Detainees at California ICE center on hunger strike for a week over living and work conditions

Once they enter a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center, life changes radically for undocumented immigrants. Anxiety prevails because they know they can be deported at any time. In the meantime, they are being held in conditions that have led 42 detainees to go on a hunger strike at the Golden State Annex facility in McFarland, California, about 130 miles (210 km) north of Los Angeles. Since July 12, the strikers have been refusing to eat in protest over the standards of medical care and food. They also say their right to free calls is being curtailed, and that they are being subjected to solitary confinement.

The hunger strike raises the intensity of a protest that began 10 days earlier with a work stoppage by 59 detainees both in this center and in Mesa Verde, in Bakersfield, California, about 26 miles (42 km) south of the Golden State Annex. The migrants typically work scrubbing bathrooms and cutting hair for $1 a day. Both facilities are operated by GEO Group, a for-profit organization that declined to comment on the matter. Among their demands, the striking detainees are demanding that ICE sever its contract with this organization.

Jonathan Montes, 31, is one of the detainees participating in both strikes. He is neither eating nor participating in essential work within the compound. Montes, who came to the United States when he was two years old and is now a father of three, has been detained for 13 months. He figures that a similar period lies ahead, and explains that the protest is not about new complications. “When I arrived here there were already a number of problems,” he explains. “I am what is considered a dorm representative, and we have had monthly meetings with administrators to talk, but the problems I had on the first day are still there today.”

Montes admits that it is difficult for him to say what is the most pressing thing that must change, but the list of demands includes that in addition to ending the contracts of both Golden State Annex and Mesa Verde in December — “because there is no humane way to manage these places”—that detainees be granted freedom and for their cases to be reviewed fairly, including the semi-annual custody reports by ICE. “The fact that I am here, I don’t even understand why. I am locked up over a civil matter, but people are not detained over a civil matter,” protests Montes.

Authorities have had alternative detention programs since 2004 that allow non-citizens to remain in their communities, continue to fulfill their family obligations, and prepare for immigration or departure procedures.

Another demand by protesters is to end solitary confinement. These isolation measures in prisons and detention centers in the United States have been criticized for decades by the United Nations Committee Against Torture. And it is something that is combined with what protesters consider to be a violation of ICE’s own standards, which include providing adequate medical assistance, including mental health, nutritious and non-expired food; clean facilities; free calls to families and lawyers, and the end of retaliation against those who protest against the violation of those standards.

The strikers want to draw the attention of those who can change things, particularly ICE Acting Director Patrick Lechleitner and Moisés Becerra, the director of the San Francisco Enforcement and Removal Office (ERO). responsible for both centers.

The organization California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice (CCIJ) regrets that instead of listening to the strikers’ requests, officers are retaliating by cancelling or limiting their time outdoors. There is also a lack of toilet paper, cold water, ice or even air conditioning in the middle of a summer with intense heat waves in the state of California.

Montes says that now there are more detainees than when he arrived — at Mesa Verde, until last week, there were 52 people, and in Golden State Annex the number ranges between 300 and 400 — so that problems such as long waits for medical assistance are getting worse. Montes believes that detainees in other facilities may be experiencing the same difficulties.

The inspection service of the Department of Homeland Security made an unannounced visit to Golden State Annex in April, as it usually does at different facilities, and issued a series of recommendations to change and improve some aspects of the treatment of detainees and the management of their documentation. The report also revealed that ICE had paid $25.3 million for unused beds. The CCIJ support group, which is working closely with detainees, says that since that inspection ICE has sent more people to the Golden State Annex facility, which has increased its detainee population by 200% and complicated pre-existing problems. From January 2023 to March 2024, the population rose from 130 detainees to around 400.

Montes says that those $25 million make him angry. “It’s $25 million and they can’t give us the basic things we need?”

This newspaper reached out to ICE, which declined to comment on the situation at Golden State Annex due to “open litigation” and indicated that GEO Group, the second largest private prison operating company in the United States, should be the one to provide remarks. The latter organization did not provide a response.

No details have been forthcoming about the nature of this litigation, but there are several open cases. In 2021, a court in Tacoma, Washington, ruled that GEO Group owed former detainees $17.3 million in unpaid wages after the company paid them just $1 a day to clean and work in the kitchens at the detention center. That compensation was ruled to be a violation of the state’s minimum wage law.

In 2023, the Social Justice Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit on behalf of several detainees and former detainees against GEO Group for the alleged use of toxic chemicals to clean detention centers, specifically the California center known as Adelanto. The product, which has been in use for years, was used much more intensively during the Covid pandemic and exposure to it allegedly caused health problems for inmates.

Most recently, in April, the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization, the National Immigration Project’s network of immigration attorneys, and the non-profit The Bronx Defenders sued ICE and GEO Group on behalf of the Honduran national Ángel Argueta Anariba, who has lived in the United States since 1998 and has been in detention centers for seven years. Argueta participated in hunger strikes to protest what he considered mistreatment and inhuman conditions; in retaliation, according to the lawsuit, he was punished with solitary confinement on several occasions, once for 43 days. In addition, he said he had been subjected to verbal and physical abuse.

According to the organization Detention Watch Network, the loss of free minutes to talk on the phone, which was made available to detainees in 2020, and the deterioration of other living conditions led to the declaration of other hunger strikes in mid-June at Moshannon Valley Detention Center (Pennsylvania), Elizabeth Detention Center (New Jersey), Batavia Service Processing Center (New York), Orange County Jail (New York) and Desert View Annex (California). According to this organization, at the Moshannon center, hundreds of people faced retaliation for participating in the protest and four of them ended up in solitary confinement.

Back at Golden State Annex, Montes says that he will go as far as he can with the hunger strike, and that he will listen to his body to determine when he has to stop. But he also says that he has heard from the people who share detention with him and is surprised by the support that he is finding. “These are people who could be deported at any time, but they feel it is a good cause.”

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