ICE data collection and continued unsafe conditions at Adelanto
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Immigrants detained at Adelanto say inhumane conditions continue, despite government claims
While ICE and the GEO Group fight over who’s legally responsible for the conditions inside the Adelanto ICE detention center in San Bernardino County, CA, prisoners inside continue to suffer from inadequate food and water, little to no medical care, and other inhumane conditions. In late July a court ruled in favor of those detained in Adelanto and there was a preliminary injunction filed to get access to clean water and adequate nutrition to people in the prison within 24 hours. The government however, is refusing to comply with the injunction by trying to file multiple stays and dispute already proven claims about the conditions inside Adelanto.
Fighting with GEO about who is responsible seems to be one tactic the gov’t is using to avoid this court order, however there might be other things going on. There seem to be some really intense staffing issues going on at Adelanto, and staff churn at the detention center might be part of the problem. “We are hearing that guards have to work 16, 18 hour shifts, and so they’re burning out quickly, either getting fired or leaving, quitting their jobs,” a lawyer for Public Counsel representing the plaintiffs said. Lawyers and organizers on the outside continue to monitor and support Adelanto prisoners standing up for their rights.
ICE Collected Nearly 1 Million People’s DNA Last Year—Including Young Children
Over the last couple of years, ICE has dramatically expanded its DNA collection practices, rapidly adding to the FBI's genetic database built to solve criminal investigations. ICE potentially added roughly 920,000 genetic profiles to this database in 2025 alone. Despite the fact that this DNA is being collected from people held for civil immigration violations, not criminal ones, this genetic material can now be left in a lab indefinitely to be used by law enforcement to prosecute folks in the future. Over the course of 2025, CBP even sent the DNA of 493 children under the age of 14 to the FBI's criminal database - despite rules instructing officers not to collect DNA from children that young.
Even more frighteningly, some people are now being prosecuted for refusing DNA collection. Although ICE officers have been trained to warn people that refusing collection is a federal crime for years, a 2021 presentation revealed that the agency was at that point unaware of a single such case accepted for prosecution. This expansion of the FBI’s genetic database, DHS’s lack of transparency about usage, noncompliance with age restrictions, and prosecution of those refusing to hand over their genetic information are all cause for concern, if an unsurprising development.
The Deaths ICE Doesn’t Count (can also include The Quiet War on Immigrants, Round Two)
The staggering tally of 55 people who have perished in detention under the tender mercies of the Trump ICE gulag may in fact be an undercount. A recent Human Rights Watch report puts the rate of mortality in ICE detention at an all time high.
But not everyone who perishes as a consequence of the maltreatment and medical neglect prevailing in these for-profit hellscapes dies while incarcerated. Some, like Mexican American Priscliano Trejo Ricano and Salvadoran American Edwin Lopez-Cornejo meet their end in a hospital, transported there after experiencing medical crises while in ICE custody. Others expire after being released to the streets with no provision for their care, like Haitian American Daphy Michel, who died of hypothermia at a bus station in Pittsburgh. And the deportation machine sometimes moves sick people who decline and die outside of the US. The agency does not include any of these deaths in their grim total.
At the same time that it systematically murders those in detention and assaults those in the streets, the current administration is methodically destroying the legal architecture of the immigration system. A recent report by Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass), documents this process, concluding that the second Trump administration has “destabilized lawful presence, expanded enforcement, and reengineered adjudication to accelerate and prioritize removal.” Terrifyingly, legal residents, asylum applicants, and naturalized citizens have all become targets for detention and deportation.
The cruelty is always the point with this administration. Their project is to make life unbearable for immigrants and their communities and upend the legal system protecting them and their allies. As it upends long held rights of due process and habeas corpus, the Trump administration degrades any possibility of democracy in the United States.
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