Out in the middle of the Mojave Desert and surrounded by Joshua trees, marijuana dispensaries and razor wire, the remote Adelanto ICE Processing Center is a difficult place to visit.
The facility, roughly 85 miles northeast of Los Angeles, is on a road splintered with cracks and potholes. Once there, some wait for hours to see their loved ones. If a visitor happens to be wearing anything forbidden by the dress code – say a crop top, or shorts that rise above the mid-thigh – they won’t get to see them at all.
Melanie Lesage is among those who have been navigating the hurdles. Her husband, 25-year-old Jairo Palma, was detained by federal agents in July, she said, at a routine ICE check-in appointment at the federal building in downtown Los Angeles. He has been held at Adelanto for four months.
The 21-year-old mother of three, who has no car, has managed to visit her husband four times, hitching a ride from friends or family.
At times she’s had to wait over seven hours in the facility’s waiting room. The long waits make bringing her young children to see their father a difficult feat, but she feels it’s necessary.
Lesage’s one-and-a-half-year-old daughter had lost a considerable amount of weight since she witnessed her father being taken by ICE agents, she said.
“When she saw him the first time, she ran to him. She ran to him and just gave him a hug. He started crying,” Lesage said. “The only reason I’m probably still standing on my two feet is because of my kids. But it’s been a roller coaster. It’s been hard financially-wise, emotionally, mentally – it’s been very, very hard.”
Over 59,000 people swept up in President Donald Trump’s deportation efforts are detained inside ICE facilities across the country, according to recent government data. Only a couple of people were being held inside the high desert detention center in Adelanto at the beginning of 2025. As of June, Adelanto’s population swelled to 1,400, according to Disability Rights California.
President Trump has repeatedly stated that federal immigration agents would target “the worst of the worst” yet the same data showed that nearly 71% of people detained in ICE custody have no criminal convictions.
The same government data lists over 50% of people detained at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center as “criminals”, though the data does not specify how the agency defines criminality.
ICE assigns each detained person a “threat level” on a scale of one to three, with one being the highest severity, that is determined in part by alleged recent criminal activity, according to the agency. Detained people with no criminal convictions are classified as “no ICE threat level.” As of late September, roughly 60% of people detained in the Adelanto facility have no threat level and nearly 25% have a level one threat classification.
The administration contends illegal border crossings and the growth of the undocumented immigrant population in America had become untenable and is a national security issue. Some officials have publicly stated that a mass deportation effort is necessary to improve public safety and reduce the strain on community resources.
“No one’s off the table. … We’re going to go out there and keep the president’s promise to make sure that we have one of the largest deportation efforts ever,” said Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons in a recent interview.
Allegations of abuse
At least 15 people have died in ICE custody this year, including Ismael Ayala-Uribe, a 39-year-old father who died after not receiving proper medical attention while detained inside the Adelanto center, according to his family’s attorney.
Lesage’s husband knew Ayala-Uribe. “I fear for my husband’s safety, my husband’s health after that,” she said. “I’m just like, you know, if it could happen to Ismael, it can happen to any of those in there.”
Earlier this year, Disability Rights California issued a report concluding that people with disabilities inside the Adelanto center have been subjected to abuse and neglect. A man with diabetes reported receiving his medicine twice within 10 days – a medication he said he needs twice a day.
In 2018, the Office of Inspector General made an unannounced visit to the facility and found nooses made out of bedsheets in detainees’ cells, among other “significant” health and safety concerns that reportedly violated ICE’s Performance-Based National Detention Standards.
In response to the OIG’s findings, ICE said it would issue a “full inspection” of the facility to “ensure concerns identified in this report are fully inspected and addressed.”
After touring the facility in August, U.S. Rep. Judy Chu, D-Pasadena, said some detainees told her “they are deprived of the food that they need in order to survive. These are conditions where they are treated indeed like dogs in a cage.”
Visiting Adelanto
Many of the ICE detention centers are owned and operated by private prison companies. Florida-based GEO Group owns and operates almost 100 immigration facilities throughout the country, like the Adelanto facility, through contracts worth over $1 billion with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according documents posted to GEO Group’s website.
GEO Group requires detention center visitors to adhere to a strict dress code that includes no jewelry, no watches, no open-toed shoes, no ripped clothing, no spandex clothing, no sweatpants, no leggings, no hats, no bras with wires and no clothing that falls below the armpits.
One day in early October, a woman wearing a hot pink long-sleeve shirt and black leggings frantically asked others in the Adelanto center parking lot if anyone had a pair of pants she could borrow. She had traveled from Santa Ana to visit her brother.
“I’m someone that has documents, but I feel unsafe there,” said Esmeralda Santos, an organizer with the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice, who was visiting detainees that day. She’s been going to see people locked inside Adelanto for the last four years through the volunteer organization, though it brings her “emotional turmoil.”
But, she said, “It feels really important to be able to connect with folks that are experiencing this extreme isolation and check in with them, see how they’re doing.”
Language barriers make it difficult for detainees to communicate with one another, Santos said, compounding the isolation they experience.
Santos also knows that for some people, visiting someone inside an ICE detention center isn’t an option. “Some folks choose not to visit their loved ones because they don’t feel safe due to not having documents. They are worried about being arrested,” she said.
