LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL?
- Quinn DeFilippes
- 4 days ago
- 9 min read
By Quinn DeFilippes (He/Him)
BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS
A meager hour and a half away from downtown Pomona and beyond the San Gabriel Mountains lies the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, where migrants endure poisoning, undernourishment, and trafficking. The facility is run by the GEO Group, a private prison corporation that profits from the incarceration of immigrants. Reports and investigations have shown that detainees are routinely denied medical care, given spoiled or contaminated food, and subjected to hazardous chemicals like HDQ Neutral – sometimes in (iStock) ways that violate federal law. I explore the poetry of former detainee Carlos Hidalgo. This post covers Hidalgo’s torture within Adelanto, Adelanto’s many detainees' experiences after being trafficked by ICE, and the terror that ICE has unleashed upon the Pomona community and broader LA county.
CALL ME LIBERTAD
Former immigrant detainee Carlos Hidalgo captures his trafficking and torture after being detained in his poem, “CALL ME LIBERTAD:”
Some of the things we see are apples with worms,
Maggots, expired juices, and other badly spoiled food.
Others are denied basic care, like fever or cold medicine.
The medical department solution?
“Drink a lot of water.”
Every day we wonder who will be deported next.
Every morning we look around for our friends.
We make sure they are still here.
Those who are deported are taken at the wee hours,
Setting that fear among us as if we were kids afraid of the dark.
While we wait behind these walls, all we can do is watch.
Watch all that we’ve worked for all these years go down in flames.
And our families?
They are scattered, living with relatives.
And our children?
They ask and wonder, “When is Daddy coming home?”
We don’t ask for much. Just for liberty and justice for all (Hidalgo 15).
While highlighting the neglect and dehumanization inside the facility, Hidalgo also gives readers a sensory illustration of the environment: the spoiled food, lack of care, and imposed helplessness. The poem evokes the viewer's senses of smell, taste, and sight by highlighting the rotten food and drink while underlining the absence of medical treatment. Echoing the privations described in the poem, the mistreatment of detainees at Adelanto is amplified by the for-profit logic of the GEO Group. While Hidalgo offers a vivid exploration of how detainees are subject to malnourishment and trafficking, the facility used a toxin, HDQ Neutral, in ways that violated six provisions of its pesticide label, putting detainees at risk of illness and poisoning. Perhaps Adelanto’s more debilitating effect is the powerlessness and enforced voicelessness it imposes on detainees. Hidalgo captures this phenomenon in his poem: “While we [the collective detainees] wait behind these walls, all we can do is watch.” That sense of impotence is compounded by “fear among us as if we were kids afraid of the dark,”(15). The detainees can only wait for their friends and fellow detainees to be ripped away and deported. This kind of dread prevails at Adelanto. As GEO Group envisions profits, the facility's employees separate and destroy families and leave children wondering “When is Daddy coming home?” (15). Hidalgo is effective in presenting Adelnato and the motivations of GEO Group as anti-American, comparing the injustices he experienced as antithetical to the Declaration of Independence. He poignantly concludes his poem by expressing his desire for "liberty and justice for all.”
César Martínez, a human geographer and abolitionist, effectively demonstrates how Adelanto operates in his 2025 article “Migrant Abolition Geographies: Toxic Caging and Cuerpo” about immigrant detention centers, which operate as “toxic carceral environments,” where bodily harm, chemical exposure, and environmental neglect become mechanisms of control and dehumanization. Martínez’s concept of “toxic caging” helps clarify what Hidalgo expresses how the environment itself becomes a weapon of control, Martínez argues that detention centers like Adelanto don’t just punish people with walls, but with the environment itself: the poisoned air, the spoiled food, the sickness that spreads without care. All of these factors become part of the system of control. Hidalgo’s poem shows how this “toxic” control seeps into the body, making people’s pain invisible but constant. Martínez characterizes this toxicity as slow violence, which is often unexplored and minimized. Hidalgo's description of events within the Adelanto facility is not bred by chaos but instead by designed brutality that keeps detention profitable and instills powerlessness into those trafficked, as if they were “kids afraid of the dark” (Hidalgo 15).
Pomona Persecution
While the Adelanto Immigration Facility may seem anomalous to the Pomona community, Hidalgo's torture is emblematic of facilities across all of Los Angeles County. According to American-Spanish speaking newspaper company Telemundo, federal agents in downtown Los Angeles trafficked undocumented laborers to the Adelanto Detention Facility. Perhaps one theme Hidalgo's poem could have also explored was the lack of a lawyers after being bartered all the way to the GEO Adelanto Ice Processing facility. Indeed, the question may not only be “when’s daddy coming home” but also "where is he?” The lack of hygienic resources has also expanded to where victims reportedly have not been able to change underwear in 10 days and have reused the same towel over and over again.
