Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by Cal Soto from La Talacha on April 8th, 2026.
My name is Cal Soto. I’m an attorney.
I’ve represented day laborers locked up in this prison.
I’ve sat with them and listened.
They told me about rashes spreading across their skin. About scalding or freezing showers, in water reeking of some unknown chemical. About an entire wing without a working toilet for more than 16 hours. About men taken away in the middle of the night without warning or explanation—just gone.
I’ve met people with their arms scraped raw from being thrown onto asphalt by masked, armed agents. They winced in pain while talking to me, from inside a cage.
One young person watched an older man who couldn’t stop coughing. He coughed until he collapsed. He lay there 30 minutes before any staff arrived. Fifteen minutes after that, an ambulance came. Weeks later, no one knows what happened.
One man told me he had been brought here with his cousin. They were arrested together and separated on intake. He learned from the news that his cousin, detained in a different building, was dead.
Thirteen people have died here since 2011. Three in the last five months alone.
Ismael Ayala Uribe died of a heart attack after an untreated abscess. He was a Dreamer, a former DACA recipient. Alberto Gutierrez Reyes spent more than a week pleading for help before he was transferred from his cell to a hospital, where he died.
Since the Trump Administration returned to power last year, 58 people across the country have died at the hands of DHS enforcement.
At the end of 2024, this prison held three people. Community uproar and a federal court order froze new intakes. Three people.
Then the court lifted the freeze. ICE reactivated a 15-year contract with the private prison corporation GEO Group. By June 2025—six months later—there were 1,200 people inside. Today, the facility is over capacity. Close to 2,000 people are held here.
From three to thousands in a matter of months—not because of necessity, but because of a contract, because of a political choice, because of profit.
We cannot reform this. We cannot simply build a nicer prison. The people who are dying inside aren’t dying just because of neglect. It’s organized abandonment: a system designed to produce premature death for certain populations, and it’s called management.
The truth is that, to the federal government, to GEO Group, and to private prison companies, Adelanto isn’t a failure. It’s working exactly as they designed it.
And it’s not just the conditions. Every day, immigration judges hold court in nearly empty courtrooms. They deny bond to people who ran from masked, armed agents, calling them a flight risk. They cite decade-old infractions to justify that someone is “dangerous” to the community.
In one courtroom, interpretation is only provided for the swearing-in. Everything else—the arguments, rulings, and decisions determining freedom or continued detention—happens in a language the person cannot understand. Their attorney has to explain afterward what happened. These are not courts; they are pressure chambers.
Look at this landscape. The Mojave is alive—it holds water, history, life. Inside these walls, people are given “outdoor” recreation in concrete yards, surrounded by walls so high they cannot see the mountains. The desert is right there. They cannot see it.
We have seen this place reduced to three people. We can do it again. And this time, we will not stop there. Make it politically impossible to fund private prisons. Make it financially impossible to profit from their stock. Make this prison—this horrific scar on the desert landscape—erased.
Shut it down.
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