Conditions inside the Adelanto ICE Processing Center have become the subject of federal litigation, congressional scrutiny, and growing national debate.

In this episode of Democracy on Fire, Kay Brown speaks with Alvaro M. Huerta, Director of Litigation and Advocacy at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), about the lawsuit challenging conditions at the privately operated detention facility. Their conversation examines allegations involving medical care, sanitation, access to attorneys and family members, retaliation against detainees who organized a hunger strike, and the legal standards governing immigration detention.

Brown and Huerta also discuss recent Supreme Court decisions affecting Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and asylum policy, what those rulings could mean for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, and the broader questions they raise about immigration enforcement, due process, and congressional oversight.

Topics Covered

• Conditions inside the Adelanto ICE Processing Center
• Federal litigation challenging detention conditions
• Medical care, sanitation, and detainee access to counsel
• Hunger strikes and alleged retaliation
• The GEO Group's operation of Adelanto
• Congressional oversight of ICE facilities
• Temporary Protected Status (TPS)
• Recent Supreme Court immigration decisions
• Asylum law and border policy
• Civic engagement and public oversight

Guest

Alvaro M. Huerta is Director of Litigation and Advocacy at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, California's largest provider of deportation defense services. He is part of the legal team challenging conditions at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in federal court.

Democracy on Fire is hosted by Kay Brown and features conversations with policymakers, journalists, advocates, and experts examining the issues shaping American democracy.

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Foreign.

Welcome to Democracy on Fire.

I'm Kay Brown.

Today we'll take a look at some of the injustices and atrocities going on in ICE detention centers.

We'll take a specific look at one here in Southern California, the Aldolanto ICE Processing center, an immigrant detention facility in the desert north of Los Angeles, where several thousand detainees are being held in inhumane conditions.

And while this is going on, the US Supreme Court just greenlighted race motivated mass deportations by terminating temporary protective status for more than 350,000 Haitians and Syrians.

Our country's immigration policies are sadly a big mess, and.

And that's been made even worse by the Trump administration's policies and the highest court's acquiescence.

My guest is Alvaro Huerta, Director of Litigation and advocacy for the Immigrant Defenders Law center in la.

He's part of the coalition that's brought suit in federal court over the conditions at this ICE center at Adelanto.

The Immigrant Defenders Group MDEF for sure, is the largest provider of deportation defense services in California.

Welcome, Alvaro.

Thank you so much for being with me.

Thanks for having me, Kay.

Well, since the start of President Trump's second term, five people have died while in custody at Adelanto or shortly after being transferred there.

And over the years, numerous problems have been pointed out about the serious issues at this facility, including delayed medical treatment, unsanitary conditions, and barriers to communication with lawyers and family.

And this detention center, which is really operating like a prison, is run by the GEO Group, which is a private prison contractor, and it gets millions of taxpayer dollars to detain immigrants there.

So thanks, Alvaro, for bringing this suit against the federal government.

Tell me about it.

What are you asking for?

What are the issues being litigated here?

Sure.

No, thanks for giving us the opportunity to talk about this really important case and really the tragic situation that so many people detained at Adelanto are facing.

We brought this case back in January of this fear really challenging the government to improve the conditions that are currently being allowed at the Adelanto facility and many detention facilities across the United States.

I think Adelanto is just representative of what's happening across the country.

What we've heard from our clients at Adelanto and many others who are detained there is that they're really living in squalor.

They're living without access to adequate medical care, without.

Without adequate food and water, in really unhygienic conditions.

And some of our clients who have disabilities are finding their disabilities aren't being accommodated while they're there.

As you mentioned there's already been way too many deaths at Adelanto and many of these other facilities.

And it should be unacceptable to every American that this is happening on American soil.

So who is housed there?

I've read that the California ag, in reporting on the situation, found that a large percentage of the people there have no documented criminal history beyond immigration related issues.

What's your knowledge and experience about who is.

Who are these detainees?

That's right.

So Atalanta was actually shut down during the COVID pandemic almost for the same reasons.

It was clear to a court that shut it down that people couldn't be housed there in safe conditions during the COVID pandemic.

And because we saw such a huge increase of the number of people detained there so quickly, a large percentage, the vast majority of the people there who are being held don't have any criminal record, despite what the administration has said that they're going after, quote, unquote, the worst of the worst.

What we're seeing is, you know, grandmothers who are 60 years old without a criminal record, being held in custody, and again, without access to adequate medical care, with very limited access to their families, and in some cases, limited access to lawyers.

