Now that DHS owns two detention camps formerly belonging to private prison profiteer CoreCivic, “finding out what’s going on inside of them is likely to become harder”
The federal government is paying a private prison profiteer more than a billion dollars in taxpayer funds as part of a likely scheme to evade accountability for its in-detention abuses. CoreCivic announced earlier this month that it finalized the sale of two California facilities to the Trump administration for a whopping $1.5 billion, including $739.2 million for the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego and $732.6 million for the California City Detention Facility in California City. The sale is estimated to net CoreCivic $1.1 billion, the private prison profiteer boasted.
A MOVE TO SHIELD PRISON FROM STATE OVERSIGHT
The administration has already paid roughly that same amount to buy up nearly a dozen warehouses to serve as mass detention camps (some of that plan appears to be on hold – for now). However, the recent purchases in California appear to be “a move that may serve to shield the facilities from state oversight,” Mother Jones says. “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.”
THERE IS PLENTY TO HIDE
And, there’s plenty that ICE likely wants to hide from Americans who are newly outraged over the recent ICE-related deaths of immigrant dads Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián. In recent years, immigrants at both the Otay Mesa Detention Center and the California City Detention Facility have staged hunger strikes to protest inhumane conditions, including prolonged detention and medical neglect that has resulted in entirely preventable deaths.
When a Cameroonian immigrant collapsed at Otay Mesa in 2019, it took the facility nearly an hour to get him emergency care. By the time EMS arrived, it was too late.
“After staff discovered that Nebane Abienwi had suffered a stroke at the Otay Mesa Detention Center, it took 50 more minutes for emergency medical services to arrive and provide the required higher-level care, because the on-call medical provider at the detention facility did not respond to a nurse’s request for authorization to call an ambulance,” American Civil Liberties Union, American Oversight, and Physicians for Human Rights said in a 2024 report. While Mr. Abienwi had informed staff that he’d recently been hospitalized for hypertension, Otay Mesa’s medical staff didn’t monitor him for high blood pressure.
“This delay in EMS services and a higher level of care may have changed the outcome for Mr. Abienwi,” a physician said in the report.
“Men with diabetes or psychiatric conditions who arrived late last month complained they couldn’t get their medication,” The Los Angeles Times reported last year about the California City Detention Facility, a former state prison that was reopened as an immigration detention by the administration last year. “One man at the detention center, open barely a month, tried to kill himself, officials said.” Other detained individuals have reported being stripped of dignity and price-gouged by the multi-billion-dollar corporation (CoreCivic reported $2.6 billion in total revenue in 2025) for the most basic needs, like sanitary napkins.
CHANGE IN OWNERSHIP IS A CALCULATED SCHEME
ICE’s purchases of the two facilities won’t appear to make any discernible difference for the quality of life for individuals currently detained there: CoreCivic says in a release that it “expects to continue to manage the California City Facility and the Otay Mesa Facility” under current ICE contracts. So why the sale?
Well, sometimes the correct answer is the most obvious one. The change in ownership from CoreCivic to the federal government could “protect the detention centers from legal attacks,” Mother Jones said. “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.'”
“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 has authored legislation ensuring 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.”
THE DEATH TOLL MOUNTS
This effort comes as federal immigration officials have acknowledged yet another in-custody death. “Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva, a 45-year-old man from Venezuela, died in ICE custody on July 13, 2026, during a transfer out of the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia,” writes Austin Kocher, a professor at Syracuse University. He’d been detained for just four days when he became the at least 50th person to die in federal immigration custody since the start of the Trump administration.
Kocher writes that Folkston D. Ray ICE Processing Center, the detention camp that Mr. Arenas-Silva was being transferred to, “has a record of its own.”
“In April 2024, under the Biden administration, Jaspal Singh, a 57-year-old man from India, died at the Folkston ICE Processing Center after a doctor delayed treatment for his chest pain,” he continues. “ICE’s own review of his death found that the facility’s medical care ‘deviated beyond safe limits and directly contributed to his death.’” The problems are systemic – and are being exploited under the mass deportation obsessions of the current administration. Rather than reining in these abuses, it’s also gutting oversight and is imprisoning immigrants on “a scale of mass detention not seen since the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans and nationals during World War II,” NPR noted in March. Meanwhile, the ICE death count continues.
