Californians deserve far more insight than they currently have into what is happening inside the privately run immigration detention centers operating across the state — facilities where reports of neglect, violence and death have become alarmingly routine.
Over the past year, the population held in these for-profit facilities has more than doubled. Since September, six people have died at two Southern California sites alone: the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County and the Imperial Regional Detention Facility near the Mexican border. Detainees have resorted to hunger strikes, sit-ins, and even scrawling notes on paper and tossing them over barbed-wire fences just to get word out about the conditions inside.
Given how many lives are affected, the public has every right to know what is going on behind those walls. Yet these detention centers remain remarkably opaque, and there is little indication that federal oversight will improve any time soon.
California, however, has the power to force more sunlight onto these facilities through a modest but meaningful change to its public records law — one that would require local law enforcement agencies to release 911 call logs and related records tied to immigration detention centers.
This isn’t a hypothetical fix. Earlier this year, CalMatters reported that the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department received multiple reports of alleged sexual assaults at the Otay Mesa detention facility in 2025. Rather than investigating those claims itself, the department operates under an agreement that leaves the decision on whether to investigate up to the facility’s own warden.
When journalists sought public records about those cases, the sheriff’s office denied the request, citing an exemption in the California Public Records Act that shields active investigative files — even though no investigation was actually taking place.
I encountered this same wall of silence years ago. In 2017, while reporting for the Los Angeles Times, I began examining a series of deaths and suicide attempts inside the Adelanto facility. The people I interviewed described dangerously overcrowded, mentally taxing conditions that sound eerily similar to what detainees are describing today.
One man recalled discovering a fellow detainee who had tried to hang himself with a bedsheet from a second-floor railing. What struck me most wasn’t his shock — it was his lack of surprise.
“I think doing something like that is something that has crossed the mind of all of us who are locked up here,” he told me.
A colleague and I spent months trying to obtain official documentation about complaints from detention centers throughout California. When federal officials stalled or refused our records requests, we turned to local police departments and asked for 911 call logs tied to the facilities. Those logs documented hundreds of calls reporting violence or abuse.
But the call logs alone told us little. Most contained scant detail about what had actually happened or how — or whether — authorities had responded, because local agencies withheld the more substantive records. It took nearly two years of persistent requests before we were able to piece together a clearer picture of what detainees were experiencing.
The public shouldn’t have to fight this hard to understand what is happening in a system that affects thousands of people living, working and awaiting hearings in our state.
Reporting from other states shows exactly why this kind of transparency matters. In Arizona, journalists obtained a 911 recording revealing that officers had pepper-sprayed 47 detainees inside an overcrowded holding room at an ICE facility. In Florida, reporters used 911 calls from staff and detainees’ families to document chaos and fear at the “Alligator Alcatraz” detention site. And at a family detention center in South Texas, 911 records exposed medical emergencies involving young children and pregnant women.
A California law mandating disclosure of 911 calls and related records from privately operated detention centers could bring the same kind of accountability here.
Fortunately, state Sen. Lena Gonzalez, a Long Beach Democrat, has introduced Senate Bill 423 to do exactly that. The measure includes protections to preserve legitimate investigative confidentiality and safeguard victims’ privacy, while making clear that the public’s right to know cannot be left to the discretion of individual agencies.
The First Amendment Coalition, where I train journalists on navigating public records law, is co-sponsoring the bill alongside Immigrant Defense Advocates, a policy and advocacy organization focused on immigrant rights.
For state lawmakers, this should be a straightforward decision. No one should have to scrawl a plea on a scrap of paper and throw it over a fence just so the outside world understands what is happening to them inside a California detention facility.
Original source: CalMatters
