California's Democrat-dominated legislature is waging a fierce battle to rid the state of private immigration detention centers, which many lawmakers say prioritize profits over the health and safety of detainees. Yet the GEO Group, a private prison company with some 20 detention centers across the country — including one in California’s Mojave desert and another in the state’s agricultural Central Valley — continues to secure billions of dollars worth of contracts from the federal government for operations in the Golden State.

Now, behind-the-scenes communications and deals between GEO and leaders of the cash-strapped city of Adelanto are shedding light on how the company has influenced decision-makers and sought out workarounds in order to continue operating one of the country's largest immigration detention centers.

Emails obtained through the California Public Records Act raise questions about whether GEO has been forthright about its business at its detention center in Adelanto. The documents appear to contradict company CEO George Zoley's statements, in a sworn declaration in federal court, about the extent of his coordination with city leaders in executing on a plan that would allow the company to not only keep the 1,940-bed facility open, but also expand business.

The correspondence also offers a window into GEO's strategy, including urging Adelanto city officials to pull out of a detention center contract and promising to continue paying the city $50,000 annually for complying with the request.

The GEO Group, a private company, operates the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Adelanto processing Center in Adelanto. Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun

Critics have called GEO’s tactics corrupt and unlawful, and have accused the company of engaging in a quid pro quo.

“California has been clear that we are against for-profit detention and expansion of detention in our state,” said Jackie Gonzalez, policy director for Immigrant Defense Advocates in Sacramento. “GEO has repeatedly and consistently engaged in a pattern and practice of circumventing state laws and they need to be held accountable.”

A spokesperson for GEO said the company would not provide comment for this story. The Florida-based company, which also operates facilities in Australia, the United Kingdom and South Africa, projected $2.49 billion in revenue in 2019 in its third-quarter earnings report. Zoley, the company CEO, earned $6.6 million in total compensation in 2018.

A sign with the Adelanto city motto "the city with unlimited possibilities" welcomes visitors to the city on Air Expressway Road in Adelanto, Calif., on Jan. 22, 2020. Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun

'The city with unlimited possibilities'

The 85-mile trip from Los Angeles to Adelanto begins along interstates 10 and 15. The journey continues over the Cajon Pass, which cuts between the San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountains, and culminates along Highway 395 in the Mojave desert, where fields of Joshua trees give way to stoplights, strip malls and tract home developments.

Known as “the city with unlimited possibilities,” Adelanto has teetered on the edge of a financial crisis for years. Its leaders hitched the city's future to cannabis and prisons, in a bid to generate revenue and some well-paid jobs with benefits for its more than 33,000 residents.

In 2010, Adelanto sold a prison, the 650-bed Adelanto Community Correctional Facility, to the GEO Group for $28 million; GEO converted the prison into the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, which houses asylum-seekers and other people awaiting either their next hearing or deportation. (GEO expanded the facility to 1,940 beds in 2015.)

Detainees walk around outside at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Adelanto Processing Center in Adelanto. Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun

The city in 2011 entered into a contract with ICE, known as an intergovernmental service agreement or IGSA, to provide housing, safekeeping, medical care and other services to detainees, on behalf of the federal agency. Adelanto subcontracted with GEO to operate the detention center and fulfill the city's obligations to ICE.

The city provided minimal oversight of facility operations, however, instead acting as little more than a middleman between ICE and GEO, paying the same amount it received from the federal government to the prison company, according to a 2018 report from the state auditor.

As part of the contractual arrangement, GEO paid the city more than $1 million in annual fiscal mitigation payments and administrative fees. That included $963,600 stemming from a bed tax of $1 per bed, occupied or not, per day, for the detention center and the GEO-owned state prison located next door, Desert View Modified Community Correctional Facility, as well as $50,000 for facilitating the subcontract with ICE, according to the 2016 development agreement between GEO and the city.

The Desert View Correctional Facility is operated by the GEO Group and may be converted to an immigration detention facility in Adelanto. Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun

The city’s civic organizations reaped benefits, too. City Manager Jessie Flores asked GEO for donations to local causes, including $7,500 for the city’s annual Christmas parade. In one email, Flores called a Jan. 16, 2019, meeting with Zoley and his executive team “very productive and informative” and asked for a $3,500 contribution to the baseball league.

“The league is in desperate need of equipment such as uniforms, baseball bats, ground maintenance, park usage fees, utilities, etc.,” he wrote in a Feb. 5, 2019, email to Greg Hillers, GEO Group’s assistant warden of finance and administration. “Your continued support and consideration is very much appreciated.”

The detention center has at times brought notoriety to the city. A 2018 report from Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General, for example, found that medical staff at the Adelanto facility disregarded federal regulations, making detainees wait months or years to receive basic dental care, and said guards ignored more than a dozen “nooses” made from bedsheets. Seven inmates attempted suicide between December 2016 and October 2017, the report said.