While this treatment defies humane considerations, it does conform to profit-driven motivations. In June, GEO Group’s facility population jumped from about 350 to 1,200 in about 10 days. This overcrowding is part of what Martinez calls the intensification of confinement — where private companies like GEO Group turn human suffering into economic returns. The more people they detain, the more they profit. It’s not just about control; it’s about extraction.
Adelanto itself is designed to break people down slowly, quietly, and profitably. Hidalgo’s descriptions of silence and waiting mirror Martínez’s idea that detention turns people into disappeared bodies, present but unseen by the rest of the country. Through this profit-driven system, human beings from LA are being trafficked away and then kept unseen from even their lawyers and “loved ones.” This protocol of enforced suffering isn’t random.
It is a phased control machine that initially disconnects and then punishes through systematic malnourishment, poisoning, and enforced squalor.
Indeed, this torture facility has become a source of abject terror to the Los Angeles and the Pomona community. The fear of being seized within Pomona has caused locals to avoid reporting to their jobs or seeking help at charity centers. According to a local day laborer, Carlos (who did not wish his last name to be listed), he had to watch how other laborers were trafficked by ICE. CNN recounted his experience, noting “how the fear of soft-target raids is changing undocumented behavior.” Carlos was left so powerless while watching his friends get trafficked that he was reduced to merely crying in response. Carlos’s experience with ICE is reminiscent of the terrors felt by Hidalgo, where he was similarly powerless watching his friends be trafficked away in Adelanto. The article illustrated that though the terror may seem limited to the Pomona community, it has actually created “a shockwave of fear through the migrant community” (Elam). The worker rights director for the Pomona Economic Opportunity Center, Alexis Todorado, describes how ICE operations have gripped Pomona in a“chilling effect,” where workers fear deportation and are kept away from the jobs they depend on. The GEO Group’s network of facilities provides the capacity for an unrelenting, multifaceted campaign of for-profit torture. In fact, this “shockwave” is so great that it has affected those especially in need, with ICE often raiding Pomona’s charitable organizations, thereby keeping migrants away from receiving the aid they require.
REHABILITATION PROGRAMS TO INDIVIDUALS?
This creeping power leads to a natural question: Who is GEO Group? What does it do? How are they in California? Has it created “shockwaves" in the nation as a whole? Well, the Floridian-based GEO Group’s professed commitment is to provide “evidence-based rehabilitation programs to individuals while in-custody and post-release into the community through the GEO Continuum of Care®.” Although intriguingly, its rehabilitation programs include both psychological torture along physical.
The GEO Group is the largest private-prison owner in America. Its reach is shaped by its profits, lobbies, political donations, and soft power to wash its reputation. Concerningly, the GEO Group's business model incentivises both the carceral system that aims to house more convicts and, in the case of immigration, rising numbers of trafficked individuals. This private for-profit industry was tailored to Trump’s electoral victory (November 7, 2024), as GEO Group Executive Chairman George Zoley said on an earnings call just two days after Trump got elected that "The GEO Group was built for this unique moment in our country's history and the opportunities it will bring." Indeed, the GEO Group accurately predicted “changes concerning laws and crime” that the new administration would bring, raising “private prisons' necessity and profitability, thus the companies’ existence” (Hidalgo 10).
Although California has seemingly banned for-profit and private detention centers, in practice, that has not been the case. California’s attempt seemingly would never find success, as it violated the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. ICE activity within LA County and across the nation has caused the GEO Group’s continued profitability to skyrocket.
