Dear Neighbor,
Last week, I visited the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in Southern California, a private immigration detention center operated by GEO Group, a corporation worth billions of dollars.
Four people have died at Adelanto in the last year. Inspectors have also raised concerns about unsafe drinking water, inadequate medical care, and dangerous conditions inside the facility.
During my visit, I met with a woman detained there who came to this country seeking asylum.
She did everything she was supposed to do. She sought asylum at the border. She was allowed to enter the country while her case moved forward. She showed up for every court hearing.
Then ICE agents detained her at one of those hearings and separated her from her four-year-old child.
She told me there were worms in the food she was served. She was deprived of basic hygiene items. All around her, detainees were getting sick and denied any medical care.
Her story is horrifying. But it is not unique.
Across California, people are being separated from their families and held in privately operated ICE detention centers while the corporations running them make hundreds of millions of dollars from federal detention contracts.
That's why I introduced AB 1633.
The bill would impose a major new tax on the gross income of corporations operating private immigration detention centers in California and direct the revenue toward services that support immigrant communities.
Companies should not be able to make enormous profits from a system where people are being held in dangerous and inhumane conditions.
California has fought to end private immigration detention. But as long as the federal government continues paying corporations to detain people here, we need to hold those corporations accountable.
AB 1633 has now passed the Legislature and is on Governor Newsom's desk.
What I heard inside Adelanto made the stakes of this fight even clearer. California should be doing everything in our power to protect immigrant families and push back against a system that has turned their detention into a multibillion-dollar business.
Sincerely,
Matt Haney
Assemblymember, 17th District
