At least 20 immigrants detained at California’s Adelanto ICE Processing Center have gone on hunger strike. The group launched the strike May 19 in protest against what they say are inhumane living conditions, medical neglect, and abuse.
The center, operated by the private prison company GEO Group, has been the focus of numerous complaints and lawsuits, and has seen four deaths of detainees this year.“
“There are many people suffering here,” the striking detainees said in a statement. “This is the only way we have to raise our voice. We hope there are no consequences, because there are older people who are suffering even more. This is a call to stop the suffering and to respect our dignity as human beings.”
A May 20 press conference organized by Defend Migrants Alliance captured the voices of family and community advocates supporting the strikers, who are housed in the center’s Desert View Annex in San Bernardino County.
Sonia Calderon spoke through tears about conditions that her brother, Jose Martinez, has experienced. Martinez, who fled violence in his native El Salvador, has been detained for two years at the Adelanto detention facility.
According to his sister, he has been denied medication, despite having suffered repeated falls. Her sister-in-law also struggles to pay rent during her brother’s prolonged detention.
Caleb Soto is an attorney at the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). He visits the facility each week to see the people he is representing. Speaking during the conference, he described the lack of medical care at the facility.
“Medical appointments can take weeks or even months to be approved and often last 60 seconds ending with a prescription of Tylenol, Advil, or even a salt packet. People with serious conditions go untreated,” said Soto.
“Hunger strike is not the first resort,” he added. “It’s what people do when every other option has been taken from them.”
The hunger strikers put forward a list of demands that include adequate medical care, improved conditions, nutritious food, the right of detainees to organize, accountability for detainees’ deaths, and bond reform.
Four of six deaths in California detention centers this past year have occurred at the Adelanto facility, which — along with the Desert View Annex — has a capacity of 2,690 beds. The number of detainees held there went from 424 in 2023 to 2,087 in 2025, when the state’s Department of Justice last visited the site.
Bertie Hernandez with California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance supports legal defense for immigrants facing deportation and organizes with Shut Down Adelanto Coalition. Hernandez says that conditions haven’t changed since the first Trump administration.
“They have gotten worse due to the overpopulation at these immigration jails,” she said.
Hernandez praised the courage of the hunger strikers who could face retaliation for speaking out, including solitary confinement, forced feeding, or transfer out of state. “The repression and retaliation, and the abuse is day-to-day in this detention center.”
A class action lawsuit filed in LA federal court by Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights LA and partnering organizations seeks legal remedies for all immigrants detained at Adelanto under “dangerous conditions and pervasive abuses.”
In mid-May, Attorney General Rob Bonta released a report on conditions in California’s detention facilities. The report documented the record high number of detainee deaths this past year, the lack of food, poor sanitary conditions, cold temperatures, and medical neglect.
Border Czar Tom Homan has told reporters that the conditions at detention facilities were better than in jails and prisons, and downplayed the rise in deaths of detainees.
“That’s a lie,” said Hernandez. “The food that they serve is often the food that even the jails don’t even want. A lot of the food that comes is rotten, right? And no one should die in this detention center.”
Guillermo Torres recalls bearing witness to the suffering of detainees at Adelanto when hunger strikers were mistreated for protesting, and says these conditions have not improved.
A program director at Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, he described a recent visit with a mother from Colombia who suffered a dislocation in her shoulder during her arrest. The GEO Group staff ignored her cries and pleas, he said.
“They denied her help and they told her that they couldn’t do anything, and that she had to put the bone back in place herself after screaming and crying. And that’s what continues to be at Adelanto,” noted Torres.
Immigrants in detention, meanwhile, are denied options for release on bond back to their communities. The bond system has been “systematically dismantled,” said Soto. “The Trump administration declared that anyone who entered without papers was ineligible for bond, regardless of their record, their family, their ties to the community.”
A February ruling ostensibly ended the Trump administration’s efforts to deny bond to immigrant detainees, though, according to Soto, “ICE and the immigration judges there at Adelanto kept applying it anyway.”
Ultimately community advocates want Adelanto and other detention facilities to be shut down.
GEO Group—along with private prison firm CoreCivic—is reporting significant profits from these operations. Both companies stand to benefit from the $75 billion additional funding set aside for immigration enforcement and detention centers under H.R. 1.
“We will continue to add our voices to … shut down this place,” Torres said. “And not only this place, but all these horrific immigration centers that should not exist.”
This story is part of “Aquí Estamos/Here We Stand,” a collaborative reporting project of American Community Media and community news outlets statewide.
