Detainees at an Inland Empire federal lockup where large numbers of undocumented immigrants are regularly housed pending deportation hearings will have the right to privileged, confidential phone calls with their attorneys from now on, following settlement of a civil rights lawsuit, it was announced Wednesday.
Attorneys for the ACLU Foundation of Southern California said the agreement with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security over the end of telephonic restrictions at the Adelanto Processing Center operated by prison management firm GEO Group Inc. satisfies legal challenges that began in 2018 in the case of Ernesto Torres et al. v. DHS and U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement, filed in U.S. District Court in Riverside.
“Confidential legal calls are a critical lifeline for people in immigration detention to win their freedom and fight against their deportations — not to mention a right protected by the Constitution,” ACLU spokeswoman Eva Bitran said. “The settlement safeguarding access to counsel is all the more critical in light of ICE’s vast raids throughout Southern California, which have resulted in a population boom at Adelanto.”
One of the plaintiffs’ principal points in the federal lawsuit was that GEO-hired guards were routinely limiting “detainees’ access to outgoing legal telephone calls.”
“(They also) prohibited incoming telephone calls to detainees, charged prohibitively expensive calling rates and monitored and recorded telephonic conversations,” according to the suit. “Defendants (haven’t) allowed detainees access to confidential phone calls, even when speaking with their counsel about privileged matters.”
The settlement applies corrective measures to all of the impediments, under a two-year court-monitored program, according to the ACLU.
Points and authorities in documents, including motions to dismiss, filed by the government were under seal in the court system’s web portal, evidently due to privacy concerns related to the named detainees.
Los Angeles-based Immigrant Defenders Law Center joined the ACLU in waging the legal battle, and the center’s chief executive officer, Lindsay Toczylowski, said the organization was “delighted to reach a settlement that will make it easier for our clients to access the legal counsel they are entitled to.”
“GEO was profiteering on the backs of imprisoned people, which prevented them from exercising their rights and disabled them from regaining their freedom,” Toczylowski said.