Immigrants on hunger strike at two facilities

Gustavo Adolfo Flores Coreas recalls being subjected to “abusive patdowns” by guards every time he left his dorm at the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield.

The 31- year- old on Thursday told The Fresno Bee he began to skip meals to avoid the uncomfortable pat- downs by the guards employed by The GEO Group, which operates Mesa Verde and the Golden State Annex in McFarland for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“It was awful,” Coreas, who is now housed at the Golden State Annex, told The Bee during an interview about the pat- downs at Mesa Verde. “I didn't want to be excessively touched.”

Another detained immigrant, 25-year- old Rigoberto Hernandez Martinez, arrived at Mesa Verde in winter and recalled how cold it was inside the facility. He also remembers being given a blanket with holes in it.

“It was really freezing in here,” Martinez told The Bee during an interview.

Coreas and Martinez are among about 77 immigrants at the two Central Valley immigration detention facilities who are taking part in a hunger strike they began Friday. The hunger strike comes after a 10- month- long, ongoing labor strike to protest getting paid $1 per day to work to maintain the facilities.

In July 2022, a group of nine immigrants sued The GEO Group over the $1 wage.

The immigrants and the ACLU of Northern California told The Bee the hunger strike also comes amid “abhorrent” and “soulcrushing” living conditions at both facilities. They say, at times, immigrants have been given expired and cold food, and are not treated in a timely manner when a medical condition arises.

Plus since the labor strike began, the ACLU of Northern California said that it has received reports of retaliation.

The Bee has reached out to The GEO Group and ICE for comment.

Minju Cho, a staff attorney with the Immigrants' Rights Program at the ACLU of Northern California, said detained immigrants have already been met with significant retaliation since their labor strike began.

The forms of retaliation, she said, have included being placed in solitary confinement, being threatened with transfer to an out- of-state facility, being written up, and “perhaps, most shocking” at Mesa Verde, “they have been subjected to sexually abusive pat- downs.”

Before the labor strike, immigrants were patted down as necessary, but not excessively.

“Once the labor strike began, we started hearing a lot of reports about people being groped, robbed, made to feel very uncomfortable, having their private parts touched unnecessarily, and being subjected to comments by the guards about their bodies,” Cho told The Bee on Thursday.

That prompted the ACLU of Northern California to file a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, she said.

In the wake of a hunger strike at an immigration facility in Tacoma, Wash., earlier this month where strikers were met with violence in retaliation, Cho urged caution by The GEO Group. Guards at the Tacoma facility used smoke bombs and pepper spray on the first day of the strike.

“The hunger strike is a peaceful, constitutionally-protected expression, and the hunger strikers have the constitutional rights to express themselves this way without interference from GEO or ICE,” she told The Bee. “They have first amendment rights that they did not shed when they walked through the detention facility doors.”

Coreas and Martinez say they are taking part in the hunger strike to call for their release and for the facilities to be shut down.