California DOJ audit found the ban may violate CoreCivic’s own policy
The California City immigration detention center, California’s largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, has prohibited all contact visits since the Trump administration opened the site one year ago, The Guardian reported Friday. Roughly 1,600 people are held at the remote desert facility north of Los Angeles, which is operated by private prison firm CoreCivic, and families who travel there cannot sit with or embrace their relatives — all visits occur through thick glass partitions and phones.
Detained residents have organized to demand the policy be reversed. A California Department of Justice audit found the ban appears to violate a CoreCivic policy the company provided to the state, which stipulated there should be opportunities for physical contact and visits should only be restricted for “security risks.” The prohibition is part of a broader pattern: four of the ten largest ICE detention centers in the U.S. entirely bar contact visits, according to ICE’s websites.
Teresa Reyes drove 300 miles from her home in May to be with her son Guillermo on his 32nd birthday at the facility. She could not give him a gift, share a meal or hug him. “I want to hold my son, I want to touch him, I want to assure him everything is going to be OK, but I can’t,” Reyes, 63, said in Spanish. “When I see him, I have to hold back tears. I have to pretend to be strong, because I don’t want him to think I am suffering.”
Her son, a tattoo artist from San Jose, is among the roughly 1,600 people detained at the facility. The total denial of contact visits is an extreme restriction for any detention site where people are held long-term, particularly a facility holding people accused of immigration violations rather than criminal offenses, The Guardian reported. Prisons housing people convicted of serious offenses typically operate visitation rooms where families can sit at tables, only temporarily barring contact visits when safety concerns arise.
Allen Tayson, 37, a repair shop worker from Gilroy, has been detained since February, when he was taken into ICE custody at his green card interview at a United States Citizenship and Immigration Services office. Tayson came to the U.S. from the Philippines as a child and is married to Samantha Sanchez, a U.S. citizen. They have a 14-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter, and Sanchez is seven months pregnant.
“We feel isolated in here,” Tayson said, speaking by video call from inside the facility. “Everything is meant to break you down and discourage you and make you give up hope. If I was able to hug and hold my wife and kids, it would be like a brief getaway that would take me away from this setting. I’d cherish every second.”
The family speaks by video call, which costs 21 cents per minute or $6.30 for a half-hour, according to The Guardian. Sanchez, who is managing a high-risk pregnancy, said the lack of physical contact has affected her mental health. “I have this baby growing inside me, and he hasn’t even touched my belly,” she said. Their 5-year-old daughter asks daily when her father is coming home and often prays alone. “She says, ‘I’m just talking to God, so he can help dad,’” Sanchez said.
Tayson said he and his wife decided early on that she would not travel 300 miles to visit if they could not have physical contact. The couple knew first-hand how painful the glass-partition experience could be: when their son was around three, Tayson had a stint in a jail on firearm felony charges that were later dismissed, and that facility only allowed visits behind glass. At the end of one visit, the boy reached out to hug his father and collided with the glass, Tayson said. He said he is haunted by his son’s look of disbelief and vowed it would never happen again.
The full denial of contact visits is unusual but not unique. Of the ten ICE detention centers with the largest populations, four entirely bar contact visits: California City, the Stewart detention center in Georgia, the South Texas processing center in Pearsall and the Montgomery processing center in Conroe, Texas, according to ICE’s websites.
Michelle Brané, a former immigration detention ombudsman for the Department of Homeland Security, said contact visits were common in ICE facilities before 2016. The shift to glass-only visits began during Trump’s first term and has persisted since. Brané, now executive director of the advocacy group Together and Free, said detention officials have often claimed there wasn’t enough space to accommodate contact visits. “When you have as much money as this administration, there’s no excuse for inhumane conditions,” she said.
After auditing California City in the spring, the California Department of Justice said the prohibition on contact visits appeared to violate CoreCivic’s own policy. A photograph of the visitation area published by the state DOJ showed picnic tables and open space — remnants of the facility’s prior use as a state prison, when families could sit with detainees. ICE detainees are no longer allowed to enter that part of the room; instead, they speak through phones on the other side of a row of windows.
The Rev. Deborah Lee, executive director of the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, said some visitors have struggled to hear through the phones, which allow only one party to speak at a time. “It’s just a denial of people’s humanity,” Lee said.
During a July visit, Lee’s group encountered California City warden Christopher Chestnut, according to The Guardian. When she asked him why no one could have a regular visit, he told her facilities with contact visits had higher overdose rates, without providing further explanation, Lee said.
ICE did not respond to requests for comment, The Guardian reported. Ryan Gustin, a CoreCivic spokesperson, defended the facility’s policies in an email: “Facility leadership, in conjunction with our government partners, has determined that non-contact visitation is the most appropriate approach given security considerations. As with correctional and detention facilities across the country, preventing the introduction of contraband is a significant safety and security concern.”
Gustin added that CoreCivic “recognizes the importance of maintaining family and community connections for individuals in our care” and that under “applicable detention standards,” individual facilities have authority to set visitation policies based on “factors including facility design, operational requirements, staffing considerations and security protocols.” ICE and CoreCivic did not respond to interview requests for the warden.
In response to the policy, detained residents began organizing. In April, Gustavo Guevara, who had been detained at the facility since it opened in August 2025, helped organize a letter within his dorm demanding regular visits. The effort spread to other dorms, with residents writing their own letters. Some had come from other ICE facilities where contact visits were allowed and were bewildered and angry to lose that access, Guevara said.
“Not only are you immediately deprived of that human interaction, but what is hanging over your head is the possibility of being sent to another country, not knowing if you’ll ever hold your loved ones again,” Guevara said.
Guevara and others worked with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice (CCIJ), an Oakland-based nonprofit that advocates for detained people, and a coalition of activists delivered the letters to the warden and helped launch the “Hugs Beyond Bars” campaign. Some residents had advocates film them on video calls pleading for contact visits, which were published on social media. Tayson recorded himself reading his own demand letter, which the coalition released on Instagram.
“Across all the dorms, people could unite behind this,” said Val Suarez, CCIJ community and legal organizer. “They saw this big family room that used to be a visitation room which proves there really is no reason for them to not have access to this.”
For Guevara, the issue was personal: a close friend had visited him regularly behind glass until June, when the friend was deported to Mexico. Guevara said he never got to hug him and doesn’t know if he’ll see him again, but he will continue advocating for contact visits for those he left behind.
Last month, Sanchez joined CCIJ for a visit to U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla’s office in San Francisco, urging Congress to pressure CoreCivic to provide visitation. “I wanted my kids to see that mom can have a voice – that I’m doing this for dad and other families,” Sanchez said. The senator’s office seemed sympathetic to their pleas, advocates said, but so far CoreCivic and the California City warden have not responded to their demands.
During Teresa Reyes’s May visit, she noticed vending machines for visitors and hoped to buy a snack for her son, but learned that was not possible. When advocates accompanying her asked if staff could make an exception and give her one brief hug, the officers said no, she recalled.
Reyes said she has not been back to California City since May and will only return if she can hug her son.