ICE opens eighth detention center in California

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Immigration and Customs Enforcement expanded again in California’s Central Valley, opening a new 700-person detention center operated by for-profit prison company GEO Group.

The agency last week began moving immigrant detainees to the McFarland Detention Center, according to human rights activists.

The center, the so-called The Central Valley App increases the total number of active detention centers in California to eight, up from six in early 2025. They are all operated by private companies and have a combined capacity of nearly 10,000 beds.

The two detention centers that were inaugurated after the President Donald Trump assumed office were used as private prisons until California’s prison population has declined to a level that allowed the Newsom administration to terminate those contracts.

According to DetentionReports.com latest figures show an average of 5,337 people are being held in immigration detention centers in California. This figure represents a 72% increase from the daily average of approximately 3,104 people detained in California in April 2025.

This new installation is part of a array of detention centers in Kern County which includes the Golden State application in McFarland. It is unclear whether GEO has received conditional use permits or business licenses from the city of McFarland to begin housing immigration detainees at the Central Valley Annex.

Advocates for immigrant detainees said they had no opportunity to voice their concerns in public hearings before ICE began using the new facility.

“We don’t want another ICE detention center in California or anywhere else,” said anti-ICE detention activist Edwin Carmona-Cruz, referring to the new Central Valley Annex application.

The Central Valley app is adjacent to Geo Group’s Golden State app, which is home to an average daily population of 565.

Until 2020, GEO Group operates a collection of private prisons in McFarland for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Closing them as private prisons was inevitable, as Governor Gavin Newsom said has agreed to terminate these contracts.

In 2019, California Democrats tried to stop GEO Group from turning that land into immigration detention centers by passing a law prohibiting such use.

ICE signed a 15-year, $1.5 billion contract with GEO for two facilities in McFarland and one in Bakersfield just weeks before the law took effect. In 2023, a federal court declared the state law unconstitutional, ruling that it violated federal immigration enforcement powers.

In 2020, McFarland’s mayor resigned after the city’s planning commission failed to reach an agreement on GEO’s proposal to convert two of its parcels into immigration detention centers. Then-Mayor Manuel Cantu Jr., he told the Desert Sun the day after the vote that the small town depends on the roughly $2 million a year GEO pays in property taxes and utility fees to provide vital municipal services like water, sewer and public safety.

However, the private prison company appealed and was eventually able to move forward in 2020 with the opening of the Golden State application for its work with ICE.

GEO told the Planning Commission in 2020 that opening the Golden State and Central Valley annexes would bring the city $511,000 a year in compensation payments, plus high-paying jobs.

California state law requires this A city or county provides 180 days’ notice and holds public hearings before approving or permitting the reuse of an immigration detention center.

The city clerk and city manager of McFarland, a small farming town of about 15,000, did not immediately return phone calls and questions from CalMatters.

Jason Sweeney, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the center opened its doors “under an existing intergovernmental service agreement” that “has been in place for several years.” He added that the Central Valley facility began housing detainees in the past two weeks and that the agency will include this new facility in its biweekly reports.

California’s Newest Detention Centers

Last year, CoreCivic, another private prison management company, opened a 2,560-person immigration detention center in California City, eastern Kern County, on the site of another shuttered state prison. It is the largest ICE detention center in the state. The company began detaining immigrants there in late August 2025 without obtaining the necessary documentation from California City, contributing to legal and public opposition.

According to the GEO Group website, the newly activated Central Valley Annex facility is accredited by the American Correctional Association and the National Commission on Correctional Health. It previously housed detainees from the United States Marshals Service.

ICE did not immediately respond to a question about whether the facility currently houses both U.S. Marshals Service detainees and immigration detainees.

The unprecedented increase in people being held in ICE detention centers across the country is due to a $45 billion injection from the spending bill that Trump signed last year and dubbed the “Big Beautiful Bill.” The Trump administration plans to detain more than 100,000 immigrants a day as part of its massive deportation campaign. When he takes office in 2025, ICE detains an average of about 40,000 people a day.

State supervision of domestic conditions

Carmona-Cruz, co-executive director of the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, said people sent to the Central Valley Annex “are at risk of the same horrific abuses and inhumane conditions that people in the neighboring ICE detention center have faced for years.”

For years, detainees at the Mesa Verde and Golden State Annex facilities — the others under the same contract as the Central Valley Annex — have reported abuse and unsafe conditions, including medical neglect, salary of only 1 dollar a day for work isolation in a single cell after a report of sexual abuse and inadequate food.

In response to some of these previous allegations, Chris V. Ferreira, a spokesman for GEO Group, previously told CalMatters that his company “strongly disagrees with these baseless allegations, which are part of a radical, politically motivated and long-standing campaign to dismantle ICE and end federal immigration detention by attacking contractors at federal government immigration facilities.” He did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this article.

“The people they send there are members of our community, neighbors, family members,” Carmona-Cruz said. “ICE and GEO Group are failing to address the human needs of the people they detain. ICE detention is not only unjust and unnecessary, it is deadly. Nearly 50 people have died in ICE custody since Trump took office, and the situation is only getting worse.”

Last year, the California Attorney General’s Office published a report in which he expressed his concern about the medical care provided at ICE facilities. At that time there was only six detention centers in operation in the state.

This story was updated on April 24 to include comments from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

CalMatters reporters Sergio Olmos and Nigel Duara contributed to this report.