ICE is running a private prison that bans detained immigrants from hugging their families.
Teresa Reyes drove three hundred miles from her home to sit across a pane of glass from her son Guillermo on his thirty-second birthday in May. He is a tattoo artist from San Jose. She brought no gift — there was no way to give one. She could not share a meal with him. She could not embrace him. She could not, in the end, even touch him. The only way his mother can see him is through a thick pane of glass. They speak into phones.
The detention center at California City, in the desert north of Los Angeles, is the largest ICE facility in California. It holds roughly sixteen hundred people. It is run by CoreCivic, the private prison company. It opened in August 2025 under the Trump administration, and from the day it opened it has denied every person held inside the right to a contact visit. A court-appointed federal monitor found, in July, that the facility had failed every court-ordered health standard. The picnic tables in the visitation room you can see in the California Department of Justice’s own photographs are left over from the years when the building was a state prison and families used to sit together at them. Today they sit empty. The detained are steered to a row of windows at the edge of the room and told to speak into phones. Visits take place at twenty-one cents a minute. Group conversations are not possible because only one person can speak through the phone at a time.
One of the people held inside is Allen Tayson, a thirty-seven-year-old repair-shop worker from Gilroy and the father of two. Tayson came to this country from the Philippines as a child. He has a wife who is a United States citizen, a fourteen-year-old son, a five-year-old daughter, and a baby on the way. His wife is seven months pregnant, and he has missed nearly her entire pregnancy. He was detained in February at his green card interview with United States Citizenship and Immigration Services — the application that would have made his life here fully legal. He came out in chains. He is one of a growing number of people taken into custody at the very appointment where they were trying to regularize their status; a seventy-six-year-old permanent resident with stage 4 cancer was seized at his citizenship interview just days ago. Tayson has not held his family since February. He has not touched his wife’s belly to feel the baby kick. His daughter asks every day when her father is coming home. She has begun praying alone in her room at night. “She says, ‘I’m just talking to God, so he can help dad.’”
In a video call from inside the facility, his face going in and out of focus behind the ICE messaging app’s blur, Tayson said: “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.”
This is not an accident. It is the mechanism.
The people inside have organized. They wrote letters dorm by dorm. Gustavo Guevara, detained at California City since the facility opened and deported to Mexico in June, helped organize a letter within his dorm in April demanding regular contact visits; the idea spread. Residents who had been held at other facilities where contact visits were allowed wrote their own demands, bewildered and angry to have lost that access. Some recorded their demands on video. The coalition supporting them — the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice and the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity — released the recordings under the name the residents’ advocates built around them: Hugs Beyond Bars. Last month Tayson’s wife joined other family members for a visit to Senator Alex Padilla’s office in San Francisco, urging Congress to pressure CoreCivic. “I wanted my kids to see that mom can have a voice,” she said, “that I’m doing this for dad and other families.” They have done this while their cases drag on for months, in some cases years, in a system that has no obligation to release them on bond and no calendar that promises them a hearing.
When Tayson’s wife, who is trying to manage a high-risk pregnancy and the care of two children on her own, asked facility officers if they could make a single exception and let her briefly hold him, the officers said no. She has not made the three-hundred-mile drive back since.
You don’t have to take my word for the mechanism. Take the warden’s. When the Reverend Deborah Lee of the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity asked Warden Christopher Chestnut, in July, why no one inside the facility could have a regular visit, he told her that facilities with contact visits had higher overdose rates. He did not provide further explanation. He offered no evidence. He offered no source. There is no study that supports the claim. The state’s audit found the prohibition appears to violate CoreCivic’s own written policy, which the company provided to the state, stipulating that physical contact should be available and only restricted for individual “security risks.” The space for what the company claims it cannot accommodate is right there in the photograph. A private company’s own written rule says you must allow contact visits. The company has chosen to ignore its own rule. So when CoreCivic’s spokesperson, Ryan Gustin, writes that “facility leadership, in conjunction with our government partners, has determined that non-contact visitation is the most appropriate approach given security considerations,” the question worth asking is the one Michelle Brané, the former Department of Homeland Security immigration detention ombudsman, asked. Brané, who ran the office the government created specifically to monitor these places, noted that before 2016 it was common for ICE facilities to offer contact visits. “When you have as much money as this administration, there’s no excuse for inhumane conditions.” The federal government has allocated record funds for detention. The reason contact visits are banned is not a lack of resources. The reason is the policy itself.
The glass is not a security measure. It is the policy’s own confession.
In the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, in the discourse Jesus gives about the final judgment, the Son of Man separates the nations as a shepherd separates sheep from goats. The criterion is not doctrine. The criterion is what was done to the body. I was hungry and you fed me; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you welcomed me; I was in prison and you visited me. “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says, “just as you did it to one of these the least of mine, you did it to me.” The Torah gave the commandment that recurs in it more than any other — thirty-six times by one count: when a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress him; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. The text does not ask whether the stranger had a green card interview. The text does not ask whether he had been convicted of anything. The text asks whether you touched him when he was hungry and in prison. If you did not, the answer is the answer.