So we are seeing that the numbers, the proportion of people without criminal records has skyrocketed in Adelanto and other detention facilities.

How long are people held in these facilities without having their cases addressed?

It can be quite a while.

For a few days we were trying to find them.

First.

They were being processed in a downtown facility called B18.

It was the basement of the federal building.

And we often wouldn't be able to locate them.

Their families were desperately looking for them, calling our rapid response hotline, saying that they think one of their family members was picked up in a raid.

And sometimes it would take days.

Eventually we might locate them in Adelanto.

Some of them might even have been transferred away from Adelanto, outside of Southern California by the time we were able to locate them.

And so it would take days to find them.

And, you know, a lot of these folks don't have attorneys.

You know, we do what we can as an organization to represent as many people as we can.

We're trying very hard to get a lot of these people out of.

Out of detention now, primarily because the faster you can get an attorney, the faster you understand your rates, and the faster you might have a possibility of staying in the country.

Many of these people are eligible to stay, or at least are eligible to be released while they're awaiting adjudication of their cases.

So it's very important that they have access to an attorney, that they have access to know what their rights are in detention, and that they don't feel this pressure to sign away their rights to sign a deportation order.

What seems like their strategy is to just lock everybody up in these deplorable conditions and then wear them out, you know, wear them down until they voluntarily leave with the, you know, the fact that there's way more cases than there are people available to process them, and the system seems really clogged up.

That's exactly right.

I think there is this intentional.

They're really trying to get people to give up hope, right?

Trying to give.

To ensure that they don't have access to an attorney, that they don't have access to family members, and so that they feel this hopelessness and instead think, okay, why would I, you know, waste away in detention when I could be deported?

And then, you know, at least, you know, provide for myself, provide for my family from outside of detention, the detention facility.

So I think it is very, very much an intentional ploy by this administration to make people lose hope so that they'll, you know, self deport.

So I understood there had been retaliation against at least one of the people inside being detained there who had been involved in organizing a hunger strike that we heard was reported in the Press.

Up to 150 people were participating and petitioning on those issues and striking to bring attention to their conditions.

And that this particular person met with a congressional delegation who came there on an inspection a few weeks ago and then almost immediately after that, was deported.

What can you tell us about that situation?

That's right.

So like you said, a number of people were participating in a hunger strike across three different facilities at the Adelanto Processing center, the detention center there.

And what they were doing is primarily saying, look, these conditions are so bad, you need to pay attention to them.

You need to fix them.

As you mentioned, the Adelanto facility is managed by the Geo Group, which is a private corporation.

They're under a contract with the federal government to provide these detention services.

But they are supposed to meet certain standards.

There are national standards that they have to abide by.

And that includes providing adequate food and water, hygienic areas, making sure that the cells that people are held in are clean, that people have access to recreation time, can get outside.

And what we were seeing and what the detainees were saying was that they were being retaliated against for trying to just get those basic services provided.

Many were being put in solitary confinement just for speaking up and for speaking up on behalf of each other.

And so one of these people who is one of the leaders of the hunger strike, a national of Belize, was targeted and retaliated against for helping to organize this strike.

He is a particularly savage.

Sorry, excuse me, he, this person was a particularly savvy person.

Detention.

He was able to help others, you know, file their habeas petitions, file for trying to get out of custody.

He was able to help them claim their rights.

And I think the government saw him as a threat.

Right.

They saw him as a leader who was organizing people to fight back, fight for their rights.

And so what could they do?

They decided to deport him as soon as they could.

And there's no, no appeal to that.

Once, I suppose, you're gone, you're gone.

Yeah, unfortunately, he had a removal order and so they were able to deport him before we could act to get him out of detention.

He's now in Belize and to his credit, he keeps fighting on behalf of the people who are still detained there.

He's still in communication with many of them and he's trying to do what he can from afar.

So the congressional delegation that came there on June 1 found continuing unlivable, deplorable conditions and supposedly have asked the leadership of ICE to provide some answers.

And there's supposedly going to be a report soon.

Have you heard anything further about what's going on with their investigation?

We haven't heard anything further about their investigation.

What I do know is that ICE and the government are trying to fight the ability for other Congress members to visit.

They had earlier tried to implement policies that required a congressional member to provide at least seven days notice before they were arriving at these facilities.

According to our laws that Congress has passed, that is not a requirement.

A Congress member is allowed to inspect a facility at any moment.

They can go on without notice.

