DHS is spending $1.5 billion to block ICE oversight

The Department of Homeland Security has purchased two privately-run detention facilities from the for-profit prison company CoreCivic, the company announced Monday, in a move that may serve to shield the facilities from state oversight.

DHS bought the two Southern California prisons, Otay Mesa Detention Center and California City Detention Center, for about $1.5 billion on Monday. But the facilities will still be operated by CoreCivic employees, meaning the company will still generate income, over and above the sale price, from both prisons. 

California law requires that privately held detention centers be subject to oversight by local and state authorities, as well as members of Congress. 

Now that DHS owns the buildings, finding out what’s going on inside of them is likely to become harder.

“It seems like a very clear attempt to evade oversight and accountability,” said Alexa Van Brunt, a civil rights attorney with the MacArthur Justice Center. “If they own the building, then there is a very good argument that a state law cannot trump federal ownership,” Van Brunt explained. That sets up a potential oversight battle between California’s state government and the Trump administration. 

DHS said as much. “ICE can not rely on local state and county partners for detention space in California,” where “politicians continue to push legislation to outlaw or make private prisons financially infeasible,” an agency spokesperson said in response to a request for comment. “Now, with federal ownership of these detention centers which are crucial to ICE’s detention network on the west coast ICE retains the detention capacity needed to arrest, detain, and remove illegal aliens,” the spokesperson concluded.

The purchase could also protect the detention centers from legal attacks. As Katya Schwenk of The Lever put it in March, when the plans were first reported, federal ownership may help ICE evade not only state monitoring but “some lawsuits tied to alleged abuse, including labor violations.” 

One such lawsuit concerns Otay Mesa: Owino v. CoreCivic, ongoing since 2017, is a massive class-action suit alleging forced labor practices there. It’s one of many attempts to curb or regulate ICE detention in California: just this week, the state sued to stop the construction of a new detention center outside the town of Gilroy. 

“California created oversight for private detention facilities because we have seen too many abuses, including deaths, behind closed doors,” said state Sen. María Elena Durazo, who co-sponsored legislation to strengthen state oversight. “It is shameful for any government agency to try to sidestep basic health and safety protections for people in its custody. If the federal government believes that purchasing these facilities allows it to avoid oversight, that is unacceptable.”

CoreCivic representative Ryan Gustin did not respond to questions about how federal ownership of the facilities might impact oversight. “Asset transactions of this nature are not uncommon for government,” Gustin said in a written statement. “We have previously completed facility sales to government partners, and operating government-owned facilities is a well-established model within our business.” 

Other firms are indeed exploring the model. George Zoley, CEO of GEO Group—the other major ICE detention contractor—said on an earnings call in May that “as some blue states are considering more active involvement in oversight of facilities, I think the logical solution to much of that is federal ownership,” as The Appeal’s Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg reported.

If the federal government owns the buildings, it will “provide stronger credibility in the courts,” Zoley added, such that “states can only have very limited involvement in those policies and programs.” 

ICE facilities across the country, both privately and publicly owned, have been slammed with lawsuits over detainee mistreatment, forced labor, health code violations, and deaths in custody. At least 21 people have died in ICE custody this year, according to data collected by lawyer and journalist Andrew Free, as the number of people detained by ICE skyrockets from around 45,000 last year to more than 63,000 as of this week. Denying state officials the right of inspection makes investigating those deaths—as UN human rights chief Volker Türk demanded this week—far harder. 

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) conducted oversight visits at Otay Mesa when it still belonged to CoreCivic—and, like lawmakers in other states, was sometimes denied entry.

“Too many people who pose no threat to public safety and should not be in detention are nevertheless being held in unacceptable conditions with inadequate access to medical care, legal counsel, clean water, nutritious food, and other basic necessities,” Padilla said. “Whether these facilities are operated by a private contractor or owned by the federal government, my expectations remain the same.”

Setareh Ghandehari, of the advocacy group Detention Watch Network, described the purchase as one facet of ICE’s mass expansion of incarceration: converting warehouses into detention centers, buying existing jails, and contracting to build new ones, all of which will “intensify the already cruel and inhumane conditions in ICE detention and streamline the agency’s ability to target and dehumanize immigrant communities to achieve its stated goal of ‘Amazonification’ of mass detention and deportation,” Ghandehari said. 

“There still will be avenues for accountability,” Van Brunt, of MacArthur Justice, said. Even without the right of inspection, ICE-owned detention centers could be sued on constitutional grounds. But this purchase “does make it harder for people to get in those detention facilities at the state level and find out what’s actually going on,” Van Brunt continued. “It makes it much more of a black box, and it makes the people who are held there much more vulnerable to abuses and to poor conditions.”