While the GEO facility employs hundreds of workers, prosperity is not widespread. About 35% of Adelanto residents live below the poverty level and the city's median household income is just over $40,000, according to the 2018 American Community Survey. Residents talk about driving "down the hill" — an average commute of about 40 minutes — to find decent work.

Show caption Hide caption A detainee who gave only his first name of Jesus (center with bandaged leg) said he had been denied medical treatment for his swollen leg... A detainee who gave only his first name of Jesus (center with bandaged leg) said he had been denied medical treatment for his swollen leg for more than a week at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Adelanto Processing Center. Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun

Jose Villafuerte, who teaches biology at the local high school and lives in nearby Victorville, said Adelanto's reliance on prisons contributes to his students' "grim" outlook of their city and future. Along with the immigration detention center and the GEO-owned state prison, Adelanto is also home to a San Bernardino County jail, the High Desert Detention Center.

"The fact that their city has a jail and a detention center and that's all it has, to them it's a negative thing," he said.

But GEO, employees and some city leaders would disagree — and go to lengths to preserve the company's operation in the High Desert.

Jose Villafuerte speaks against converting the Desert View Correctional Facility into an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility at Adelanto City Hall on Jan. 22, 2020. Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun

GEO sends termination letters to city

Among the state laws targeting private detention centers that have taken effect since 2018 is SB 29.

It effectively prevents private companies like GEO from expanding detention centers, so long as cities or counties remain part of the contract after Jan. 1, 2018. But the law contains a loophole: The growth limitations do not apply to contracts between private companies and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the federal Department of Homeland Security. As a result, the city of Adelanto essentially stood in the way of GEO expanding its Mojave desert facility in the future.

The law was the backdrop to a series of communication between GEO and city officials that began as early as January 2019.

Zoley, the company's CEO, called Flores, the Adelanto city manager, and left a message on Feb. 5, 2019, emails show. Looking for Flores, he also called the Adelanto facility’s warden and the city clerk.

The emails don’t explicitly state why the CEO needed to reach the city manager and don’t mention the state law. But the correspondence indicates that when they finally spoke, the two discussed Flores sending out a pair of letters to GEO and ICE, announcing the city’s decision to terminate its contracts for the detention facility.

A GEO employee emailed Flores on Feb. 6, 2019, to follow up on the conversation with Zoley.

“Per your conversation with Dr. Zoley this morning, please find attached the two letters discussed,” the email reads. “If possible he would like them to go out today.”

Two-and-a-half hours later, another GEO employee sent Flores a separate email containing a one-sentence clarification from Zoley. The subject: “Term Letter,” as in termination of the subcontract.

An empty male dormitory in the unit known as Adelanto West at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Processing Center in Adelanto. Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun

“George asked me to let you know that there would be no financial impact to the city,” she wrote.

One minute after that, Flores forwarded the first email — the one with the two letters attached — to the city’s finance director and attorney.

“Please take a moment to review the time sensitive attachments,” he wrote. “I would like to get these two separate documents on City letterhead and out by the end of the day.”

In formal language, the letters announced the city’s intention to terminate its agreements in three months. The letters were addressed to officials at ICE and GEO and ended with the same sign-off: Very truly yours, Jessie Flores.

'It feels... like a quid pro quo'

Discussions between GEO and city leaders regarding the termination of the detention center contracts stalled for more than a month. During that time, the Adelanto City Council had placed Flores on administrative leave for an undisclosed reason, pending the results of an internal investigation.

The council reinstated the city manager on March 7. On March 13, a GEO employee sent Flores a memo from Zoley.

“We are respectfully requesting that the City of Adelanto give its notice of discontinuation to ICE,” Zoley said in the memo.

In addition to the bed taxes, GEO would continue paying the city $50,000 a year, even though Adelanto would no longer be contractually involved in the detention center and the city would have no oversight role of the facility, he said. Terminating the contract, he said, would “reduce the city’s legal and financial exposure to ICE critics advancing claims for detainee records, or other facility documents.”

A residential neighborhood in Adelanto. Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun

“The annual financial compensation to the City of $50,000 for facilitating the IGSA will be continued by GEO,” he wrote. GEO would also keep paying the bed tax — nearly $1 million — outlined in the 2016 development agreement between the company and the city, he said.

Critics see GEO’s pledge to continue paying Adelanto $50,000, with no strings attached, as an incentive to get the struggling city to comply with its request.

“The fact that these payments are in writing is shocking to me,” said Mark Fleming, associate director of litigation for the National Immigrant Justice Center in Chicago. “It feels a little bit like a quid pro quo: ‘If you step aside, we’ll make these payments to you.’”

“There’s no basis for them to make that payment at that point,” he said.

