California:
Hunger Strike in Immigrant Prison

Oct 13, 2025

More than 100 inmates in a California immigrant prison have staged hunger strikes in September and early October, to protest the unlivable conditions they have been forced into.

The 500 or so immigrants imprisoned at the California City Detention Center, about 100 miles north of Los Angeles, have reported severely unsanitary conditions, including filthy rooms, backed-up toilets, a lack of clothes, soap, toothpaste and other basic amenities. People with serious medical conditions such as diabetes have been denied their medications. Inmates have not been able to see doctors, not even in urgent cases. Protesting inmates have been put under 17-hour lockdowns and in solitary confinement.

CoreCivic, the company that owns this old private prison in the Mojave Desert, reopened it hastily in late August, without an operating license and despite failing a fire inspection. Rain in September caused severe flooding in much of the prison. Prison guards spoke of not having time to prepare for the inmates’ arrival, and of 16 or 18 hours shifts.

These conditions are in fact common in the federal government’s rapidly expanding immigrant prison system. Tens of thousands of workers, locked up for nothing but their immigration status, are grossly mistreated. Those who protest the abuse, or just try to fight imprisonment and deportation, are put in solitary confinement or transferred to prisons hundreds of miles away, cutting them off from their families, attorneys and community support.

None of this began with Trump. Inmates have been reporting inhumane conditions in immigrant prisons and organizing hunger strikes and other types of protests for many years, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. But the Trump administration has not only taken the brutality against immigrant workers to new heights; it also parades it in front of the population.

This extreme cruelty is not an accident—it’s part of the administration’s deliberate policy of forcing immigrants to leave the U.S. Administration officials say it openly to immigrant workers, in TV and radio ads and on posters in immigrant prisons: “If you don’t want to be arrested and thrown into the hellholes of prisons we have made for you, leave.” They are even offering money, 1,000 dollars, to those who leave. Some immigrants have given up and accepted the “offer,” but many can’t, because they have families in the U.S. that depend on them.

Immigrant workers are the direct target of this terror campaign. But the Trump administration has put this horror show in immigrant prisons in front of all of us, so that the message is clear to ALL workers: they say, “Toe the line and keep your mouth shut, or expect the worst, even torture.”