Due to this failure, the Adelanto Detention Facility causes abject terror beyond the San Gabriel mountains in Pomona and contributes to the broad erosion of American ideals. Its torture reaps profits while its alliance with ICE has caused the United States to violate its commitment to “Liberty and justice for all.” The only way to dismantle this dangerous alliance is to halt ICE enforcement in Pomona and the rest of LA County, physically demolish the Adelanto Detention Center, and ultimately remove for-profit prisons and detention centers not only in California but the nation as a whole. For now we also must address how detainees are trafficked and how community solutions cnan be shaped in Pomona. We must expand community-based support, like rapid-response networks, local legal defense, and resource hubs, offering a shield against ICE’s terror. Although this is not a final solution it provides us with a way of countering ICE and for-profit reaped detention centers and protecting our community members.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
“Private Prison Company Poisoned Immigrants at Adelanto for a Decade.” Earthjustice, 3 Oct. 2022, earthjustice.org/press/2021/private-prison-company-poisoned-immigrants-at-adelanto-for-a-decade
Hidalgo Poem Fialho, Christina, et al. Call Me Libertad: Poems Between Borders. Edited by Alicia Partnoy et
al.,Illustrated by Art24, Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC), San Francisco, California nia, 2016, liz-martinez-dyr6.squarespace.com/s/Call_Me_Libertad_Poems_Between_Borders_Final.pdf. Elam,Stephanie, et al. “How the Fear of Soft-Target Raids Is Changing Undocumented Migrants’ Behavior.” CNN, 2 May 2025, www.cnn.com/2025/05/02/us/pomona-califor nia-day-laborers-raid-fear . Katherine Culliton-Gonzalez and Lama Elsharif “Trump’s Budget Bill Benefits Private Immigration Detention Companies That Donated to Trump - Crew: Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.” CREW |Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, 23 July 2025, www.citizensforethics.org/reports investigations/crew-investigations/trumps-b
udget-bill-benefits-private-immigration-detention-companies-that donated-to
trump/#:~:text=A%20look%20at%20their%20political,raise%20ethics%20and%20corruption%20concer ns . Brooke Eisen, Lauren. “Califor nia’s Attempt to Ban Private Immigration Detention Hits a Snag.” Brennan Centerfor Justice, 13 Oct. 2021, www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/califor nias-attempt-ban-private
immigration-detention-hits-snag. Brooke Eisen, Lauren. “What Trump’s Victory Means for the Private Prison Industry.” Brennan Center for Justice,25 Nov. 2024,
www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/what-trumps-victory-means-private-prisonindustry . Martinez, Cinthya. "Migrant Abolition Geo graphies: Toxic Caging and Cuerpo-Territorio in California." Gender, Place & Culture (2025): 1-21.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/388789312_Migrant_Abolition_Geo graphies_Toxic_Caging_and_Cuer po-Territorio_in_Califor nia
Sturmhoefel War nberg, Linnéa. "Maintaining the Prison-Industrial Complex: Private Actors and Power: A Multi Dimensional Power Analysis of CoreCivic and The GEO Group." (2021). https://www.diva portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1521521/FULLTEXT02.pdf
Photo one: “Pomona Downtown Aerial with the San Gabriel Mountain Range in The...” iStock, www.istockphoto.com/photo/pomona-aerial-with-san-gabriel-mountains-gm2216765893-633390694 . Photo 2 (double negative)
Victoria, Anthony. “Immigrants in Detention: Adelanto’s Immigration Carceral Dilemma.” IE COMMUNITY NEWS , 15 Sept. 2017, iecn.com/immigrantsdetentionpartone .
Linthicum, Kate “Expansion of Adelanto Immigrant Detention Center Underway.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 8 July 2014, www.latimes.com/local/la-me-ff-adelanto-immigration-20140709-story.html . Photo 3: Shinn, Dr. “Psycholo gically Speaking: Why Are Kids so Afraid of the Dark?” Variations,
www.variationspsycholo gy.com/blo gs/why-are-kids-so-afraid-of-the-dark-11-things-parents-should-know. Photo 4:
Acosta, Carmen Molina. “Psycholo gical Torture: Ice Responds to Covid-19 with Solitary Confinement.” The Intercept, 11 July 2023, theintercept.com/2020/08/24/ice-detention-coronavirus-solitary-confinement/.Photo 5:
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/video/on-air/3-day-laborers-detained-during-ice-raid-inpomona/3783450/ Photo 6:
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Author's Memo:
My chosen audience is primarily to inform the Pomona Community about what's been left in the wake of Adelanto Detention Center. My piece is also showcases the struggles of Adelanto with the entirety of LA county along with the nation as a whole.I landed upon this audience as although it may be considered far or farther away from Pomona I ended up landing upon them because of movements like ICE out of Pomona knowing that the Pomona community has instilled pro-migrant and pro-advocacy attitudes. While also informing a broader audience and giving a local lesson to a problem that is emblematic across the country.
I hope to circulate my newsletter by using Gente Organizadas Cuaderno which should support my outreach to the local Pomona community. Throughout my piece this was important as I connected the terrors within Pomona and to the ones an hour and half away in Pomona. My multi modality instilled a connection between the two with having images of terrors brought upon by ICE and the terrors of being trafficked to Adelanto. My piece also utilizes headers as signposts to signal to the reader what I will be discussing like P: omona (and) ersecution which gives a cue to the reader that I will be discussing persecution within Pomona. My images were used to create outrage in the community to an issue that they may not be as privy too.
AI Use:
AI (claude) used to help find sources to bolster evidence and for minor editing.
Quinn is a freshman at Pitzer College from Washington DC, who hopes to write about migrant justice in the city of Pomona.
