Adelanto illustrates problems, spanning across presidential administrations, with what’s been described as ICE’s “layered system for inspections” and the agency’s unwillingness to hold its contractors accountable. The agency’s use of an inspection company called the Nakamoto Group to examine the contractors that operate its detention centers has contributed to problems persisting at ICE, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s watchdog office.

Responding to a query regarding the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties’ review of Adelanto, an ICE spokesperson pointed a journalist for The Atlantic to the results of Nakamoto’s preannounced inspection that occurred after the office’s review and the inspector general’s surprise inspection. In contrast to the office’s review and the inspector general’s findings, the company found Adelanto completely compliant with ICE’s standards, and called the inspector general’s work “erroneous” and “inflammatory.”

In a previous interview with POGO, Nakamoto Vice President Mark Saunders said the inspector general “took a housekeeping problem and made it a suicide issue” to “sell their product.” The “housekeeping problem” is a reference to the hanging bedsheets in detainees’ cells that Adelanto’s staff described as “nooses” to the inspector general team. A detainee had used a bedsheet to hang himself in 2017.

An examination by Disability Rights California, a nonprofit empowered by law to investigate conditions in facilities where people with disabilities are held, showed that some of Nakamoto’s conclusions were at odds with what the nonprofit found.

For example, according to the nonprofit’s report, Nakamoto’s finding that there were “no serious suicide attempts” at Adelanto in 2018 is “demonstrably false,” because it relies on the GEO Group’s narrow definition of suicide attempt “that is inconsistent with the definition used by the federal government.”

However, Disability Rights California quotes Adelanto facility records from 2018 saying a detainee was found “in the shower in fetal position, fully dressed, crying and holding left bleeding wrist,” and was subsequently hospitalized for five days. Medical records called it a “suicide attempt,” which the detainee confirmed.

A Department of Homeland Security advisory group and the inspector general have found flaws in Nakamoto’s approach to inspections of ICE detention centers. Nakamoto’s role at ICE has also come under congressional scrutiny in recent months.

“One of ICE’s performance goals is for all of its detention centers to pass inspection…[and] Nakamoto is well aware of the pressures to meet that target,” according to an NPR story this summer that cited a former agency official. ICE has claimed that 100% of its detention facilities have met agency standards since fiscal year 2013.

“Every negative report made about us has been factually refuted,” said Saunders, the Nakamoto vice president, in an email to POGO, while declining to provide details. “We have no agenda whatsoever but to do our work, and do it well.”

The agency’s Office of Detention Oversight also inspects detention centers. Unlike Nakamoto, the Office of Detention Oversight “uses effective methods and processes to thoroughly inspect facilities and identify deficiencies,” the inspector general wrote last year, though this office’s inspections are “too infrequent” (its last inspection of Adelanto was in 2014).

The Office of Detention Oversight’s most recent annual report on inspection findings states that in fiscal year 2017, it found “close to a threefold increase in the incidence of repeat deficiencies compared to the previous fiscal year.”

But even when ICE’s inspectors do find violations of standards, the inspector general wrote in January 2019, “ICE does not adequately hold detention facility contractors accountable.”

The watchdog found that between October 2015 and June 2018, ICE’s various inspectors had identified 14,003 deficiencies involving 106 contractor-run detention centers, but that “instead of holding facilities accountable through financial penalties, ICE frequently issued waivers to facilities with deficient conditions, seeking to exempt them from having to comply with certain detention standards.”

During that period, according to the inspector general, ICE only financially penalized “one facility as a result of a pattern of repeat deficiencies over a 3-year period, primarily related to health care and mental health standards.” The facility and the contractor operating it were not named.