is not held by federal officers in a federal building.
They are handed over to a company that bills the government per bed, per day. The companies’ incentive is to keep beds full and costs low. The deaths and the broken bones and the moldy water are the result of that cruel math.
The state report did not mince words about where responsibility lies. The federal government and the private operators, it said, face “a significant choice” — either bring the facilities into compliance or continue prioritizing detention over safety, which “likely will lead to dire human and legal consequences.”
The choice they have made, so far, is the second one.
What’s Being Stripped Away
The report also documents something that has happened quietly since January 2025. The federal government has rolled back protections for people inside detention. The Department of Homeland Security defunded the legal orientation programs that used to inform detainees of their rights. It shut down the DHS civil rights and civil liberties office that handled complaints.
The internal mechanisms that existed to flag exactly the kinds of abuses California is now documenting have been dismantled.
State inspectors are now one of the last lines of independent oversight on these facilities. And even that authority is set to expire. The state law mandating these inspections, Assembly Bill 103, sunsets on July 1, 2027.
AG Bonta is sponsoring Senate Bill 1399, which would remove the sunset and let the inspections continue. Another bill from Assemblymember Matt Haney would tax detention facility operators, with the funds going to immigrant rights groups — essentially making it unprofitable to operate detention facilities in California at all.
These are the kinds of fights happening at the state level while the federal government continues to expand. The Trump administration has paused, for now, its plan to convert warehouses into mass detention facilities with a capacity of 96,000 people, but the pause is temporary.
The push continues. Congress is currently weighing an additional $140 billion in federal funding for ICE and Customs and Border Protection, on top of the $170 billion DHS received last summer.
And last month it was reported that $100 billion still remains of the $170 billion ICE and CBP received last Summer.
The Bigger Picture
The California numbers are not an outlier. Eighteen people have died in ICE detention across the country in just the first four months of 2026, putting the agency on pace to break the record set in 2025, which was already the highest in more than two decades. Since the start of Trump’s second term, more than 48 people have died in immigration custody.
A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the current death rate is nearly seven times higher than fiscal year 2023 levels.
ICE has also quietly changed how it reports detainee deaths. The agency used to release a detailed three-page report on each death within ninety days. Those reports have now been cut to four-paragraph summaries written in narrative style, using the word “passes away” instead of “death” and emphasizing the criminal histories of the deceased.
At least four deaths from earlier in the year still have no final report posted at all.
Including the criminal history of a person who died in ICE custody serves one disgusting purpose: to communicate, “this person was a criminal on top of being an illegal alien, so they deserved to die. It follows the Republicans’ pattern of dehumanizing and demonizing anyone who is not straight, white, and Christian.
What Bonta Said, and What it Means
“This is cruel, inhumane, and unacceptable — and it is past time for the Trump Administration to do something about it. My office has worked tirelessly to shine a light on conditions at these facilities — and I hope this report will generate the rightful outrage and urgency necessary to improve conditions and protect detainees’ civil rights.”
Civil rights are the relevant phrase. The people held in these facilities are not serving criminal sentences. Immigration detention is civil detention.
Many of the people inside have not been convicted of anything. Some are asylum seekers. Some have lived in the United States for decades. Some were picked up on minor charges that local police would have ordinarily released them on.
All of them are entitled to due process and humane treatment under both U.S. and international law.
Six People Died in California ICE Detention
The next two sentences are extremely important. Share them using the “Share on X” button or by copy/pasting it to other social media accounts.
What the California report on ICE detention deaths describes is not detention. It is punishment. And the people being punished have not been convicted of a crime that warrants what is being done to them.
They are being warehoused, by private companies, for profit, with the explicit approval of the federal government, and at least six of them in California paid for it with their lives.
The report exists. The numbers are now public. The question is, will anyone with the power to stop it do anything?
