Taxpayers still footing bill for $85M California ICE detention center to sit empty as state becomes epicenter of illegal border crossings
Taxpayers have been shelling out millions of dollars each year to fund hundreds of empty Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention beds at one California facility as the state has become the epicenter of illegal border crossings.
The Adelanto ICE Processing Center, roughly 80 miles northeast of Los Angeles, can hold up to 1,940 detainees but has been almost empty for years due to a COVID-19 court order.
However, the contractor running the facility, The Geo Group, is still making roughly $85 million annually despite it having just a handful of immigrants in custody, it revealed in a recent press release.
ICE funds space for 640 detainees in the facility, but a source recently told The Post there were just five individuals in custody at Adelanto.
ICE contracted Geo to run the facility for a period of 15 years starting in 2019, but a judge’s order blocking Adelanto from taking in more detainees in response to a lawsuit over the spread of COVID-19 came shortly after in 2020.
The judge’s order forced the facility to maintain social distancing, despite the reversal of such orders being discarded at detention facilities across the rest of the country.
ICE sources told The Post that with the facility sitting mostly empty and the contract to fly migrants in agency custody to other detention centers across the country, it is costing more money.
“We have to fly people out of state for housing,” one ICE source said.
Contractors and nonprofits “are the ones benefitting from this, while the taxpayers keep paying the bill,” the source added.
“That’s taxpayer money, are you f–king kidding me,” a second ICE official seethed.
The Biden administration was set to close Adelanto in December before ICE launched a 60-day evaluation of the facility, followed by another 120 days to provide “additional time for potential relief from ongoing litigation that prevents full use of the facility,” Fox News reported in January.
The ICE contract with Geo to operate the facility has since been extended to Sept. 30 to allow ICE “to realize potential relief from ongoing litigation that prevents full use of the facility,” agency spokesperson Jenny Burke said in a recent statement.
With hundreds of empty beds, the facility’s emptiness presents a national security issue as the state becomes the epicenter of illegal border crossings, sources recently told The Post.
Border Patrol agents in the San Diego region to the south are overwhelmed as it becomes the top sector for illegal crossings for the first time in decades with 37,000 migrant encounters in April alone.
Agents in San Diego arrested 10,000 migrants from 69 countries within one week in April, according to Chief Border Patrol Agent Patricia McGurk-Daniel.
“[The Biden administration’s] inaction has resulted in the release of Special Interest Aliens — individuals from countries with adversarial positions towards the United States — into American communities rather than detaining them per usual protocol,” retired Denver ICE chief John Fabbricatore recently told The Post.
