More than 40 detainees inside the Adelanto ICE Processing Center started a hunger strike on Friday, May 15 to demand quicker medical attention and to protest meager food portions and mold in the showers, several detainees told the Southern California News Group.
As of Tuesday morning, an additional 20 people detained inside the Desert View Annex, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility next door, joined the hunger strike, activists said, to demand adequate medical and mental healthcare, nutritious food, bond reform, accountability for deaths in ICE custody, and to shut down the Adelanto ICE facilities. They’re also engaging in an economic boycott by not buying anything from commissary and not making phone calls, detainees said.
The Friday strike was prompted by a new report on California ICE detention centers released by the California attorney general’s office describing conditions as “cruel, inhumane, and unacceptable.”
“We are doing this because the conditions are horrible, it’s inhumane. To get medical help, it takes two weeks. You have to literally fall on the floor in order for this to happen,” said one detained man. His name is being withheld because he fears retaliation.
“The food I wouldn’t feed to my neighbor’s dog. …The facility is dirty. The treatment, the names we are called … no one should have to go through this,” he said.
Several people were threatened with solitary confinement for engaging in the hunger strike, several detained people said.
The Adelanto ICE facilities combined can hold up to around 2,500 people. The population at the facilities has surged since the Trump administration began an aggressive campaign to detain and deport undocumented immigrants.
Between 2021 and 2024, the two Adelanto immigration detention centers had a combined average of 259 people detained in them, according to ICE data.
In 2025, that jumped to 999, almost four times the average number of detainees during the presidency of Joe Biden.
At least five deaths in ICE custody have been connected with the Adelanto ICE facilities since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term, four of which are allegedly associated with substandard medical care, according to the newly released 2026 report on immigration detention in California by the state’s attorney general’s office.
In a response to questions and a request for comment, the Department of Homeland Security claimed that there is no hunger strike taking place inside the Adelanto ICE facilities.
“For the record: During hunger strikes, ICE continues to provide three meals a day, delivered to the detained alien’s room, and an adequate supply of drinking water or other beverages,” an unnamed DHS spokesperson said in the statement.
“All detainees are provided with 3 meals a day, clean water, clothing, bedding, showers, soap, and toiletries. Illegal aliens also have access to phones to communicate with their family members and lawyers. Certified dieticians evaluate meals. In fact, ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens.”
GEO Group, the for-profit prison company that owns and manages the Adelanto ICE facilities, referred all questions to ICE.
ICE did not respond to questions or a request for comment.
In January, a federal lawsuit was filed by two law firms and a Los Angeles nonprofit against federal authorities and agencies, alleging inhumane conditions inside the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, such as moldy towels, medical neglect, inadequate food and dirty water.
“I’ve worked with many detained individuals who have been forced to go on hunger strikes to protest their conditions. The response from GEO Group and ICE is nearly always to punish them,” said Sophia Wrench, an attorney with Public Counsel, a law firm involved in the lawsuit. “They lose ‘privileges’ like purchasing essential items from the commissary, lose access to communicating with family on the tablets, and sometimes are sent to solitary confinement. All for using what power they do have to try to get leadership to solve real ongoing problems that affect their lives.”
Last week, state Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office released their annual report on the state’s immigration detention centers, which detailed findings of inadequate medical care, unsanitary conditions and a lack of basic necessities.
“This is cruel, inhumane, and unacceptable — and it is past time for the Trump Administration to do something about it,” Bonta said.
Hunger strikes inside the Adelanto ICE facilities aren’t new, and neither are the reasons for the strikes.
Some of the earliest hunger strikes since the opening of the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in 2011 can be dated back to 2015, according to Luis Nolasco, a senior policy advocate and organizer with the ACLU of SoCal, who’s been looking into conditions inside the Adelanto ICE facilities since 2013. He said there have been five hunger strikes in the last six years.
“Food, medical access, treatment inside, lack of attorney access. These have just been prevalent issues since the beginning of the facility,” Nolasco said. “They’re built off of human suffering and as much as you try to fix it and put in the safeguards, the same problems continue to happen over and over.”
The most concerning method of retaliation against hunger strikers, said Nolasco, is being transferred to different facilities across the country.
“In Desert View and Adelanto, we’ve had documented stories of folks that were leading or coordinating hunger strikes that got transferred to, for example, the Northwestern detention center up in Seattle and some folks that got transferred over to Eloy [in Arizona] and some some other folks that got transferred to Louisiana. Again, as a result of their organizing hunger strikes.”
Retaliation remains a risk for those currently engaged in the ongoing hunger strike, said Esmeralda Santos, a lead organizer with the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice.
“Folks are very scared to hunger strike, but they’re at a moment now where they feel like they have no other choice but to hunger strike because they’re not getting any of their needs met,” she said.
As a result of one hunger strike several years ago, Nolasco recalls detainees getting new workout equipment.
As the population has grown at Adelanto’s facilities during the Trump administration’s expanded immigration efforts, so have 911 calls from the facility.
The number of calls to 911 to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department went up six times in 2025. That’s 150% faster compared than the rise in population.
Staff writer Beau Yarbrough contributed to this report.
