Conditions at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in the high desert of Southern California are so bad that at least 20 people detained there have declared a hunger strike.
“There are many people suffering here. This is the only way we have to raise our voice, this is a call to stop the suffering and respect our dignity as human beings,” read a statement written by the strikers that was read during an press conference held online Wednesday morning. It was put on by a coalition of advocacy groups.
The immigrants at the Adelanto ICE detention complex have not eaten since Tuesday, organizers said. They are demanding “due process, bond reform, improved conditions, adequate medical and mental health care, nutritious food, accountability for deaths, and the right to organize and communicate” according to their statement.
The 20 men on strike are all being held in the facility’s Desert View Annex processing center, which is one of the three facilities in the Adelanto detention complex, where immigrants who are detained await deportation or release. There are also reports of a hunger strike at the Adelanto Processing Facility West that began last Friday, according to the Community Defense Coalition, a grassroots immigration advocacy group who is in touch with people being held there through their families.
The Adelanto ICE facility is California’s largest immigration detention facility and currently holds over 2,000 people, according to the California Department of Justice. It is owned by GEO Group, a private corporation contracted to operate immigration detention facilities, prisons and mental health facilities around the country.
Earlier this month, a former GEO Group executive was named the acting director of ICE, replacing Todd Lyons who will soon retire.
Four people have died in the Adelanto facility between September 2025 and March 2026, according to a report from the California Department of Justice.
Between January 2025 and early March 2026, at least 30 immigrants arrested in and around San Francisco have been taken to the Adelanto complex, according to data from the Deportation Data Project at U.C. Berkeley analyzed by Mission Local.
Caleb Soto, an immigration attorney who goes inside Adelanto every week to speak with clients, said that detainees wait weeks or months for a medical appointment to be approved, which often results in a 60 second appointment that ends with Tylenol or a salt packet. “I have watched people age in front of me in a number of months,” said Soto.
There have also been reports of overcrowding; the facility went from holding seven individuals in 2023 to 1,570 in 2025, according to California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who described the detention center “inhumane.”
Disability Rights California, a nonprofit advocacy group that visited Adelanto, and published a report on their findings in June 2025, noted “inadequate access to food and water, including extreme delays in meal distribution, provision of food that results in significant health issues, and a shortage of drinking water.”
One person quoted in their report noted that he needed to take diabetes medication twice per day but had only received it twice over the 10 days he had been detained—placing him at life-threatening risk of diabetic shock. The report also noted that there were only three psychologists to serve a population of nearly 1,400 detainees as of June 25, 2025.
Activists say there have been reports of detention staff suspending phone calls for detainees as punishment for discussing conditions there.
Immigrants in the facility are are also boycotting commissary accounts and withholding phone calls to pressure the GEO Group to take action.
Legal aid organizations have filed ongoing lawsuits challenging the conditions inside the detention centers at Adelanto as well as lawsuits challenging the dismantling of the bond system which once allowed law-abiding asylum-seekers to live and work independently, as long as they showed up for regular hearings.
Sonia Calderon, the sister of a detainee at Adelanto who has been held in detention for nearly two years, said that her sister-in-law is struggling to pay rent and put food on the table, and that her nieces and nephews cannot fathom why their father is gone, and have developed behavioral problems since his detention.
Recently, Calderon brought her two-year-old niece to visit her father at the detention center, and was informed that the girl would not be allowed to hug her father.
“She wanted to be close to him and the officers did not allow it, I feel it is very inhumane,” she said.
Additional data reporting by Kelly Waldron.
Hundreds of prisoners at more than 20 CA prions went on a hunger strike in 2025 because of the conditions they were in.
As for the 4 deaths. There were more than 400 deaths in CA prisoners in 2025. Dividing by the number of prisoners gives you double the mortality rate as the Adelanto facility. Once you adjust for the time period, the obvious conclusion is that CA subject prisoners to “inhumane” conditions.