Billion-dollar private prison operator GEO Group was ordered by a judge to provide us with records related to a brutal use-of-force incident that occurred at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center on June 12, 2020.
These records were initially submitted under seal in an ongoing civil lawsuit against GEO Group filed in federal court by Hugo Gonzalez, Jose Baca, Erick Lopez, Mario Manjarrez, and Ricardo Sandoval Guadarrama, who say they were injured by the attack carried out by the company’s SWAT-like team of guards.
As GEO Group has continued to profit off mass incarceration and the Trump administration’s deportation regime, The Southlander has been digging into the company’s violent past — and now we’ve got an unprecedented look inside GEO Group’s black box detention center and their use of chemical weapons against people held there.
Our attorneys at Public Justice filed our motion to unseal the records nearly two months ago.
This story is yet another piece to the long history of violence at the hands of corporations and the federal government – both working in tandem to keep secret what goes on inside of these detention facilities. Just a couple months ago, people inside of the same notorious detention facility went on a hunger strike to protest the conditions inside.
GEO Group bent over backward to try and stop this disclosure because it exposes the inhumane treatment of the people detained at Adelanto at the hands of a corporate federal contractor that has already been accused of forced labor, severe medical negligence, and violence toward people it detains. In one filing, the detention center’s former warden, James Janecka, goes so far as to claim that making records public about the temperature of the facility’s shower water would “promote public scandal.”
But a federal judge saw right through GEO Group’s arguments and ordered it to make public what it's been hiding for years.
Now we want to report on what we’re seeing in these records, but we need your help.
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If you’re a donor who believes in holding private prison giants like GEO Group accountable, would like to give a larger amount and receive a tax write-off, reach out directly to our Outreach and Grants Coordinator Erin Foley.
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