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During a recent tour of the Immigration and Customs detention center in Adelanto, California, conducted by Thomas Giles, acting director of ICE’s Los Angeles field office, a team of Fox News reporters including a videographer were given a firsthand look at the facility and gave it a positive review.
Representative Judy Chu (D-Calif.), in a July 10 interview, called the facility “a travesty.”
Fox News reported that detainees in Adelanto “had access to 24-hour health care, dental care, mental health care, unlimited phone calls, legal advice, a law library, physical-contact visitations, outdoor recreation, and religious services seven days a week.”
The Fox News report observed that there were multiple phone banks in the common areas of the facility with directories for embassies and legal services. There was even the number posted of a hotline to DHS’s Office of Inspector General that detainees could call to air any grievances they might have.
There were recreational opportunities provided to the detainees, including X-box games and artificial turf soccer fields. The report also observed that detainees had relatively good freedom of movement and were not locked in cells at any time.
One detainee interviewed by the reporters, Noel Beltran of El Salvador, had positive things to say about the Adelanto facility compared to previous places where he had been detained.
“For me it is great. I can see my family, hug my family, at [a previous detention facility] I couldn’t hug my family,” Beltran said. “[Their visits] would get cut off real quick, behind the glass. Right here I have contact with my family, I can hug my kids.”
A July 10 article in the Blade (which describes itself as “America’s LGBT News Source”) quoted Chu, who was strongly critical of the Adelanto facility, saying she is “concerned about how the de facto prisons are privately run.” (Adelanto is run by a privately contracted company, GEO Group.)
“We have one here in California. Adelanto. It is just such a travesty. It’s a horrendous kind of situation where these migrants go in there for months on end, if not years. They make a profit off of denying care to these migrants,” Chu said.
“Every time I’ve gone there, they have denied that anything wrong is going on,” Chu insisted. “It wasn’t until the Inspector General report this past year that there was great detail about the lack of medical care — as well as the nooses that they allowed to continue up there just as a way of creating even greater misery. There were migrants that tried to hang themselves and some did hang themselves. They just left the nooses up there as a way of even greater mental depression for these migrants.”
“I want to make sure that everybody is safe and treated humanely in the detention centers, including ‘trans’ people,” Chu said.
Chu did not cite any evidence indicating that any migrants detained by ICE were “transgender.”
Warren Mass has served The New American since its launch in 1985 in several capacities, including marketing, editing, and writing. Since retiring from the staff several years ago, he has been a regular contributor to the magazine. Warren writes from Texas and can be reached at [email protected].
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