Adelanto Immigrant Detention Center Is Still Killing People. We Refuse to Look Away

By Javier Hernandez, Executive Director, Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice

For over 15 years, we have been fighting to shut down the Adelanto Immigrant Detention Center. For over 15 years, we have been told to be patient, to wait for the right political moment. And for over 15 years, people have continued to die inside those walls.

Last week, another life was lost. José Guadalupe Ramos-Solano, a Mexican national, was found unresponsive in his bunk at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center and later pronounced dead. He is among the growing number of people who have died in ICE custody,  and one of several deaths tied to Adelanto in recent months.

Unfortunately, this is not surprising. And this is not an accident. Adelanto has long been a site of suffering, neglect, and systemic abuse. Reports have documented inadequate medical care and failures to treat chronic illness for years, the same conditions that continue to take lives today.

We have seen this before. We have seen people denied care until it was too late. We have seen detainees beg for help and be ignored. Across the country, the list of deaths in ICE detention continues to grow. The names change but the pattern does not.

Six years ago, our team penned an op-ed calling out these very deaths and warning what Adelanto represented. Instead of accountability, we received a cease and desist letter from GEO Group, a multi-billion-dollar private prison corporation, attempting to silence us.

We were not silenced.

If anything, their response confirmed what we already knew: the truth was too dangerous for them to ignore. And over time, those who have tried to justify Adelanto’s existence, whether in the name of contracts, politics, or even “jobs”, have only exposed the deeper moral failure behind this system. 

At the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice, we helped build a coalition to shut down Adelanto because we understood early on what this facility represents. It is not just a detention center. It is part of a larger machine that profits from incarceration and treats immigrant lives as expendable.

We have gone through ups and downs in this fight. There were moments when it felt like we were close and moments when groups close to us decided to compromise instead of standing with our communities. 

But through it all, we have never stopped.

We have never stopped organizing. We have never stopped showing up.

And most importantly, we have never stopped uplifting the voices of those most impacted, 1 the people inside Adelanto and their families demanding dignity and care. Every death inside Adelanto is not just a statistic. It is a human being whose life was cut short under government custody. It is a family left searching for answers.

And yet, despite all of this, the facility remains open. Despite years of advocacy, lawsuits, and public outcry, Adelanto continues to detain, neglect, and kill.

That is unacceptable. We refuse to normalize this. We refuse to accept this as the cost of enforcement.The fact is that Adelanto should have been shut down years ago but it’s not too late. 

Our coalition alongside partners and impacted communities  will continue this fight until Adelanto is closed. We will continue to expose the conditions and demand accountability.

Adelanto is not just a detention center. It is a warning to our country of what happens when we stop paying attention.

And we will not stop until it is shut down.