You have banned hugging for a year, Christopher.
The girl is five. She prays alone for her father to come home.
The mother drove three hundred miles to her son’s birthday. She could not touch him.
The wife is seven months pregnant. Her husband has not felt her belly.
The visitation room has picnic tables. You have roped them off.
The glass is where you keep the children from their fathers.
The California City immigration detention center sits in a desert region north of Los Angeles. It opened in August 2025, run by the private prison firm CoreCivic under contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It holds roughly 1,600 people — the largest ICE facility in California, and one of the largest in the country. Since the day it opened, every person inside has been denied contact visits. No exceptions for birthdays. No exceptions for a pregnant wife. No exceptions for a five-year-old daughter.
Of the ten largest ICE detention centers in the country, four prohibit contact visits entirely: California City, the Stewart detention center in Georgia, the South Texas processing center in Pearsall, and the Montgomery processing center in Conroe, Texas.
Families travel up to three hundred miles to the remote site, only to find their relatives seated on one side of a thick pane of glass, speaking through telephones. One person can speak through the phone at a time. The other side waits. The cost of seeing your own family is twenty-one cents a minute. Six dollars and thirty cents buys a half-hour video call.
The California Department of Justice audited the facility this spring and photographed the visitation room. It contains picnic tables — the same tables in use when the facility was a state prison, when families sat at them, when fathers held their children on their laps. Those tables are now roped off. ICE detainees are not allowed to enter that part of the room. A row of windows at the edge is what they get.
The state audit found that the prohibition appeared to violate CoreCivic’s own corporate policy — the policy the company itself provided to the state. That policy stipulated that physical contact during visits should only be restricted for individuals classified as “security risks.” No such classification appears to apply to the general population of California City.
Michelle Brané, who served as immigration detention ombudsman for the Department of Homeland Security, said contact visits were standard practice in ICE facilities prior to 2016. They were normal. They were humane. Beginning in Trump’s first term, more detention centers shifted to glass-only visits, Brané said, and the change has persisted since.
CoreCivic spokesperson Ryan Gustin defended the policy in writing: “Facility leadership, in conjunction with our government partners, has determined that non-contact visitation is the most appropriate approach given security considerations.” He cited the prevention of contraband as the primary concern.
Warden Christopher Chestnut told Rev. Deborah Lee of the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, when she visited in July and asked why no one inside could have a regular visit, that facilities with contact visits had higher overdose rates. He told a minister this. He told her without a document, without a study, without a number. He said it to a woman who had driven to your facility to ask you to let mothers hold their children. As if the cure for addiction were to deny a five-year-old a hug with her father. As if a pregnant wife should be separated from her husband because somewhere, in another facility, somebody overdosed.
Christopher, listen. I have seen what you have done. I name it.
Allen Tayson is thirty-seven years old. He came to the United States from the Philippines when he was a child. He has lived in this country longer than he has lived anywhere else. He married Samantha Sanchez in 2016. They have a fourteen-year-old son and a five-year-old daughter. Samantha is seven months pregnant with a high-risk pregnancy. Her doctor has told her to manage her stress. Her husband is three hundred miles away, behind your glass, and the only way to see his face costs six dollars and thirty cents per half-hour.
Allen worked at a repair shop in Gilroy. He was detained in February at his own green-card interview — the door he walked through to become a citizen of the only country his children have ever known was the door that closed behind him. The mechanism that put him inside is the same mechanism that, in recent weeks, pulled a seventy-six-year-old permanent resident with stage-four cancer out of his citizenship appointment and into custody on the same administrative hook.
His daughter is five. She asks her mother every day when her father is coming home. Samantha has caught her praying alone in her bedroom. The child told her mother, “I’m just talking to God, so he can help dad.” That is the sentence your visitation policy has produced, Christopher. A five-year-old girl, praying alone, because you have decided she cannot sit in her father’s lap.
The baby inside Samantha will be born without her father’s hand on her mother’s belly. That is your policy, Christopher. You have made that true. The hand that should be there is on the other side of your wall.
“Everything is meant to break you down and discourage you and make you give up hope,” Allen said from inside the facility, his face going in and out of focus on the video call. “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.”
Teresa Reyes is sixty-three years old. She drove three hundred miles on a Wednesday in May to be with her son Guillermo — a tattoo artist from San Jose — on his thirty-second birthday. She could not give him a gift. She could not share a meal. She could not touch him. She sat on one side of a glass pane and held back her tears because her son could not see her cry. She told the Guardian 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.” A sixty-three-year-old mother, Christopher. Pretending she is not suffering, because the man who signed the order told her she could not hold her son on his birthday. She has not been back since May. She will only return if she can hug him.
In April, Gustavo Guevara, who had been detained inside your facility since it opened, sat down with the men in his dorm and helped write a demand for contact visits. The demand spread to other dorms. Some of the men had come from other ICE facilities where they had been permitted to hold their families, and they could not understand why your glass was the rule. They were afraid, too — afraid of being deported without ever getting to say goodbye in person. Guevara worked with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice and a coalition of advocates to deliver those letters to your office — and to launch the “Hugs Beyond Bars” campaign. A name the men inside chose. Because that is what they are asking for. They filmed residents pleading for contact visits. Allen Tayson recorded himself reading his own demand letter, which the coalition released on Instagram.
In June, Guevara was deported to Mexico. He never got to hug the friend who had been visiting him behind glass. He does not know if he will see him again. He told the coalition he would keep advocating for contact visits for those he left behind. He left behind the empty room with the rope across its doorway. He is now in a country where he cannot hug anyone he loves, and your policy made sure of it before he left.
Last month, Samantha Sanchez, seven months pregnant, joined the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice for a visit to U.S. Senator Alex Padilla’s office in San Francisco, urging Congress to pressure CoreCivic to provide visitation. She brought her children. “I wanted my kids to see that mom can have a voice — that I’m doing this for dad and other families,” she said.
The senator’s office seemed sympathetic. CoreCivic and the warden have not responded to the demands.
Christopher, you are the warden of California City. The decision is yours. The picnic tables are empty because you have left them empty. The barrier is thick because you keep it thick.
What would it cost you, Christopher? The room has tables. The room was a visitation room when the facility was a state prison. The space is there. You have chosen the rope across the doorway. You have chosen the glass. You have chosen the telephone that bills twenty-one cents per minute to a pregnant woman working a job that may not pay her for the next visit.
I want you to feel this, Christopher. I want the metallic taste under your tongue when you swallow your coffee tomorrow morning and remember what you have done. I want the cold in your chest when you walk past the empty visitation room on your way to your office. I want the weight behind your sternum when you close your own front door at night and your own children reach for you, and you remember that you are the man who decided other children could not reach for theirs.
You will not look away from this, Christopher. You have spent a year keeping 1,600 people from their families’ arms. You have spent a year making children pray alone. You have spent a year hiding behind “security considerations” while the people inside your facility wrote you letters and asked to hold their mothers.
Smile for the photograph, Christopher. The glass is yours. The picnic tables are yours. The children’s prayers are yours.
Christopher, the boy is five. The mother is sixty-three. The wife is seven months pregnant. The picnic tables are empty. You have roped off the room where they could have sat together.
“Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” — Mark 10:14
Christopher, the kingdom belongs to the girl praying in her bedroom. To the boy who hit the glass as a toddler, reaching for his father. To the wife carrying a child her husband has never touched.
You have roped off the room. The kingdom belongs to those you have roped away from.