{"id":800457,"date":"2026-08-03T03:46:28","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T03:46:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/800457\/"},"modified":"2026-08-03T03:46:28","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T03:46:28","slug":"doctors-report-on-healthcare-in-ca-ice-center-finds-bottlenecks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/800457\/","title":{"rendered":"Doctor’s report on healthcare in CA ICE center finds bottlenecks"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Nigel Duara<\/a>, CalMatters<\/p>\n

This story was originally published by CalMatters<\/a>. Sign up<\/a> for their newsletters.<\/p>\n

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is failing to provide adequate healthcare at a new detention center in California City, according to a report from an independent monitor at the facility, where detainees complained of missing medications and months-long delays to cancer treatment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The findings appear in a report by Dr. Muthusamy Anandkumar, a court- appointed monitor of the California City Immigration Processing Center, which is about 75 miles east of Bakersfield and run by the private prison company CoreCivic. The federal government purchased the facility<\/a> earlier this month but CoreCivic continues to operate it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A judge appointed the monitor<\/a> in March as part of an ongoing lawsuit <\/a>filed by seven detainees who allege the conditions in the California City facility are a violation of their due process rights.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe facility lacks a reliable system to consistently provide adequate health care, placing individuals at serious risk of both immediate and long-term harm,\u201d Anandkumar wrote. \u201cThis pattern indicates broader problems in the facility’s healthcare delivery system rather than occasional lapses in care.\u201d<\/p>\n

The fault, Anandkumar wrote, was not with the individual healthcare workers, but rather an issue of staffing, management and oversight. At times, staff was pulled out of training to cover a shift because of staffing shortages.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a result, staff who had not been fully trained were themselves training new staff,\u201d Anandkumar wrote. \u201cGiven the number of patients and the seriousness of their medical and mental health needs, these substantial gaps contribute to an unsafe environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anandkumar found 13 areas of deficiency in CoreCivic\u2019s healthcare program in California City. Among them were inadequate emergency care, dental care and chronic disease management. The monitor also found that the facility did not provide timely access to prescribed medications.\u00a0<\/p>\n

ICE opened the immigration detention center at the site of a closed state prison and began admitting detainees in August. In September, a state disability rights group conducted a two-day inspection<\/a> of the facility and found that its operators failed to distribute medication for life-threatening conditions and did not schedule timely surgeries for people that needed them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The findings of that two-day inspection by Disability Rights California mirror many of the conclusions found 10 months later by Anandkumar, including delays in response to acute sick call requests and a failure to distribute prescription medication for conditions requiring consistent management like diabetes, high blood pressure and seizures.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A CoreCivic spokesperson said the facility provides daily access to physical and mental care services, and said emergency medical services are available 24 hours a day, every day.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen specialty or advanced care is required beyond the services available onsite, facility healthcare staff coordinate with community physicians, hospitals, and specialty providers to facilitate access to medically necessary treatment,\u201d said CoreCivic spokesperson Ryan Gustin. \u201cWhile we work diligently to arrange and support those appointments, the scheduling, availability, and capacity of outside providers are not controlled by the facility.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gustin said compliance with detention standards in immigration detention facilities is monitored by an ICE compliance officer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The lawsuit filed in U.S. federal court in the Northern District of California by people held in California City claims detainees do not have appropriate clothing for the chilly desert nights, nor appropriate medical attention for life-threatening conditions. The lawsuit alleges detainees with mobility issues don\u2019t have access to wheelchairs, and in some cases are unable to bathe or dress themselves.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sokhean Keo, a California City detainee and a plaintiff in the lawsuit against ICE said in a statement distributed by the ACLU that he never received the medication he was prescribed for an infection.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there is no change to this system,\u201d Keo said, \u201csick people are going to die.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on CalMatters<\/a> and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives<\/a> license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Nigel Duara, CalMatters This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters. U.S. Immigration…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":800458,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[97,252,253,790,113221,2825],"class_list":["post-800457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health-care","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare","tag-immigration","tag-kern-county","tag-prisons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=800457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800457\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/800458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=800457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=800457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=800457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}