ICE bans hugging inside California’s largest detention center. Families are fighting back

In the California City facility, ‘contact visits’ are strictly forbidden – but detained residents aren’t staying quiet. Are officials listening?

Teresa Reyes drove 300 miles to be with her son on his 32nd birthday in May, but she couldn’t give him a gift, share a meal with him or give him a hug. She couldn’t even touch him.

Her son, Guillermo, a tattoo artist from San Jose, is locked up in the California City immigration detention center, California’s largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility, and the only way he can see his mother is behind a thick pane of glass.

The detention center, housing roughly 1,600 people in a desert region north of Los Angeles, has denied contact visits to all people held inside since the Trump administration opened the site one year ago. That means no one inside the facility, which is run by private prison firm CoreCivic, can sit with or embrace family members who travel to the remote site for visits. Instead, families are left talking through phones while their relatives sit in an adjacent room, separated by glass barriers.

“I want to hold my son, I want to touch him, I want to assure him everything is going to be OK, but I can’t,” said Reyes, 63, speaking in Spanish. “When I see him, I have to hold back tears. I have to pretend to be strong, because I don’t want him to think I am suffering.”

The total denial of contact visits is an extreme restriction for any prison or detention site where people are locked up long-term, particularly a facility holding people accused of immigration violations. Prisons across the US housing people convicted of serious criminal offenses typically operate visitation rooms where families can sit at tables, only temporarily barring contact visits when there are safety concerns.

The harsh policy, advocates say, is part of the Trump administration’s strategy of placing more and more people in crowded facilities while their cases drag on, subjecting them to prison-like conditions and restricting their connections to the outside – all which can increase pressure to accept deportations.

In California City, detained residents aren’t staying quiet, instead working with advocates to launch a public campaign, pleading with their warden to let them hug their relatives. Is he listening?

Six months of ‘isolation’

Allen Tayson, 37, spoke over the loud clangs and shouts behind him. The father of two from Gilroy, a California city south of San Jose, was appearing on a video call from inside the California City facility, his face going in and out of focus, with the ICE messaging app blurring the background behind him.

“We feel isolated in here,” he said. “Everything is meant to break you down and discourage you and make you give up hope. If I was able to hug and hold my wife and kids, it would be like a brief getaway that would take me away from this setting. I’d cherish every second.”

Tayson, a repair shop worker, hasn’t been able to hold his family since February when he was detained by ICE at his green card interview at a United States Citizenship and Immigration Services office.

Tayson is from the Philippines and came to the US as a child. He and his wife, Samantha Sanchez, a US citizen, have known each other since they were teenagers and married in 2016. They have a 14-year-old son and five-year-old daughter – and Sanchez is now seven months pregnant. Tayson has missed nearly her entire pregnancy.

“I’m so used to taking care of my family, and I feel so helpless every single day that I’m here and my family has to figure out a way to get by without me,” said Tayson.

When Tayson arrived at California City and learned contact visits were banned for all, he and his wife made a choice: she would not travel 300 miles to visit if they couldn’t have contact. They knew first-hand how painful that process could be. When their son was around three years old, Tayson had a stint in a jail for firearm felony charges that were later dismissed. That facility only allowed visits behind glass, and at the end of one visit, his son reached out to hug his father and collided with the glass. Tayson is haunted by his son’s look of disbelief and vowed that would never happen again.

So the family talks on video calls, which cost 21 cents a minute, or $6.30 for half an hour, a cost that adds up as Sanchez works to provide for her two kids – all while navigating a high-risk pregnancy.

“I have this baby growing inside me, and he hasn’t even touched my belly,” Sanchez said. She wants to see her husband in the flesh so she has some reassurances that he is physically OK. She is trying to manage her stress and depression, worried her declining mental health will lead to pregnancy complications: “It would just be a bit of relief on my nervous system to hug him.”

Their five-year-old daughter asks daily when her father is coming home, Sanchez said. She often catches her daughter praying alone. “She says, ‘I’m just talking to God, so he can help dad.’”

A nationwide problem

The lack of access to visitation is a growing human rights crisis across the US, advocates say. Of the 10 ICE detention centers with the largest populations , four entirely bar contact visits – California City, the Stewart detention center in Georgia, the South Texas processing center in Pearsall and the Montgomery processing center in Conroe, Texas, according to ICE’s websites.

Michelle Brané, a former immigration detention ombudsman for the Department of Homeland Security, said before 2016, it was common for ICE facilities to offer contact visits. But in Trump’s first term, more detention centers began only offering visits behind glass – and it has been a persistent problem since.

