Last week, dozens of advocates and community supporters gathered outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Field Office in San Francisco. They waved signs, drummed, and together demanded that ICE end its estimated $1.5 billion contracts with the GEO Group. The GEO Group, one of the largest private prison corporations in the world, operates many ICE detention facilities, including Mesa Verde and Golden State Annex in California’s Central Valley.
More than 350 people are detained in these facilities. They are parents, siblings, and community members who live across California and are striving to do what most of us want: build a better life for their families and children. As people fight their deportation and seek release, ICE holds them in detention facilities rife with abuse, medical neglect, contaminated water, moldy food and facilities, and solitary confinement.
In protest of these horrors, dozens of people detained in Mesa Verde and Golden State Annex launched a labor strike in July. Many of these community members are also waging a hunger strike, risking their well-being to create a safer world for others.
Jose Ruben Hernandez Gomez, who was detained at Mesa Verde detention center for 16 months, gives an account of the inhumane conditions and the violent retaliation he experienced for participating in hunger strikes.
Their courage and leadership have meant that people across the U.S. are learning about what happens with ICE detention facilities, particularly those managed by GEO Group as it rakes in profits and ramps up its lobbying. Strikers and other detained people report that they provide cleaning and sanitation services and cut hair for the GEO Group, which pays them $1 each day for that labor. For many, this is the only way to afford hygiene items or edible food from the commissary. Recently, ICE and GEO Group cut off community members’ access to free phone calls, ripping them even further apart from their loved ones.
As people inside ICE facilities lead a movement for safety, freedom, and belonging, their loved ones outside are also organizing to bring people home. At the Asian Law Caucus, we work alongside partners like California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, Pangea Legal Services, ACLU of Southern California, ACLU of Northern California, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area to reunite families and end threats of detention and deportation. Through these efforts, we’ve met so many families directly affected by ICE and GEO Group who are bravely speaking at rallies, talking to legislators, and helping Californians threatened by ICE.
You can support strikers' fight for justice by sending a message to ICE today. As you’re doing that, please take some time to learn about inspiring families like those of Gladis and Kassandra.
Eunice Hernández Chenier of Pangea Legal Services rallies a crowd of community members outside the San Francisco ICE Field Office. Behind her, a supporter waves a large painted banner with the demands of strikers detained inside Mesa Verde and Golden State Annex.
Gladys: ‘We have to support each other.’
Ever Oropeza-Paz has always been more than a little brother for Gladys, who is the oldest of four. She sees him as almost her own child, and she’s taken care of him her whole life. As a young girl in Honduras, Gladys carried Ever on her back when he didn’t have shoes. Growing up in east Los Angeles, she worried about Ever, who had to navigate gangs on the streets outside of their house when he was just 14 years old.
Ever was a teenager when Gladys last saw him at home. Now, he is almost 40. After completing his sentence in prison, Ever was transferred to Golden State Annex. Gladys still remembers their family being so happy when Ever finished his sentence, hopeful that he would come home and finally have a chance to correct his past. When they found out that he was in ICE custody, Gladys had nightmares that Ever would be deported to Honduras. “It’s going to be two years that he’s been in detention. He’s already spent so much time, his best years of life, in custody. It’s like he’s serving another sentence.”
Ever and other people in Golden State Annex also led a hunger strike in spring 2023. Days into the strike, she got a call that her brother was so dehydrated that he was being sent to a hospital in Kern County.
This year, she learned about the latest strike while watching the news on TV and immediately was scared for Ever. “To be honest, when you are on hunger strike, you could get punished, too. It’s a way to fight back. My concern was what was the outcome of that and his health. He’s not a teenager anymore.”
The news also alarmed Gladys because she hadn’t heard from Ever in a while. ICE has abruptly ended people’s ability to call their families, a decision which Ever explained to South Kern Sol is yet another “injustice perpetrated” to strip people of their rights.
At a protest in August, attendees wear duct tape over their mouths and wear posters hanging from their necks with quotes from people in detention. They represent detained people who have been silenced for their advocacy and participation in labor and hunger strikes.
When she thinks about Ever returning home, Gladys gets emotional. While she worked, Ever cared for her oldest daughter, who is now in her 20s. “He used to make scrambled eggs with big pieces of hot dogs for her to eat. He was so worried that she was not eating so he would make her whatever she wanted to eat.”
