A court appointed monitor has found that California’s largest immigration detention facility failed to provide adequate medical care to detainees and violated an earlier court order mandating basic healthcare standards.
The finding marks the first time a neutral court appointed party has investigated the full scope of medical care delivery at an ICE detention center.
Dr. Muthusamy Anandkumar, the monitor appointed by a federal judge earlier this year, conducted a three day site inspection, interviewed more than a dozen staff members and 40 patients, and reviewed 141 patient medical records along with thousands of pages of documents.
He concluded that the facility lacked a reliable system for consistently providing adequate healthcare, placing detainees at serious risk of immediate and long-term harm.
The California City detention facility, a former prison in the Mojave Desert operated by private prison company CoreCivic, was found out of compliance with all eight components of a functional healthcare system that the court had ordered ICE to implement.
Those components include adequate healthcare staffing, timely and responsive emergency services, and timely access to prescribed medications.
The findings come amid a broader crisis in immigration detention under the Trump administration, with deaths in ICE custody reaching their highest level in more than two decades.
Report Adds to Concerns Over California City Detention
The monitor’s report adds to a mounting body of evidence documenting dangerous conditions at California City since it reopened as an immigration detention facility in late 2025.
Disability Rights California conducted a monitoring visit in September 2025, just four weeks after the facility began confining people, and found that ICE and CoreCivic were already subjecting people with disabilities to abuse and neglect.
The findings included extreme delays in critical surgeries, inadequate medication management, and poor mental health crisis management.
One detainee reportedly went weeks without a scheduled surgery intended to prevent blood clots after being abruptly transferred to California City.
Another reportedly went seven days without diabetes medication and said they felt physically unstable.
A separate investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle, which analyzed records for 48 deaths in ICE custody between Trump’s inauguration and April 2026, found that at least 17 people died after medical staff delayed or failed to provide critical care that might have saved their lives.
Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch documented 52 deaths in ICE custody during the first 500 days of Trump’s second term.
The organizations reported that the mortality rate was more than twice that of Trump’s first administration and nearly four times that of the Biden administration.
The causes have varied but include at least one homicide, multiple suicides, and numerous deaths from treatable conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, and kidney disease.
ICE and CoreCivic Defend Detention Standards
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, pushed back against the monitor’s findings.
The department stated that no ICE detainees are denied access to medical care and that ICE is regularly audited and inspected by external agencies to ensure that facilities comply with performance based national detention standards.
CoreCivic, the for profit company operating California City, said it was reviewing the report and that the health, safety and well being of people in its care remained its highest priority.
The company also noted that an on site ICE officer was responsible for monitoring compliance with detention standards.
However, those assurances stand in contrast to the experiences documented by advocates and the court appointed monitor.
ICE has been central to President Trump’s immigration crackdown, which has pushed detention numbers to record highs, exceeding 71,000 people in January 2026.
At the same time, the administration has dismantled some oversight mechanisms, stopped paying third party medical providers, and restricted congressional access to facilities.
With approximately 50 deaths in ICE custody since Trump took office in January 2025, the California City monitor’s findings raise urgent questions about whether the administration’s expansion of detention can be reconciled with its constitutional obligation to protect the lives of people in its custody.