And so there's a fight in the courts right now where this administration is saying that they need to provide at least seven days.

And Congress members are saying that is not the law.

So this all our conditions in the Detention are worse than prisons.

Right?

I mean, that's what they're.

You're saying these are unconstitutional conditions and they are worse than if people were held in prison, yet they haven't been convicted of any crimes.

How can that be?

That's correct.

Yeah, that's right.

What we've heard from some of the detainees who have spent some time in prison is saying that they felt they were treated a lot better in prison.

They had more time to visit with family members.

They were able to have contact, physical contact with their family members, hug their family members.

The people in Adelanto are not even allowed to do that.

We recently had one attorney who was visiting her client in detention and who.

That client said that she had not received any water for 30 hours.

And so our attorney gave her a sip of a, of her water bottle that she had.

And now this attorney has, is facing discipline, in many ways a retaliation for doing so.

She now has to have no contact visits with her client.

So this has really become kind of a very egregious right, like where people who are in prison have better conditions than the people who are in civil detention.

And that's something very important to remind people that immigration detention is civil detention.

You're not detained in immigration custody because you've committed a crime.

You're detained because the government is claiming that you were deportable.

But that's a civil offense, it's not a criminal offense defense.

So let's turn for a moment to the Supreme Court's actions last week in a couple of immigration related cases.

And tell me about the temporary protected status, one that affected hundreds of thousands of people here in the United States.

What's the essence of that decision and what's the implications going forward for mass deportations in our country?

Yeah, so we had those two really terrible decisions come out last week from the Supreme Court.

The one you mentioned about tps, really, that case was brought as a lawsuit on behalf of TPS holders because the government was trying to get rid of tps or Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians, two different cases that were combined by the Supreme Court, which like you said, affect hundreds of thousands of people in this country who are here lawfully.

They were given this temporary protected status because they're fleeing natural disasters or political violence in their home countries.

And our government had said it was unsafe for them to return home.

And so they were given this temporary legal status to stay here.

The government attempted to rescind that status.

And the plaintiffs who have TPS sued saying that the Government was trying to get rid of that status without going through the proper procedures.

What normally would happen is the government would evaluate, okay, is it safe for these people to go back to their home country?

And if so, then the tps, their temporary protected status, would lapse.

So they were arguing they had not gone through that procedure.

What we've heard over and over again is that it is unsafe for people to go back to Haiti or to Syria at this moment.

Even our own government right now, the Department of State, has travel warnings about visiting Haiti, saying that the political instability there is not.

It's not safe.

That's true for Americans traveling.

It's true for Haitians returning.

And on top of that, what the plaintiffs were claiming in that case is that the reason that they were trying to rescind temporary protected status for Haitians and Syrians was really primarily based.

Motivated by racial animus.

Right.

We know that this president has said many, many things that are fundamentally racist about Haitians.

For example, you know, that they were the eating cats and dogs that they.

He's claimed that many of them have aids.

So just really despicable things that paint this whole population with the same brush.

So they were really claiming that this was motivated by racial animus and therefore shouldn't be allowed to be rescinded.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court kind of ignored some of that and said the.

The administration could get rid of this status.

And so we expect that status to go away within 30 days.

And unfortunately, it also gives a green light to the administration to rescind the status of other communities that have temporary protected status as well.

And so there's more than a million.

What, a million three people under some kind of temporary protected status in our country now.

And all of these potentially could be.

Is the situation that when your status ends, you can be immediately deported without further ado?

That is correct, yeah.

As soon as someone loses their temporary protected status, they're now in effect, a sitting duck, particularly because in order to get that status, they had to be vetted, they had to apply, they had to go through background checks.

It's not like we just gave temporary protective status just to anyone.

These are people who affirmatively applied and.

And were fingerprinted, had biometrics taken.

So now the government has their information.

You know, this temporary protective status is renewed every 18 months in many cases.

And so these folks were complying with everything that the government asked them to do.

And so now the government has their information, and if it wanted to, these are the people it might go after once they lose their Status.

With implications for families and economies and local communities.

Because these are people, many of them, who've already established roots in the country and have jobs and potentially children born here, and just lots of really heartbreaking situations that have come about.

And as you said, it's unsafe for them to be returning to their home countries.

What was decided in the other suit that you mentioned?

The asylum seekers at the border?

Yeah.

So in that case, that was brought because the administration also put forward, and this is actually something that happened before this current administration, the previous administration, the Biden administration, put forward a rule that would allow people to be what's called metered into the.