Virginia Canter, chief ethics counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, was more cautious in her reading of Zoley’s statement. She said she would need more information about the original contractual agreement, and how long GEO would continue paying the city $50,000, to determine whether the arrangement presents any legal or ethical concerns.

“You always have to question why a party is being paid something when they are not providing anything in return,” she said.

Cities end contracts with nearly identical letters

The Adelanto City Council never voted on whether to end its contractual agreements with GEO and ICE and residents did not have the opportunity to comment on the move.

Yet two weeks after receiving Zoley’s memo, Flores notified GEO and ICE that the City of Adelanto would be terminating its agreements with both parties. He put the text provided by GEO on city letterhead. He changed the date of the letters from Feb. 6 to March 27.

Flores would later say he terminated the contract “due to the rising costs of all the continuing records requests.”

“The decision I made was strictly related to the legal fees,” he said in a July 31, 2019, phone interview with The Desert Sun. “We were simply a pass-through. That pass-through was costing the city a tremendous amount of resources that we don’t have.”

Flores did not respond to more recent requests for comment.

The language contained in Flores’ letters to GEO and ICE had been used before, according to correspondence obtained through the state Public Records Act.

Like Adelanto, the city of McFarland, a community of about 14,500 people located about 135 miles northwest of Los Angeles in the rural Central Valley, has embraced the prison industry. It's home to two GEO-owned prisons — the 700-bed Central Valley Modified Community Correctional Facility and the 700-bed Golden State Modified Community Correctional Facility. It also held an IGSA contract with ICE for GEO's 400-bed Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield.

On Nov. 30, 2018, John Wooner, the McFarland city manager at the time, notified GEO that the city would be ending its agreements with the company and ICE. In a letter, he said the city's agreements with the company and ICE had been a "satisfactory arrangement for the City" until the state started adopting laws targeting detention facilities.

When he sent two more letters to GEO and ICE on Dec. 19, 2018, informing them that the city would be ending its agreements in three months, he used nearly identical letters as those provided by GEO to Adelanto.

He, too, concluded the letters with the sign-off, “Very truly yours.”

At the time, Wooner told The Bakersfield Californian that the McFarland City Council had voted in closed session about three months earlier to back out of the agreement with ICE. He said the city decided to pull out following a change of heart among council members, the paper reported.

“The council has decided it doesn’t want to be part of it anymore,” Wooner told The Californian. He would not elaborate, the paper reported.

Wooner disappeared in May 2019 and was found dead in the Kern River Canyon last August. He was facing both personal and professional stress at the time of his death, according to The Californian.

McFarland Mayor Manuel Cantu Jr. did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

'That's not what Mr. Zoley told the court'

Adelanto formally terminated its contracts with ICE and GEO on June 25, 2019.

The next day, ICE initiated a nine-month deal directly with GEO for the operation of the facility. The temporary contract, worth nearly $63 million, was supposed to run through March 25, 2020.

The transaction GEO had sought was complete.

The exterior of the Adelanto East building at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Adelanto Processing Center. Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun

Zoley was later questioned about his communication with Adelanto in advance of the city ending the contracts, as part of a lawsuit regarding conditions at the detention center. In a Dec. 10, 2019, declaration in federal court, Zoley did not mention the February call with Flores about the termination letters, nor the March memo he sent urging the city to end the agreement.

“To the best of my recollection, I met on one occasion with officials from the City of Adelanto to discuss the possible termination of the IGSA for the Adelanto Facility,” he said in the declaration. “Other than that one meeting, I am aware of no other communications between me and officials from the City of Adelanto related to the termination of the IGSA.”

Nashville attorney Andrew Free, who is handling the lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiffs, said he was surprised to learn about Zoley’s correspondence with the city.

“We were surprised because that’s not what GEO officials testified to under oath and that’s not what Mr. Zoley told the court,” he said.

AB 32 could force Adelanto to 'pursue disincorporation'

With the City of Adelanto out of the detention center contract by late June 2019, it appeared GEO had secured not only a direct contract with ICE, but also preserved its ability to expand the facility in the future. But state lawmakers were far from surrendering in their fight to end the use of private prisons and detention centers — even those run under contract with the federal government.

Rather, lawmakers doubled down.

Assemblymember Rob Bonta, a Democrat who represents Alameda and parts of Oakland, introduced AB 32 in December 2018 seeking to phase out the use of private prisons. But on June 25, 2019 — the same day Adelanto’s agreements with ICE and GEO ended — he amended the bill to include private detention centers.

That change meant GEO and ICE would be able to continue operating the Adelanto detention center until the contract expired in March 2020, but would not be allowed to renew the agreement.

The Desert View Correctional Facility is operated by the GEO Group and may be converted to an immigration detention facility in Adelanto, Calif., on Jan. 22, 2020. Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun

The potential closure of the facility posed a major threat to the city of Adelanto’s coffers, as Flores wrote in a Sept. 17, 2019, letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom, urging him to veto the bill.

