ICE detainee reveals video of drinking water apparently contaminated with worm-like creatures

‘Disturbing’ footage shared by California detainee surfaces amid wider complaints about conditions in ICE detention

Attorneys for a man detained in a California immigration detention center have released footage showing him holding up a bottle of water from inside the facility that appeared to be contaminated with worm-like creatures.

The footage came from a video call with Carlitos Ricardo Parias, a Los Angeles man who has been detained for months at the Adelanto Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility, north-east of LA.

Margaret Hellerstein, one of Parias’s attorneys, shared the footage with the Guardian on Thursday and said it was filmed this week. The clip is brief and grainy, but shows him holding up a plastic bottle filled with water, which appeared to have small pests of some kind swimming inside.

Parias, in a statement shared by Hellerstein, described them as “worms” or some kind of “larvae”, though it’s unclear what exactly was in the bottle. He said the water was given to residents to drink.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to repeated questions about the video, with a spokesperson saying in an email that the facility gets its water from the city of Adelanto and provides the “the same water used by residents and businesses in the area”.

Geo Group, the private prison company that runs the ICE facility, did not respond to inquiries about the footage before publication. In a statement on Tuesday sent after publication, the company said the facility did not operate its own water system and that the water comes from the local municipal system and is regularly tested.

The footage has surfaced weeks after a federal judge ordered ICE to ensure that people detained in Adelanto had “24-hour access to clean, potable drinking water”. The ruling was a response to a class-action lawsuit challenging “dangerous conditions” at Adelanto, with detained plaintiffs alleging they were denied sufficient food, clean drinking water and proper medical care.

Parias said in his statement that the contaminated water came from jugs that staff had given residents for drinking. He said he poured the water with the worms into a bottle to preserve it as evidence. He showed the bottle to a relative on a video call, which was shared with his attorneys.

“This is what they give us: contaminated water, water with larvae, water with little black worms, which is slowly killing each one of us who are detained here,” Parias said in his statement, which his lawyer translated from Spanish. “We need proper drinking water, better treatment.”

The exact source of the water in the footage was not clear, and it also was not clear how widely this water was distributed to residents in the detention center.

Parias is a TikTok creator known as Richard LA. He received national attention after he was shot by an ICE agent in October and then charged with assault. A federal judge dismissed the charge and he was transferred to ICE custody where he is facing removal.

“When I saw the video, I was horrified and disgusted. I felt sick to my stomach,” said Hellerstein. “This is video evidence. They can’t just sweep it under the rug.”

The footage has circulated widely among advocates and immigration attorneys in recent days.

Lawyers involved in the class-action case said they had seen the footage, but also had not heard direct accounts from other detained residents about the specific contaminant shown in the video.

“The video is very disturbing and we’re looking into it,” said Rebecca Brown, supervising attorney at Public Counsel, a public interest law firm that brought the lawsuit, alongside several other organizations. “Detained individuals have long complained about the quality of the water … We’ve heard of water being murky, tasting terrible, having unknown things in it.”

Carl Bergquist, counsel with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, another group representing the class-action plaintiffs, said the footage was concerning and raised questions about whether the government was complying with the judge’s order to provide clean water.

The class-action lawsuit said the tap water at the facility was “discolored and tastes odd, raising serious concerns about its potability”, with lawyers writing: “The ‘drinking’ water provided in coolers often appears dirty and regularly runs out for hours at a time.”

The judge’s recent order called for consistent water access and improvements to other standards. In a filing challenging the judge’s order this week, lawyers for the DHS said the drinking water had been “sampled and tested at various distribution points by an independent third party … and determined to be clean per Food and Drug Administration (FDA) standards”.

The DHS has also argued in court that Geo Group as a contractor is responsible for the conditions of the facility. Geo Group is not a defendant in the lawsuit.

The Geo spokesperson said each housing unit at Adelanto had drinking fountains or sinks and ice water containers that are sanitized and refilled three times a day. The facility did testing of its tap water in January, the spokesperson said, and found “all results within required ranges”.