Rep. Judy Chu first went inside the immigrant detention center in Adelanto in 2014, and conditions were bad.
When she made it back inside the privately run facility in the Mojave desert last week, things weren’t much better.
“It is just scandalous as to how it has not improved,” she told me.
Truth be told, conditions are likely to get worse, if only because of sheer numbers and chaos. Which makes it all the more important to have elected leaders like Chu willing to put themselves on the front lines to give a voice to the truly, really voiceless.
As tens of thousands of immigrants are chased down and incarcerated across the United States, oversight of their detention has become both increasingly difficult and important.
Shortly after the unannounced visit to Adelanto by Chu and four other members of Congress a few days ago, ICE announced new rules attempting to further limit access by lawmakers to its facilities — despite clear federal law allowing them unannounced entrance to such lockups. While Chu and others have called these new curbs on access illegal, they are still likely to be enforced until and unless courts rule otherwise.
The narrow, fragile line of the judicial branch is holding, for now.
But families and even lawyers are struggling to keep track of those who vanish into these facilities, many of which — including Adelanto — are operated by private, for-profit companies raking in millions of dollars from the government.
GEO Group, the publicly traded company that runs Adelanto, has reported more than $600 million in revenue so far this year and projects $31 million in additional annualized revenue from Adelanto at full capacity. Maybe DOGE wants to look into the fact that GEO often gets paid a “guaranteed minimum,” according to a report by the California Department of Justice — regardless of how many detainees are in a facility. Sounds like waste.
When the Trump administration started its attack on Los Angeles a few weeks ago, Chu…