The detention center provides 760 jobs for local residents, Flores said in the letter. The GEO Group, he said, is the city’s largest property taxpayer; its facilities have a total assessed value of more than $118 million. Additionally, he said, GEO pays the city more than $1 million annually, as part of a “mitigation agreement that offsets any negative effects the facility may have on our community.”

“The agreement provides for two sheriff deputies and more than $1 million in payments directly to the City’s general fund, which is approximately 10 percent of our total revenue,” he wrote.

Adelanto would fall even deeper into financial distress if the state forced the facility to close, Flores said.

“Considering that the city is currently faced with a $6 million structural deficit, this bill will put the chances of the City closing the gap simply out of reach," he wrote. "This will likely result in the City being forced to pursue disincorporation.”

The segregation unit at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Adelanto Processing Center. Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun

Despite the city’s pleas, Newsom signed AB 32 on Oct. 11, 2019.

The law generally prohibits the private operation of prisons and immigration detention facilities in the state as of Jan. 1, 2020. However, the legislation makes some exceptions. It allows for-profit companies to operate detention centers for government agencies, as long as the contract was in effect before Jan. 1, 2020, but it bars extensions of those agreements.

The fight over private prisons continues

Fast-forward a few months and GEO had again succeeded in not only securing a new contract with ICE, but also expanding its facility.

On Dec. 19, 2019, less than two weeks before AB 32 took effect, ICE and GEO inked a 15-year contract for the Adelanto detention center. The new contract not only covers the 1,940-bed detention center, but also allows for the facility's expansion by incorporating GEO's 750-bed Desert View prison in Adelanto.

The state correctional department is expected to terminate its contract with Desert View this winter, according to GEO. The city of Adelanto needs to approve a permit modification for the prison before the expansion can go through.

One of several billboards advertising immigration deportation defense sits just outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Adelanto Processing Center in Adelanto, Calif. Jay Calderon, for USA TODAY

The company also got a 15-year contract for its Mesa Verde facility, which covers the 400-bed detention center as well as GEO's two 700-bed prisons in McFarland

Democratic members of California's congressional delegation, other state leaders and immigration advocates have slammed ICE, alleging the federal agency dodged AB 32 by rushing to lock in last-minute contracts worth several billion dollars for GEO and the other operators of the state's existing detention centers.

GEO didn't stop there. Two days before the law took effect, GEO sued Newsom and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, arguing that AB 32 unlawfully undermines the federal government’s ability to detain people in California as part of federal immigration proceedings. The suit asks a federal court to declare the law unconstitutional and bar it from taking effect. The Trump administration also sued California on Friday, saying the ban on for-profit prison contracts is unconstitutional and interferes with the federal prison and immigration detention system.

Along with the lawsuit in federal court, the fight over privately run immigrant detention centers continues in the state capital, where Assemblyman Bonta has pledged to push for new legislation creating a mechanism to enforce health, safety and welfare standards inside private prisons and detention centers.

"GEO can only do its work when it's in the dark, when it's hidden, when it's in the shadows," Bonta said. "There needs to be accountability, there needs to be oversight, there needs to be protection of Californians with respect to what GEO and other for-profit, private operators of detention centers and prisons are doing."

The fight is also playing out in the city of Adelanto's council chambers.

Video: ICE detention center expansion divides Adelanto citizens Adelanto citizens and employees of GEO Group are divided on ICE Detention Center expansion and voice their concerns during public comment. Palm Springs Desert Sun

On Wednesday night, a standing-room-only crowd packed the city's first Planning Commission hearing regarding the plan to convert GEO's Adelanto prison into an annex for the detention center. GEO officials clad in suits, and GEO employees grasping signs reading, "please save our jobs," filled rows of seats, while immigrant advocates and some residents leaned against the walls.

Regina Duran, a 15-year Adelanto resident and mother of four who has been employed by GEO for more than eight years, said working for the company has changed her life. Before joining GEO as an officer, she said, she worked as a hairdresser and relied on welfare. She has since bought a house and been promoted, she said.

"GEO has brought to the city unlimited possibilities," Duran said.

But Jose Servin of the California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance encouraged the commissioners to embrace a new vision for the city.

"Quality of life doesn't go up where there are prisons," Servin said. "Quality of life goes up where there are hospitals, where there are parks, where there are better schools. That's not going to happen with GEO."

According to city staff, the commission is expected to meet on Feb. 5 for a second hearing on whether to allow GEO to convert the prison into an immigration detention center serving ICE.

Rebecca Plevin reports on immigration for The Desert Sun. Reach her at rebecca.plevin@desertsun.com. Follow her on Twitter at @rebeccaplevin.