ICE quietly opens its 8th California detention center – CalMatters

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

Advocates say the agency began transferring immigration detainees to the McFarland center last week.

The facility, the so-called The Central Valley Appincreases 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.

Both detention centers opened after the President Donald Trump inaugurated were used as private prisons until the one in California the incarcerated population is declining to a level that allowed the Newsom administration to terminate those contracts.

The latest figures show an average of about 5,337 people are being held in California immigration detention centers, according to DetentionReports.com. That number is up 72 percent from the average daily population of about 3,104 people detained in California in April 2025.

This latest facility is part of a a cluster of detention centers in Kern Countywhich includes the Golden State application in McFarland. It is unclear whether GEO received conditional use permits or business licenses from the city of McFarland to begin detaining immigrants 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 site.

“We don’t want another ICE detention center in California or anywhere else for that matter,” anti-ICE detention advocate Edwin Carmona-Cruz said of the new Central Valley application.

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

Until 2020, GEO Group operated a cluster of private prisons in McFarland for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The writing was on the wall to close them as private prisons because Gov. Gavin Newsom has undertaken to terminate these contracts.

California Democrats in 2019 tried to stop GEO Group from turning the sites into immigration detention centers by passing a law to prohibit this use.

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

In 2020, McFarland’s mayor resigned after the city’s planning commission blocked GEO’s proposal to redevelop two of its sites there into immigration detention centers. Then-Mayor Manuel Cantu Jr told the Desert Sun the day after the vote that the small town relies on the roughly $2 million a year that 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 Annex for its work with ICE.

GEO told the Planning Commission in 2020 that opening both the Golden State and Central Valley annexes would bring the city $511,000 a year in mitigation payments, along with good-paying jobs.

California state law requires city ​​or county to provide 180 days’ notice and hold public hearings before approving or permitting the reuse of an immigration detention facility.

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.

California’s Newest Detention Centers

Last year, CoreCivic, another private prison operator, opened a 2,560-bed immigration detention center in California City, in 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 documents 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. They were previously held there by the US Marshals Service.

ICE did not immediately respond to a question about whether the facility now holds both U.S. marshals and immigration detainees.

The unprecedented rise in people held in ICE detention centers across the country has been fueled by an influx of $45 billion made available through the spending bill Trump signed last year, which he called “One Big Beautiful Bill.” The Trump administration seeks to detain more than 100,000 immigrants every 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 conditions inside

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 abuse and inhumane conditions that people in the neighboring ICE detention center have faced for years.”

Detained for years at the Mesa Verde and Golden State Annex facilities — the others under the same contract as the Central Valley Annex — alleged abuse and unsafe conditions, including medical neglect, pay only $1 per day for laborheld in solitary confinement after reporting 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 long-standing, politically motivated and radical campaign to abolish ICE and end federal immigration detention by attacking the federal government’s immigration facility contractors.” He did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

“The people sent 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’s deadly. Nearly 50 people have died in ICE custody since Trump took office, and it’s getting worse.”

Last year, the California Attorney General’s Office released a report raises concerns about health care at ICE facilities. At that time there was only six detention centers operating in the state.

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

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.