The visitor waiting area offers a controlled view into the facility. Staged photos taken of the interior line the yellow-tinged walls. An image titled “Outdoor Recreation” shows a small classroom-sized room with one mounted basketball hoop and an open ceiling.
Self-deportation instructions in Spanish are stuck to a wall. On another day a reporter visited in late October, none of the televisions were on, and the tattered National Geographic magazines from 2021 and 2022 didn’t appeal to anyone.
While more people waited in line at the front desk to check in, a woman escorted an 11-year-old girl wearing a pink Wicked shirt to the seating area. Because only three people can visit a detained person at a time, the young girl’s family asked the woman, who was waiting for her visitation the next hour, if she could wait with the girl.
She told the woman that she hadn’t seen her father, Jose, since mid-August. He migrated from El Salvador over 20 years ago and was detained this summer at a Marina Del Rey Home Depot, his 16-year-old daughter Magaly said. She asked a reporter to withhold the family’s last name, out of fear.
Jose was buying supplies and spoke to some friends on the way out, she said. Federal immigration agents appeared, and the man ran and was detained.
As they waited, the woman watching the girl comforted her by telling her about volcanoes and trees in El Salvador. The girl gasped as she was shown a photo, saying, “It looks like where Donald Trump lives.” She was viewing the palace of El Salvador President Nayib Bukele.
When the semi-hourly visitations began, visitors were instructed to line up behind the metal detector and to place keys inside a plastic bin. No items are allowed past the metal detector. Pockets were emptied. Watches were hurried back to cars. Families then walked down the hall, on a linoleum floor, and lined up along a cold wall, waiting to be reunited with their loved ones.
On that day in late October, a group of around 30 people, including babies and children, was escorted into a small holding room with just a door separating them from their loved ones. A thin rectangular window became the focal point as families peered through it, searching for familiar faces.
As a GEO Group worker called the name of each detainee, visitors were let into a room filled with plastic chairs and tables. People who were detained poured out of a side room, all wearing navy blue jail-like uniforms. One detained man was rolled out in a wheelchair.
Hugs and handshakes are only permitted at the start and end of the visits. As people sit across from one another and reconnect for an hour, babies play on the floor.
‘We’re going to do things the right way’
Lesage and her husband knew what could happen when they went to his ICE check-in this summer.
“There was a lot of tension in the air … but you know, we both decided we’re going to do things the right way,” she said. “Whatever happens, we’ll deal with it from there forward.”
The family of five had arrived 30 minutes early to Jairo Palma’s 7 a.m. appointment and headed up the elevator to the 7th floor. Palma was handed a pink slip that said “B-18” and was told to go down to the basement.
There, she said, ICE officers took her husband behind a door. After anxiously pacing and waiting outside, she heard him scream her name.
“I had my three babies with me, which at the time, my twins were like three months old,” she said. “And my daughter, my oldest, saw him being in handcuffs and being taken away.”
Lesage said the arresting agent later found her outside, said he was “sorry”, and tried to hug her — a move she did not allow. “I said, ‘Can you tell me the reason why my husband is being detained?’ And all he said was ‘because of this new administration, he had to remain under their custody temporarily.’”
An ‘ugly situation’
Aaron, a 34-year-old detainee, told a reporter during the late October visit that for the past month, he and others in Adelanto’s west facility were not able to go outside, because someone attempted to escape.
He said he missed soccer, the one thing he said made him feel alive while there.
“When we were outside playing soccer, and sweating, running, (you) feel like you are free for a little time, you forget your bad situation,” he said.
Aaron, whose last name is being withheld because he fears retaliation from the federal government, said back in the summer, federal immigration agents found and detained him outside a restaurant he used to work at in Los Angeles. He had been in the U.S. for three years without legal status.
After Aaron spent 10 hours in a subterranean ICE processing center in downtown Los Angeles, he was transported in shackles with over a dozen other people to Adelanto in the middle of the night. “They treated us as if we were the worst criminals,” he said.
Aaron said he spends his days reading his bible, praying, and leading religious meetings in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, in between being shuffled around and woken up for counts by GEO Group workers to make sure no one has escaped.
He described his cell as a small room with a toilet, sink, and two sets of bunk beds. He said the thin mattresses are “very uncomfortable” and have caused him back pain, making his difficult time sleeping even worse. The lights never fully turn off in the cells.
“Sometimes you stay there and you can’t sleep. So you stay one, two, three, four hours just in your bed, thinking what is happening and thinking about this ugly situation,” he said.
Aaron has been tempted to self-deport, but doesn’t want to leave his young son, a U.S citizen, in the country without him.
Asked specific questions about detainees’ conditions inside Adelanto, a GEO Group spokesperson said only, “We are proud of the role our company has played for 40 years to support the law enforcement mission of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). … In all instances, our support services are monitored by ICE, including by on-site agency personnel, and other organizations within the Department of Homeland Security to ensure compliance with ICE’s detention standards and contract requirements regarding the treatment and services ICE detainees receive. In the event issues are identified, we quickly resolve all of ICE’s concerns as required by ICE’s Quality Assurance Surveillance Plan.”
ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions.
