Background: The ICE detention facility in Adelanto, California (KTLA/YouTube). Inset: Detainees at the ICE facility in Adelanto (KTLA/YouTube).
The Biden administration has agreed to settle a lawsuit allowing for the reopening of a controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in California where toxic chemicals were allegedly used on detainees and basic civil rights were allegedly denied en masse — with nearly a dozen prisoners dying at the center between 2011 and 2020, when it was closed amid protests and lawsuits from immigration activists.
The settlement agreement, which was made public in court documents this week viewed by Law&Crime, calls for the reopening of the Adelanto ICE Processing Center after motions were filed to lift a COVID-19-related “intake ban” that was implemented by a judge in 2020 over the spread of the virus as part of a class-action lawsuit brought against the facility in April 2020 — as well as the Department of Justice, former Homeland Security secretary Chad Wolf and ICE — over its treatment of prisoners, with detainees named as plaintiffs.
DOJ prosecutors motioned to vacate the intake ban in a Dec. 23 filing, calling for the preliminary injunction issued in 2020 — which barred “new detainee intakes” and later led officials to weigh the financial costs of staying open with pending litigation — to be tossed out.
The settlement agreement was also announced in a Dec. 23 motion filed by the plaintiffs, one of whom was Kelvin Hernandez Roman, a Garden Grove father who claimed to have been improperly detained and held at Adelanto for nine months over tinted windows, according to local ABC affiliate KABC.
“I was afraid for my future and the future of my family, and I was left in the dark when turned over to ICE by the very deputies who swore to protect our community,” Hernandez Roman told KABC in August 2020. His lawyer, Monica Ramirez Almadani, said he could have been released the same day of his arrest on account of ICE agents not showing up on time, but authorities chose to wait and kept him locked up until the agents arrived.
“At this point, there were no criminal charges against Kelvin and so he should have been released earlier in the day and at a minimum should have been released that night with the other individuals who were being released,” Ramirez Almadani told KABC. “But instead he was held, put in a holding cell and had to wait several hours for ICE to pick him up. If ICE doesn’t show up on time, then that person must be released and ICE here did not show up to pick him up earlier in the day.”
The decision to remove the ban on new detainees at Adelanto comes as President-elect Donald Trump continues to push for mass deportations in the U.S. to kick off his second term. Incoming border czar Tom Homan on Thursday told NewsNation that there is currently no “price tag” on what Trump is planning to do with illegal immigrants.
“What price do you put on national security?” Homan asked, according to The Hill.
“I don’t think it has a price tag,” he said. “What price do you put on the thousands of American moms and dads who buried their children? You want to talk about family separation; they buried their children because their children were murdered by illegal aliens that weren’t supposed to be here. I don’t put a price on that. I don’t put a price on national security. I don’t put a price on American lives.”
Civil rights groups and immigration activists, including the ACLU and Freedom for Immigrants, have accused Adelanto and ICE management of denying detainees “basic rights” at the facility — including access to attorneys, medical care and “safe food and water” — among other federal violations.
“Privileged conversations between detained individuals and their attorneys are continuously disrupted to the point of eliminating access to legal representation,” the ACLU says on its website. “In lieu of treatment, individuals contemplating suicide are placed in solitary confinement, which can have detrimental and potentially fatal effects. Critical care including surgeries that have been approved have been significantly delayed; some stalled for months. Retaliation for participating in First Amendment-protected actions such as hunger strikes.”
According to the ACLU, “at least eight people have died in ICE custody” at the Adelanto facility since 2011.
“No one — no family — deserves this,” the group says.
Freedom for Immigrants, along with the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice, filed a lawsuit in May 2020 against ICE and Adelanto for the use of “hazardous chemicals” by the GEO Group employees that staffed there.
“Since May 11, 2020, we have received reports multiple times per day from people in ICE detention at Adelanto regarding the negative and serious health consequences that they are suffering due to being exposed to hazardous chemicals being disseminated,” the groups alleged in their suit.
One detainee allegedly told them, “The disinfection spray that the facility is using is hurting us. Everyone in our facility has been having bloody noses, burning eyes, headaches and our bones have been hurting.”
Attempts by Law&Crime to reach ICE for comment on Thursday were unsuccessful.
