U.S. Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff on Tuesday decried the inadequacy of medical care within the state’s newest and largest immigration detention center.
The two California Democrats spent hours conducting an oversight visit of the California City Detention Facility amid growing concerns over conditions inside and the Trump administration’s desire to increase the number of immigrants detained nationwide.
The two senators said they spoke to about 30 detainees of the 200 men and women who signed up to speak with them. Schiff said there are about 1,400 inmates in the facility.
“I’m leaving here even more concerned than I was when I arrived,” Padilla said as the detention facility, surrounded by barbed wire, loomed behind him. “The population here is only going to grow.”
Schiff said detainees complained to him and Padilla that the drinking water smells bad and sometimes has mold in it. “We heard from detainees who said there was mold in their food,” he said. “Many described getting stomachaches from drinking the water here.”
The two senators hope to bring more attention to the Mojave Desert facility as the number of immigrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement swells and Congress considers increasing funding to boost detention beds across the country.
After the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis this month, some Democrats in the House and Senate threatened to block the funding if the budget failed to include new guardrails against the Department of Homeland Security.
On Tuesday, congressional leaders released a bipartisan spending bill that would keep ICE funded at $10 billion for the rest of the fiscal year, which ends in September, but would reduce the agency’s budget for enforcement and removal efforts. The amount is in addition to the $75 billion that was allocated for the agency through the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, signed into law in July.
“What we have seen from Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security is frankly sick and un-American,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), vice chair of the U.S. Senate Committee for Appropriations, said in a statement Tuesday. “ICE is out-of-control, terrorizing people, including American citizens, and actively making our communities less safe.
“In this bill, Democrats defeated Republicans’ hard-fought push to give ICE an even bigger annual budget, successfully cut ICE’s detention budget and capacity, cut [Customs and Border Protection’s] budget by over $1 billion, and secured important, although still insufficient, new constraints on DHS.”
Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Appropriations, said the bill would continue to strengthen border security.
“We advance the America First promise of empowering our frontline agents to uphold our laws, deport criminal aliens, confront bad actors, and protect our country,” he wrote in a statement Monday. “From our borders and ports to aviation and cyber, we deliver the personnel, training, and technology to reinforce our security at every level.”
The California City facility became the focal point of legal and humanitarian controversy when it opened in August — part of a push by the Trump administration to expand detention capacity nationwide.
In November, just three months after it began operating, seven detainees filed a federal class-action lawsuit against Homeland Security and ICE, alleging medical neglect, unsanitary living conditions and abusive treatment by the staff.
The population of detained immigrants nationwide surpassed a high of 65,000 in November, according to TRAC, a nonpartisan research organization.
“Sewage bubbles up from the shower drains, and insects crawl up and down the walls of the cells,” the federal lawsuit alleged. “People are locked in concrete cells the size of a parking space for hours on end, and officers threaten them with violence and solitary confinement. Food is paltry and people go hungry.
“Temperatures are frigid; those who cannot afford to buy sweatshirts from the exorbitantly priced commissary suffer in the cold, some wearing socks on their arms as makeshift sleeves.”
The lawsuit, filed by Prison Law Office, the American Civil Liberties Union, California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice and other advocacy groups, alleged that the facility limited access to lawyers, leaving detainees “largely incommunicado.”
In December, attorneys filed an emergency motion asking a federal judge to order ICE to provide lifesaving medical care to two plaintiffs at the facility. One man with a serious heart condition had not seen a cardiologist, and the other needed needed urgent care related to what he feared was prostate cancer. ICE later agreed to provide medical care to the men.
Brian Todd, spokesman for CoreCivic, which operates the facility, said in a statement that the safety, health and well-being of the individuals entrusted in the company’s care is top priority.
“We take seriously our responsibility to adhere to all applicable federal detention standards in our ICE-contracted facilities,” he wrote. “Our immigration facilities are monitored very closely by our government partners at ICE, and they are required to undergo regular review and audit processes to ensure an appropriate standard of living and care for all detainees.”
In an email response to the Times, Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, said the department has made more than 12,000 arrest — up from 10,000 in December — in Los Angeles since the stepped-up immigration enforcement operations began in June.
“Some of the most heinous criminal illegal aliens arrested include murderers, kidnappers, sexual predators, and armed carjackers,” she wrote. “Thanks to our brave law enforcement, California is safer with these thugs off their streets.”
In November, the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, reported that ICE has been primarily detaining people with no criminal history or pending charges. The institute found that, between Oct. 1 and Nov. 15, 73% of the 61,800 people booked into detention had no criminal convictions or pending criminal charges. Only 5% had convictions for violent crimes.
Schiff said as far as he could tell, the vast majority of people inside the California City facility “have no prior criminal history.” He said the many they spoke with were picked up at immigration appointments.
“They were doing what they were supposed to do,” Schiff said.
Last month, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security citing “the dangerous and inadequate living conditions” at the facility.
“Earlier this year Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) opened this new facility in California, the largest in the state, without ensuring that the facility was adequately prepared to receive civil immigration detainees,” the letter stated.
The California Department of Justice conducted an initial inspection of the facility in November and “discovered serious problems with conditions at the facility and a lack of adequate medical care,” Bonta’s office said.
“Everyone has a right to dignity, safety, and respect. Earlier this year, we reported on unsafe and inadequate conditions at immigration detention facilities across California.”
According to Bonta’s office, key staff positions remained unfilled at the time of the visit, and the facility “does not have enough medical doctors for its detainee population size.” The letter also noted that staff responsible for the day-to-day supervision of detainees “appear to be inexperienced and lack basic understanding of civil detention management principles.”
Bonta’s office said that “due to the significant number of staffing vacancies, [the California City Detention Facility] reports being unable to provide contact visitation to any detainees, regardless of security classification level, which is a significant deprivation of support during a period of confinement, especially at a time when detainees are facing removal.”
For the record:
7:40 p.m. Jan. 20, 2026An earlier version of this article referred to the California City Detention Facility, or CCDF, as Child Care and Development Fund.
More than a dozen people died last year in ICE custody, including Ismael Ayala-Uribe, 39, who died a month after being apprehended on the job at Fountain Valley Auto Wash, where he had worked for 15 years.
This month, Luis Beltrán Yanez-Cruz, a Honduran man who lived and worked in the U.S. for 26 years, died after being held at the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico, Calif., for more than a month. His family said he complained of deteriorating health conditions before his death.
Padilla said the senators’ visit to the California City facility was prompted by hearing “from constituents, from families of folks who have been detained about concerns of the conditions in a lot of these facilities.”
“When you walk inside these walls, you experience a different trauma,” Schiff said. “You get to see what happens to folks who are apprehended by ICE.”
He said that they talked to wives separated from husbands and their kids and that the most frequent feedback they got “was the inadequacy of the medical care they were receiving.”
He said he talked to a diabetic woman who had been there two months but had not received treatment for her diabetes.
“That is very frightening,” he said.