The country.

So instead, our normal asylum laws basically say if you get to the United States, you can claim asylum and then, you know, you get put into deportation proceedings, but you get to kind of defend yourself from these proceedings by requesting asylum.

And if you have a valid claim, you're allowed to stay in the country.

Right.

Those are both our domestic laws and our international obligations require us to consider people's asylum claims.

Effectively.

What the government tried to do was say, if there is a wait at the border, you're going to have to wait in line.

Basically, we're going to put you on a list, and you only get to claim asylum once you're kind of made it to the front of the line.

Now, the problem with that is the government has been claiming for many years now that there is a wait, that there is a line, a very long line that you have to wait at.

But these are people who are fleeing in dangerous situations.

They.

They can't wait.

Right?

They can't.

You know, many of these people make it to perhaps the Mexican border and might be pursued by their persecutor there.

They're fleeing persecution in Mexico.

They're still stuck in Mexico.

And there's, you know, we know that there are dangerous conditions in, along the Mexican border where cartels will take advantage because they know that there are immigrants in or asylum seekers in vulnerable situations.

And so they take advantage of them.

They kidnap them and request ransoms from their family.

So this is effectively keeping people in danger and not meeting again those moral obligations and legal obligations that we have as a country, as a society to ensure that we're not keeping people in danger and that we're helping them whenever possible.

Well, the current administration's mass deportation drive and obsession has certainly made the problem worse.

I mean, I think our system has been broken for a long time, and they have just exacerbated it.

And particularly this practice of just Picking people up and detaining them without due process.

And it's just disturbing on so many levels what's going on here, not to mention the impacts on our economy, but the moral, just, moral conditions are being violated.

People, families being separated and things unnecessarily disrupted.

And particularly, you know, when we're putting people in situations where their health is at risk and the conditions are unlivable, worse than our prisons in violation of our constitution.

And people who have not committed crimes, being subjected to this treatment is just really unacceptable on so many levels.

But thank you, Alvaro.

There we go.

So much for what you and your organization is doing to try to right this situation.

We will follow and watch with great interest how things are going.

And I wanted to close by just asking you, what can people do who are concerned about this?

Is there a way that citizens can help?

Yeah.

Well, thank you, Kay, for having me, and thank you for exposing your audience to everything that's happening.

I think it is really important for us to pay attention and to ask ourselves, why is this happening in our country right now?

Why are we allowing it and what we can do?

And I think what people can do is speak up, right?

They, you know, wherever they are in the country, we need people to call their Congress members and demand that they do something in response to what we're seeing at Adelanto and many of these other facilities that they conduct oversight visits to every facility in the country, which is their right, which is under the law, they're allowed to do.

And, you know, they're stewards of our tax dollars.

Right?

Our tax dollars.

Billions of our.

Our tax dollars are going to fund the immigration enforcement system and the detention of.

Of all of these people.

Right.

We were talking primarily about the Adelanto facility, which is an adult facility, but there is family detention facility, family detention facility in Texas, for example, the Dilley facility.

And the fact that we are detaining families with their children should really shock the conscious conscience of everyone in this country.

Again, I don't think this is something that should happen on American soil.

And I think what we were seeing with the tremendous amount of money being spent on detaining people, this just isn't.

It's not worth it.

We have to ask ourselves, what are we really getting from this?

And really, what are we losing because we're housing so many people away, tearing them apart from their families and, you know, for what, to try to deport them?

We don't need to detain folks in order to have them go through the immigration system to challenge their cases if they're able to, to stay in the country and in many cases to be deported.

Some people will choose to be deported if they don't have the ability to stay here.

And, you know, those are our immigration laws.

But we don't need to detain people in order to accomplish that.

It's a waste of taxpayer dollars and it really is a moral stain on our society.

Again, people can call their congressmembers to demand change.

They can call the White House to demand that they change as well.

And they can follow organizations like ours, the Immigrant Defenders Law center or IMDEF on social media.

We put out calls to action all the time.

We try to keep people informed as much as possible, and particularly immigrants and asylum seekers.

We try to let them know what their rights are so that they can defend their own rights and not go give up this hope that I mentioned because we don't want people to give up hope, particularly because in many cases it means being separated from their families or going, being deported to danger and sometimes even to their own deaths.

Thank you.

Thank you for everything you're doing.

Democracy is on fire, and it's up to us, we the people, to demand that our representatives fix this situation.

Thanks for listening.

On United America Network or wherever you get your podcasts.