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For Immediate Release //
February 18th, 2021
Contact: Armando Carmona, 951-966-6500, media@ic4ij.org, armando@tzunu.com
Adelanto, CA – The Adelanto Detention Facility has begun putting detained immigrants in its Desert View Annex despite community disapproval and an emerging consensus that for-profit detention facilities are not only inhumane but also bring no economic benefit to local communities.
Lizbeth Abeln, Deportation Defense Program Manager for the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice stated
“It was shameful to consider expanding the facility before the pandemic. Now it is unthinkable. Rather than coming up with more models to detain more people, we must create a humane model to release people and prioritize safety for all.”
Nationwide policy developments are increasingly siding with the abolition of for-profit prisons, and we urge that these moves include facilities used for immigrant detention — something the Biden administration has yet to address. The Adelanto ICE Processing Facility, run by the GEO group, has a well-documented history of abusive treatment of detainees, medical neglect, corruption and mistreatment.
According to a report released in January by The Attorney General, Xavier Becerra, released a report in January on detention centers in California, it stated that “the review of the Adelanto facility—and particularly of its delivery of medical care—was significantly hampered by the GEO Group’s refusal to provide access to detainees and records to the same degree that Cal DOJ received at every other facility it has reviewed”
Shannon Camacho, Campaign Coordinator at CHIRLA noted
“For far too many years, immigrant community members & advocates have shown light on the inhumane and dangerous conditions of private immigration prisons. Private prison companies like the GEO Group, CoreCivic, and MTC have gotten richer over the past decade by locking up immigrants and subjecting them to deplorable conditions. Enough has been enough. We demand that ICE and these private prison companies be held accountable for the atrocities they have committed against immigrants. We call on the Biden administration to take advantage of this moment, and phase out private detention centers once and for all. Immigration detention and prisons have no place in any just society, and we have to address this through deliberate and bold policy change now.“
We will continue to advocate for the freedom of all immigrants and will fight for the shut down of the Adelanto Detention Facility and the Desert View Facility.
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Notes:
https://oag.ca.gov/sites/all/files/agweb/pdfs/publications/immigration-detention-2021.pdf