A man locked inside California's largest ICE detention center has not touched his pregnant wife in seven months. His five-year-old daughter prays alone every night asking God to bring her dad home. And the warden of the California City facility, run by private prison giant CoreCivic, has decided that none of that is enough to justify letting families hug each other.
300 Miles for a Pane of Glass
Teresa Reyes drove 300 miles to see her son on his 32nd birthday in May. She couldn't give him a gift. She couldn't share a meal. She couldn't even touch his hand. She sat on one side of a thick glass barrier while her son, Guillermo, a tattoo artist from San Jose, sat on the other, and they talked through phones like she was visiting a convicted murderer on death row.
Guillermo is being held on immigration violations. Not a crime of violence. Not a crime at all, by most reasonable definitions. He's one of roughly 1,600 people detained at the California City facility, a desert compound north of Los Angeles that the Trump administration opened just one year ago, according to The Guardian. Since day one, contact visits have been completely banned. No exceptions. No temporary restrictions tied to safety incidents. A blanket, permanent policy: you can look at your family through glass, and that's it.
"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," Reyes, 63, told The Guardian 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."
Pretending to be strong through a phone pressed against a pane of glass. On your son's birthday. This is the policy.
The Man Who Hasn't Touched His Wife's Pregnant Belly
Allen Tayson, 37, came to the United States from the Philippines as a child. He married his wife Samantha Sanchez, a US citizen, in 2016. They have a 14-year-old son, a five-year-old daughter, and a baby on the way. Samantha is seven months pregnant. Tayson has missed almost the entire pregnancy.
He was detained in February, according to The Guardian, when ICE picked him up at his own green card interview at a US Citizenship and Immigration Services office. He was there to become a legal permanent resident. Instead, he ended up in California City, 300 miles from his family, behind glass.
"I have this baby growing inside me, and he hasn't even touched my belly," Samantha told The Guardian. She is managing a high-risk pregnancy, depression, and the daily logistics of supporting two kids on a single income while video calling her husband at 21 cents a minute. That's $6.30 for a half-hour call. The math on that adds up fast when you're also paying rent without a second income.
Tayson and Samantha made the decision together that she wouldn't make the 300-mile trip if they couldn't actually be together. They knew what that glass wall does to a child. Years ago, when Tayson had a brief stint in a local jail on firearm charges that were later dismissed, their son, then about three years old, reached out at the end of a visit to hug his father and ran straight into the glass. Tayson told The Guardian he is still haunted by his son's look of disbelief. He vowed it would never happen again. The Trump administration made that vow very easy to keep by simply banning contact visits altogether.
This Is Not Normal. Prisons Don't Even Do This.
Here is a fact worth sitting with: prisons that house people convicted of actual serious crimes generally allow contact visits. Families can sit at tables. They can hug. Physical contact is restricted temporarily, when there's a specific safety concern, not permanently, as a matter of policy, for everyone.
California City doesn't house people convicted of crimes. It holds people accused of immigration violations, which is a civil matter. And it has managed to implement a visitation regime more restrictive than most maximum-security prisons in the country. CoreCivic, the private prison company that runs the facility, is being paid by taxpayers to do this.
The Guardian reports that of the 10 largest ICE detention centers by population, four now 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. Michelle Brané, a former immigration detention ombudsman for the Department of Homeland Security, told The Guardian that before 2016, contact visits were standard across ICE facilities. Trump's first term started eroding that. His second term is finishing the job.
What This Policy Is Actually For
Advocates are not mincing words about what's happening here. The Guardian reports that they describe the contact visit ban as part of a deliberate strategy: pack people into overcrowded facilities, let cases drag on for months, restrict any meaningful connection to the outside world, and apply maximum psychological pressure until people agree to be deported, regardless of whether they have legitimate legal claims.
Tayson put it more plainly from inside California City, his face blurring in and out on a video call as shouts echoed behind him. "Everything is meant to break you down and discourage you and make you give up hope," he told The Guardian. "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."
Detained residents at California City, working with outside advocates, have launched a public campaign asking the warden directly to restore contact visits. The Guardian raised the question of whether he's listening. There's no indication yet that he is.
A Five-Year-Old Is Praying Alone
Samantha Sanchez told The Guardian that her five-year-old daughter asks every single day when her father is coming home. She has started praying alone. When her mother asks what she's doing, she says: "I'm just talking to God, so he can help dad."
A five-year-old is doing solo prayer sessions because the United States government decided that a repair shop worker from Gilroy, California, who has been in this country since childhood, who is married to a US citizen, who was at a government office trying to do things the legal way, should be locked in a desert detention center without the right to hold his family.
The baby will be born sometime in the next two months. Tayson has no way of knowing if he'll be there, or if his wife will be alone for that too. His daughter will keep praying. His wife will keep managing a high-risk pregnancy under maximum stress, paying 21 cents a minute to hear his voice, and wondering what her nervous system is doing to that baby. And CoreCivic will keep cashing the checks.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe this is about safety. That's the only frame that makes any of this defensible, so let's test it. A blanket, permanent ban on physical contact for 1,600 people in a civil detention facility, with no exceptions tied to individual behavior or specific incidents, has nothing to do with safety. Prisons with convicted violent offenders don't operate this way. If this were about safety, you'd see case-by-case restrictions. What you actually see is a policy designed from the start to make detention as psychologically unbearable as possible, which is exactly what the people living through it are telling you.
CoreCivic is a publicly traded company. It runs private prisons for profit. It is being paid, with your tax dollars, to operate a facility where a pregnant woman cannot embrace her husband and a five-year-old is praying to God alone in her bedroom. The Trump administration did not accidentally land on this policy. It opened California City, imposed these conditions on day one, and has expanded similar policies across multiple facilities. This is the product. The misery is the point.
Tayson's son once ran into a glass wall trying to hug his father and Tayson vowed that would never happen again. The cruelty of where we've landed is that the glass wall is now so normalized there's a whole campaign just to get back to it. Families at California City aren't asking for much. They're asking to sit in the same room. They're asking to hug. They're asking for the baseline of human contact that this country grants to people on death row. The warden isn't listening. The administration isn't listening. Somebody should be.
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