California Desert Town Becomes Battleground as CoreCivic Opens Controversial ICE Detention Center Without Permits

The quiet reopening of the California City Detention Facility in Kern County highlights what immigrant advocates describe as a blatant disregard for law, safety, and human dignity. With 2,560 beds, it is set to become the largest immigration detention center in California, part of Donald Trump’s drive to expand incarceration of immigrants nationwide. CoreCivic, the private prison giant behind the project, has already begun housing detainees despite lacking necessary permits and failing a fire inspection. “They are operating unlawfully,” attorney Grisel Ruiz told the city’s Planning Commission, urging officials to enforce state law requiring public notice and hearings before allowing an immigration jail to open.

This expansion is not only illegal but dangerous. A city fire inspection revealed that radio signals could not reach critical areas like alarm panels and inmate cells, prompting City Manager Christopher Lopez to write: “Risks to the public’s health and safety are of such significance that the City cannot permit or otherwise allow for the operation of the facility at this time and in its current condition.” CoreCivic insists it has fixed these issues, but its track record raises serious doubts. Former inmate Jonathan Montes Diaz recalled that when the facility operated as a state prison, “It’s up there with some of the worst time I’ve been in prison,” describing days when broken water lines left people forced to use plastic bags as toilets.

An ICE spokesperson defended the expansion as meeting an “urgent operational need” to support record arrests, boasting of plans to “bring online over 60 new detention facilities.” But community leaders reject this framing. Dolores Huerta, the 95-year-old United Farm Workers co-founder, denounced the $45 billion earmarked for ICE, declaring: “This is our test … You have to stand up to this prison system here in California City. You can do it. Si se puede.”

For opponents, the reality feels plain: locking up thousands of immigrants, many of them farmworkers and caregivers, isn’t about safety. It’s about profit and control. As Ruiz put it, “The decisions being made right now will impact this community for decades to come.” Instead of offering stability or real security, the expansion of ICE detention is seen as an unjust and deeply harmful system that rips families apart and risks turning California City into nothing more than a prison town.

Link: KQED