When I read what is happening at California City, I think of Archbishop Óscar Romero of San Salvador. He was a cautious man, theologically conservative, not given to political speech. Then he watched the soldiers of his own government shoot his own people, and on the Sunday before he was murdered he stood in his cathedral and said: “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose laments rise to heaven each day more tumultuous, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression.” Three verbs, escalating. He did not soften the word to make it palatable. He named the work — represión, repression — and he ordered the powerful to stop it, and the next day they killed him for the order. The order stood.
The order stands here, too. Cese la prohibición. Cese la crueldad de decir que es por seguridad cuando las mesas del salón de visitas están vacías y nadie las usa. Stop the prohibition. Stop the cruelty of claiming security when the picnic tables in the visitation room sit empty and unused. The space is right there. The choice is yours.
I want to name, before I name anyone else, what our own communities have helped build. This system did not begin with this administration. California City is one of four of the ten largest ICE facilities in the country that entirely prohibit contact visits — including the one at Stewart, Georgia, and the ones at Pearsall and Conroe in Texas. Some of them were built or expanded under the previous administration. The contractors that run them have bankrolled members of both parties. Some of the voters who demanded a “tough on immigration” candidate in 2016 are now horrified by what toughness looks like at a visitation window. The Catholic tradition I have lived inside has its own history of operating detention, of treating the stranger as a problem to be solved rather than a person to be welcomed. The conditions at California City did not invent themselves. They were made by voters and politicians who wear crosses and read the same gospels I read and have decided, when the gospel spoke of the stranger, that the stranger is someone else. I have to say this plainly, because the prophetic register requires it: we who claim the gospel and live in this country have not yet figured out how to hold both the Sermon on the Mount and the laws we have written. The confusion is not on the side of the gospel. It is on the side of the laws.
There is another way, and it is not a mystery. Pope Francis named it at Lampedusa in 2013, when he looked out at the Mediterranean and said: “In this globalized world, we have fallen into globalized indifference. We have become used to the suffering of others: it doesn’t affect me; it doesn’t concern me; it’s none of my business!” Pope Leo XIV, our current pope, an American from Chicago, has argued this year that someone who claims to be against abortion but agrees with the inhuman treatment of immigrants is not, in any consistent sense, pro-life; he has said that to treat people who have lived in this country for ten, fifteen, twenty years in a way that is “extremely disrespectful, to say the least,” is not acceptable. The Catholic bishops of the United States and Mexico said it together in 2003, in Strangers No Longer, naming five principles that begin with the right of every person to find opportunity in their homeland and end with the human dignity of the undocumented migrant. None of these principles are exotic. None require a theology degree. They require that we treat the people inside California City as people.
What a humane immigration policy would look like, then, is not a mystery either. It would look like contact visits restored at California City, and at Stewart, and at Pearsall, and at Conroe. It would look like the right to bond hearings within seventy-two hours, as a matter of course, not as a matter of luck. It would look like the abolition of for-profit detention, because there is no version of a humane immigration system that depends on a company’s quarterly earnings report. It would look like what Allen Tayson asked for in his letter from inside the facility: a brief getaway, a moment in his wife’s arms, that would take him away from the setting he is in. That is what is being denied. It is not complicated.
To Warden Chestnut, and to the officials at CoreCivic and at ICE who set the policy: the door of return is not closed. The order Romero gave was yours the day you took the job. You did not write it, but it is yours. To the men and women who work in that building — the officers who walk families to the phone booths, the nurses, the cooks, the chaplains — the indictment is of the institution that set the policy and the company that left the picnic tables empty. Some of you are parents yourselves. The system that puts glass between a father and his pregnant wife uses you, too. You are not the cruelty. You are the people who see it every day. Many of you pray. I am asking you to pray and then to act. There are ways, inside any institution, that the people who keep it running can also be the people who change it. To the senators and representatives who took an oath to provide for the common defense and the general welfare — and that language came from people who believed the general welfare included the welfare of the immigrant, not just the welfare of the native-born — you have the power to subpoena CoreCivic’s contract with ICE, you have the power to hold a hearing on detention standards, you have the power to demand that the money your constituents sent to Washington not be used to ban a hug. You have not done these things. The reason you have not done these things is the reason the cruelty continues. Your silence is the mechanism.
To the sixteen hundred people inside, and to the families driving three hundred miles and the three hundred more home: you are not invisible. The letters you wrote, the videos you recorded, the prayers your five-year-old daughters pray in their bedrooms at night — they have reached further than the institution that holds you wants you to know. The campaign you built is named for the thing you are asking for, and the thing you are asking for is not a privilege. It is the body’s most ancient claim on the people who love it.
Teresa Reyes drove three hundred miles to be with her son on his birthday. She could not give him a gift. She could not share a meal with him. She could not embrace him. She drove three hundred miles home. She has said she will not drive those three hundred miles again until she can hold him.