What Padilla, Schiff saw at the ICE center The new ICE center in California has 1,400 detainees. What Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla saw there.

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Democratic U.S. Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff made an oversight visit Tuesday to the state’s newest and largest immigration detention center, located in California City about 100 miles north of Los Angeles.

Speaking to reporters, both highlighted what they described as inadequate medical care at the scene.

“The most common comment we received was about the inadequacy of the medical care they (inmates) were receiving,” Schiff said. He described an encounter with a diabetic inmate who, he said, had not received treatment for his condition in two months. “It’s terrifying,” he said.

More than 1,400 people are currently being held at the California detention center, run by private prison company CoreCivic, in the middle of the Mojave Desert. This center opened in late August thanks to a contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with a capacity to house 2,560 detainees.

CoreCivic previously operated the site as a state prison. The Newsom administration terminated the contract in 2024 after several state prisons closed due to reducing the prison population in California.

“They’re going to have to do something very different if they want to meet the medical needs of the people that are already there, plus when they add another thousand people,” Padilla said.

Before entering the facility, Schiff and Padilla said they were conducting the inspection to “answer complaints and questions about the conditions in which detainees are held” and “see firsthand what this facility is like.”

“On this anniversary of the second Trump administration, one year later, there are a few things we already know define his tenure: the brutality and over-aggressiveness of the mass deportation program,” Padilla said.

“It’s a necessary part of our oversight,” Schiff said. “We have all worked with constituents who have been or are detained here and have described the deteriorating conditions.”

By law, members of Congress have the authority to conduct surprise inspections of immigration detention centers. However, Padilla’s spokesman said the senators had planned the visit in advance.

In July, House Democrats took the administration to court over a policy requiring seven days’ notice for visits, arguing they violated federal law. In December 2025, federal judge Gia Cobb in Washington, D.C., temporarily blocked the seven-day notice requirement until the case was resolved in court.

After a fatal shooting involving an immigration agent in Minneapolis, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem issued a new memo on Jan. 8 reinstating the seven-day notice requirement. On January 19, Cobb does not block immediately that new policy, now reinstated, concluding that the Jan. 8 directive constitutes a “new agency action” that requires a different legal challenge than what was previously taken.

When President Donald Trump took office a year ago approximately 40,000 people were in immigration detention centers across the country. By early December, that number had increased by nearly 75 percent, with nearly 66,000 people held in immigration detention centers across the United States, and according to government data, the system had the capacity to detain 70,000 people each day, the highest level in U.S. history.

Last month, the California attorney general’s office warned of “dangerous conditions” at the California City facility. In one letter of December 19 Addressed to Noem, attorney Michael Newman wrote that the California Department of Justice “has serious concerns about the conditions at the facilities and the lack of adequate medical care” after inspecting them.

Attorney General Rob Bonta said the facility “opened prematurely and was not ready to handle the needs of the incoming population.”

CoreCivic spokesman Ryan Gustin previously told Calmatters that the center has robust medical and mental health care, including 24-hour access to those services. He added that these services meet the standards set by our government partners.

“There’s no delay in people getting their prescriptions,” Gustin said.

in November the detainees at the site filed a lawsuit alleging that the facility was contaminated by leaking sewage and insect infestations and that detainees could not receive adequate medical care for life-threatening conditions.