Some Democratic members from Los Angeles’ congressional delegation who toured an immigration detention center in downtown L.A. this week — two months after House members first attempted to check out conditions inside the facility but were denied access — described what they saw and learned as “inhumane” and “disturbing.”
Reps. Brad Sherman, Jimmy Gomez and Judy Chu visited the Metropolitan Detention Center, and then met with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials at a field office next door on Monday, Aug. 11.
Most of the nine holding cells in the detention facility were empty, and there were two toilets but no beds, meaning people who are detained there for up to 72 hours must sleep on the cold, concrete floors, the congressmembers told reporters after their tours.
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Only two detainees were in the holding cells at the time of their visit, but the visiting officials weren’t allowed to talk to them, the congressmembers said as they accused the Trump administration of providing a “sanitized version” of the conditions that detainees experienced at the height of the immigration raids in June.
ICE did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment for this article.
Some of the House members involved in Monday’s activities had previously attempted to check out the facility as a member of Congress conducting oversight, but were denied entry.
It wasn’t until after House members had given federal agencies seven days of advance notice of their visit that the lawmakers were let in, they said.
“God knows what they had to hide,” said Sherman, who represents the San Fernando Valley.
By law, members of Congress are allowed to make unannounced visits to federal immigration facilities that “detain or otherwise house aliens” as part of their oversight authority. But a new policy that was recently implemented said ICE field offices aren’t subject to those requirements, even if detainees are housed there.
Gomez, who represents downtown L.A. and had been denied entry to the downtown detention center three previous times before this week, is one of about a dozen House members suing the Trump administration to force it to comply with existing law.
He said Monday after the tour that the place was nearly empty “so that members of Congress could not conduct oversight.”
“They invited us in when there was nobody there … because they didn’t want us to see what was going on several months ago. It’s like, I’ll invite you over to my house, and it will be spotless by the time you get there,” Gomez said.
Recent data show that nationwide, federal immigration arrests dipped in July following a court order barring arrests without probable cause.
ICE averaged 990 arrests a day across the country between July 1 and 27, down 19% from June, according to data obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research center at Syracuse University.
As of Aug. 1, data released by ICE showed 3,459 people were being held at the six California immigration detention facilities, including 351 at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, 416 at Desert View Annex in Adelanto, and 1,360 at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego.
Chu, who is from the San Gabriel Valley, had also attempted — unsuccessfully — to enter the downtown L.A. facility in June. She said some of the responses from the federal agents they spoke with on Monday contrasted with what she had heard previously from detainees.
For example, she said some detainees told her they were housed at the downtown facility for up to 12 days and were given just one meal a day but no soap, toothpaste or toothbrush. ICE agents, on the other hand, told Chu this week that detainees are only held there up to three days and fed three meals a day.
“They showed us their food pantry,” Chu said. “It looked pretty scanty to me, like there was hardly anything there, but they were making it sound like you could just knock on the window and get another meal. No, that’s not what the detainees told us.”
The congressmembers — which included Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Los Angeles, who joined the press conference but did not attend the earlier tour of the detention center — said there are more questions still to be answered.
Their visit this week comes more than two months after a series of immigration raids in L.A. County in early June set off days of mass protests that in turn led to President Donald Trump sending in National Guard troops and active-duty Marines.
There is currently a federal court order limiting immigration-enforcement arrests in Southern California, though immigrant rights advocates have raised concerns of continued raids, including one in L.A.’s MacArthur Park area last week in which Department of Homeland Security personnel jumped out of a Penske rental truck. U.S. Border Patrol dubbed it the “Trojan Horse” operation.