On a scorching May afternoon, Teresa Reyes drove 300 miles to mark her son's 32nd birthday at the California City immigration detention center. She arrived with a gift, a full heart, and the desperate hope of embracing him. Instead, she sat on one side of a thick pane of glass, speaking to him through a phone receiver, swallowing the tears so he wouldn't see her break down. "I want to hold my son and tell him everything is going to be okay," she said, "but I can't."
This is the reality for families visiting loved ones at the facility, which opened a year ago under the Trump administration and is operated by CoreCivic, a private prison contractor. Located in the desert north of Los Angeles, it holds roughly 1,600 people. Since day one, the facility has enforced a strict no-contact policy, forcing all visits to occur through glass partitions with communication limited to phones. Now, relatives are banding together, publicly pressing the warden to change the rules.
Advocates argue that such a blanket prohibition is unusually harsh, particularly for a facility where most detainees are fighting immigration cases, not serving time for violent felonies. Even in U.S. prisons holding convicted criminals, family members are generally permitted to sit together in shared spaces, with contact only suspended in specific safety situations. The policy, critics contend, fits a broader pattern under the current administration: packing more people into detention while their legal proceedings crawl forward, creating conditions that mimic incarceration and severing the emotional lifelines that might otherwise sustain them. The isolation, they say, can be a coercive tool, pushing people toward accepting deportation simply to escape.
Allen Tayson, a 37-year-old father from Gilroy, California, knows that feeling of despair firsthand. Detained since February after being taken into ICE custody during his green card interview at a USCIS office, he described the facility as a place designed to crush the spirit. "Everything is meant to break you down and discourage you and make you give up hope," he said. A native of the Philippines who arrived in the U.S. as a child, Tayson worked in a repair shop before his arrest. A hug from his wife and kids, he said, would be "like a brief getaway."
His wife, Samantha Sanchez, is a U.S. citizen and seven months pregnant. Tayson has missed nearly all of her pregnancy. The couple made a painful calculation: with contact off the table, Sanchez decided not to make the long drive. The memory of a previous jail stint, when their young son slammed into a glass barrier trying to reach his father, was too raw. Instead, they rely on video calls at 21 cents a minute—a mounting expense for Sanchez, who is managing a high-risk pregnancy while working. She worries about the toll the separation is taking on her health. "I need to see him in person to know he's okay," she said, adding that the stress and depression are dangerous for her condition. At home, their five-year-old daughter asks daily when her father will return, and often prays by herself.
The situation at California City is not an isolated one. According to ICE's own websites, four of the ten largest detention centers in the country—California City, Stewart in Georgia, South Texas in Pearsall, and Montgomery in Conroe, Texas—completely prohibit contact visits. Michelle Brané, who previously served as the immigration detention ombudsman for the Department of Homeland Security and now leads the advocacy group Together and Free, noted that prior to 2016, contact visits were the norm in ICE facilities. The shift began during Trump's first term, she said, with more centers adopting behind-glass setups, a trend that has persisted. Some facilities, like Otay Mesa in San Diego, have gone even further at times, forcing families to use video conferencing from separate rooms, often plagued by poor connections. When questioned, detention officials have frequently cited a lack of space as the reason for the restrictions, Brané said.
The specific details of the California City facility's internal policy and any response from the warden to the family campaign were not included in the source material.