WASHINGTON — Three federal judges told the Trump administration Thursday what it didn’t want to hear: contracting out a detention center doesn’t contract out the Constitution.
A Ninth Circuit panel — Judges Margaret McKeown, Michelle Friedland and Eric Miller — unanimously denied the government’s emergency motion to stay a preliminary injunction over conditions at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California’s High Desert, lifting the administrative pause it had granted while it considered the case. The order was first flagged Thursday by POLITICO’s ace courts reporter Kyle Cheney.
The government’s core argument was simple: don’t blame us, blame GEO Group, the private prison company that runs the infamously foul Adelanto day to day. The panel wasn’t having it.
The Panel’s Answer: You Signed the Contract
Citing the Supreme Court’s 1988 ruling in West v. Atkins, the judges wrote that contracting out care for people in government custody doesn’t relieve the government of its constitutional duty to provide it, and doesn’t strip detainees of a way to vindicate their rights. Even if ICE doesn’t run Adelanto’s hallways, the panel found, it is “ultimately responsible” for keeping the conditions inside them constitutional — and it has options if GEO won’t comply: withhold payment, impose penalties, or move people out.
The government also argued the case ran afoul of Trump v. CASA, the Supreme Court’s 2025 limit on nationwide injunctions. The panel dismissed that too — this order covers one facility, one class, nothing universal.
Most damning: the government never seriously disputed that what the district court found inside Adelanto — including inconsistent access to potable water and adequate medical care — was unconstitutional. It just argued someone else should pay for fixing it.
What Was Actually Found Inside
The underlying injunction, issued Aug. 12 by U.S. District Judge Sunshine Suzanne Sykes, followed a lawsuit filed after two men died at Adelanto within weeks of each other last fall — Ismael Ayala-Uribe, 39, a former DACA recipient, and Gabriel García-Avilés, 56. Attorneys for detainees alleged the GEO Group failed to provide basic medical and mental health care, adequate food and water, and sanitary living conditions for nearly 2,000 people held at the center — allegations they say have already cost lives.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta backed the detainees in an amicus brief opposing what he called punitive conditions of confinement at Adelanto, after his office’s own inspectors documented overcrowding, understaffing and failures to treat urgent medical needs. ICE has disputed the findings — an agency field director told the court in a sworn declaration that clean water was already flowing 24 hours a day, sourced from the same municipal system that supplies the town of Adelanto itself, according to LAist.
Sykes wasn’t persuaded. The Ninth Circuit wasn’t either.
What This Means for Taxpayers
Here’s where it gets expensive, and not in the way DHS wants you to think.
GEO Group runs Adelanto under a roughly $400 million-a-year contract that runs through 2029 — a deal taxpayers already fund in full, ostensibly covering the water, meals and medical care detainees say they never got. That’s the accountability question sitting underneath this ruling: if the conditions were as bad as a federal judge and the state’s own inspectors found, taxpayers may have spent years paying full price for a service GEO wasn’t fully delivering.
The panel gave the government an out that doesn’t require new spending — it can enforce the contract it already has, withholding payment or fining GEO instead of asking Congress or the public for more. Whether DHS actually does that, rather than just absorbing the deficiency and moving on, is the story to watch.
Two other details matter for the ledger. First, the court noted the government never even tried to show what compliance would cost — it “has not provided an analysis that parses the expected costs,” the panel wrote, which is a remarkable thing to admit when you’re the one asking a court to let dangerous conditions continue while you appeal.
Second, the district court waived the bond ordinarily required under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c), and the panel upheld that. In plain terms: if the government ultimately wins this case, the detainees who sued won’t owe DHS a dime for the cost of fixing Adelanto in the meantime. The compliance bill stops with the agency — and by extension, the taxpayer.
Meanwhile, the underlying case continues. Opening briefs are due Sept. 17, answering briefs Oct. 15, optional reply briefs Oct. 29 — more months of federal attorney time, more months of court-appointed monitors, on a contract taxpayers are already paying nine figures a year to keep out of the news.
The government wanted a pause. It got a bill instead.
A federal appeals court just confirmed what Migrant Insider has been reporting for months: GEO Group’s excuses don’t hold up, and neither does DHS’s math. We’re about to find out exactly what taxpayers paid for and didn’t get — and that’s the story that needs paid subscribers behind it. Join the community that keeps this reporting alive, and tell one person who needs to read this.
“That’s the accountability question sitting underneath this ruling: if the conditions were as bad as a federal judge and the state’s own inspectors found, taxpayers may have spent years paying full price for a service GEO wasn’t fully delivering.”
…so fraud, right? Let me double check the dictionary on that word.
For-profit prisons need to be outlawed. Period.