Some detention centers, including Otay Mesa in San Diego, have at times had particularly restrictive set-ups, with families arriving at the facilities to discover the visit involves them video conferencing with their loved one in another room, often with a poor connection, said Brané.

Brané, now executive director of advocacy group Together and Free, said detention officials have often claimed there wasn’t enough space in the facilities to accommodate contact visits. That explanation rings hollow for the current administration, which has allotted record funds for detention, she said. “When you have as much money as this administration, there’s no excuse for inhumane conditions.”

After auditing California City in the spring, the California department of justice said the prohibition on contact visits appeared to violate a CoreCivic policy that the company provided to the state, which stipulated that there should be opportunities for physical contact and those visits should only be restricted for “security risks”.

A photo of the visitation area published by the state DoJ showed there was space for contact visits. The room has picnic tables, which families used years prior when the facility was a state prison. But now, ICE detainees aren’t allowed to sit at those tables or enter that part of the room. Instead, the photo showed, there is a row of windows at the edge of the room where the detained immigrants can speak through phones – the only available option for visits.

The Rev Deborah Lee, executive director of the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, a group supporting detainees, said some visitors have struggled to hear through the phones that families and detainees have to use to talk to one another. Because only one person can speak through the phone at a time, group conversations weren’t possible. “It’s just a denial of people’s humanity,” Lee said.

During a visit in July, Lee’s group ran into the California City warden, Christopher Chestnut, the reverend recalled. When she asked him why no one could have a regular visit, he told her that facilities with contact visits had higher overdose rates, without providing further explanation, according to Lee.

ICE did not respond to requests for comment. Ryan Gustin, a CoreCivic spokesperson, defended California City’s policies, saying in an email: “Facility leadership, in conjunction with our government partners, has determined that non-contact visitation is the most appropriate approach given security considerations. As with correctional and detention facilities across the country, preventing the introduction of contraband is a significant safety and security concern.”

Gustin added that CoreCivic “recognizes the importance of maintaining family and community connections for individuals in our care” and that under “applicable detention standards”, individual facilities have the authority to set visitation policies based on “factors including facility design, operational requirements, staffing considerations and security protocols”. ICE and CoreCivic did not respond to interview requests for the warden.

‘Mom can have a voice’

In the face of long-term detention without contact visits, California City residents began organizing. In April, Gustavo Guevara, who had been detained at the facility since it opened in August 2025, helped organize a letter within his dorm demanding officials offer regular visits.

He said the idea spread to other dorms, with residents writing their own demand letters. Some residents had come from other ICE facilities where contact visits were allowed, so were bewildered and angry to lose that access. People were especially anxious about never getting to say goodbye to relatives if they lost their cases.

“Not only are you immediately deprived of that human interaction, but what is hanging over your head is the possibility of being sent to another country, not knowing if you’ll ever hold your loved ones again,” he said.

Guevara and others worked with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice (CCIJ), an Oakland-based nonprofit that advocates for detained people, and a coalition of activists delivered the letters to the warden and helped launch a “Hugs Beyond Bars” campaign .

Some residents had advocates film them on video calls pleading for contact visits , which were published on social media. Allen Tayson also recorded himself reading his own demand letter, which the coalition released on Instagram.

“Across all the dorms, people could unite behind this,” said Val Suarez, CCIJ community and legal organizer. “They saw this big family room that used to be a visitation room which proves there really is no reason for them to not have access to this.” It felt achievable.

It was personal for Guevara, who had a close friend visit him regularly at California City behind glass. That was until June when he was deported to Mexico. Guevara never got to hug him and doesn’t know if he’ll see him again, he said, but he’ll continue advocating for contact visits for those he left behind.

Last month, Samantha Sanchez also joined CCIJ for a visit to US senator Alex Padilla’s office in San Francisco urging Congress to pressure CoreCivic to provide visitation. “I wanted my kids to see that mom can have a voice – that I’m doing this for dad and other families,” Sanchez said.

The senator’s office seemed sympathetic to their pleas, advocates said. But so far, CoreCivic and the California City warden have not responded to their demands.

During Teresa Reyes’s visit with her son in May on his birthday, she noticed there were vending machines for visitors and hoped to buy a snack for her son, but learned that was not possible.

When advocates accompanying her asked if the staff could make an exception and give her one brief hug, the officers said no, she recalled.

She hasn’t been back to California City since May – and will only return if she can hug her son.