Gladys’ younger children grew up seeing Ever in courtrooms or during visits. Family events through the years – quinceañeras, graduations, weddings, her father’s funeral – have had a big hole. “For us, it’s so hard. It’s time for Ever to come out. He’s ready to help others not go through what we went through, to take care of my mom and support her. She’s ready to enjoy time with her son after so many years.”
Gladys knows that their family is not the only one hurting. “We have to support each other, and if we can all say something and do something, why not?”
Kassandra: ‘How is it that you’re getting all this money?’
Kassandra Silva’s partner Oscar Lopez Santos has been detained at Golden State Annex for almost a year. During one visit to see him, she remembers meeting a woman who didn’t know how to put money on her husband’s books and phone. Moved to help, Kassandra went to her house and walked through how to download and use the right app. “She felt so alone and didn’t know anybody else. But we’re not alone. Maybe we don’t want to ask for help for ourselves but we can do it.”
Kassandra didn’t start emotionally processing Oscar’s detainment until she was making the drive to Oakland from McFarland five months after seeing ICE take him away on her driveway. She and Oscar had been building a stable life together. Now, she’s stretched between being a mom, holding multiple jobs, and supporting Oscar.
Oscar grew up in San Francisco’s Mission District, and in the early days of dating he would take Kassandra, an Oakland native, all over the city. She laughs when she shares how they met over Instagram and can’t say enough about their partnership. Kassandra and Oscar dealt with housework and money as a team, and Oscar had started dropping off her son at football practice. She introduced Oscar and his son to her family at a quinceañera and Oscar’s face lit up “like a little kid.” As they mingled with her aunts and uncles, it felt like a great step forward for the couple. Kassandra and Oscar, who she calls her twin flame, had started dreaming of having children, too.
Kassandra Silva and Oscar Lopez appear together at a family member’s quinceañera. The two had begun dreaming of having children together.
When ICE took Oscar, Kassandra initially went into overdrive, refusing to believe the immigration officers who told her there was nothing she could do to fight his deportation. She looked up flights to Honduras, where Oscar has no family, and was prepared to borrow money and find a place for him there. Today, Kassandra visits him regularly at Golden State Annex. Between gas and putting in funds for Oscar’s commissary and phone calls, “it’s almost like a whole other paycheck.”
When Oscar told Kassandra that he and more than 40 other people were going on hunger strike, Kassandra remembers being worried about retaliation. “He’s one of the few who speaks up, like when there’s no toilet paper. Oscar started putting through grievances and that’s when they started getting basic hygiene items,” she says with pride.
While Oscar has the support of Kassandra, she says her partner is fighting for the other community members inside who don’t have the same resources to call their families. Last month, Oscar told Bay City News why he’s taking action: “If I keep my head down and I keep my hands crossed, they’re going to do this to me. They’re going to continue to do it to the people coming after me. And it has to stop somewhere.”
Oscar Lopez with his and Kassandra Silva’s sons De’Angelo and Damian after a school performance.
The GEO Group staff have put Oscar in solitary confinement before, allegedly because they found contraband among his personal items. Staff have also threatened him with a transfer to an Arizona detention center and arbitrarily sent him to Los Angeles and back. Kassandra wonders at the cost of all this. “That’s a lot of taxpayer money. A lot of people could be out on bond, on immigration parole. Why do they have these programs when they’re not using them?”
Kassandra grew up hearing about the experiences of undocumented family members and stories of people who got entangled in the criminal legal system in their youth. When she thinks about the immigration system, she says, “We’re charging people twice for a crime when they already did what they needed to do.”
For Kassandra, it comes back to how we are choosing to give public funds to GEO Group. “There’s so much money in the immigration system. There’s these billion dollar contracts with the government. How is it you’re getting all this money but not following your own handbook? If you can’t provide the bare minimum, why are you running this facility?”
Supporters of the Mesa Verde and Golden State Annex strikes line the barricades on the sidewalk outside the San Francisco ICE Field Office. They bear painted signs and banners calling for freedom for people detained and demanding that ICE to end the contracts with the GEO Group at the two facilities.