We leave Los Angeles at 9am, four of us in the car. We have packed water bottles and granola bars, books and journals. We are preparing for long waits. We’ve packed a few different long-sleeve cover-ups. We are preparing for cold indoor air and a strict dress code. No ripped jeans, no exposed shoulders, clothing not too tight but not too loose either.

The drive takes us north on the 5, then to the 14, then the 138, then the 18, up over the mountain passes into the high desert. We pass Vasquez Rocks where Star Trek filmed an episode, and Agua Dulce, where Jordan Peele filmed Nope. As we go through Palmdale and Pearblossom and Lake Los Angeles and Little Rock, we pass ranches, trailer parks, a wide field of Joshua Trees.

K drives. L is up front navigating. T is in the backseat with me, crocheting. She is always the prepared one in our friend group, carrying around a practical purse packed with snacks, bandaids, painkillers, writing supplies, books, crafts. Now she’s prepared for the hour and forty minute drive to our destination.

We are chatty and caffeinated as we catch up with each other. I tell them about my recent residency at VCCA. K talks about her adult children and how busy they are. L and T both speak very passionately at length about the challenges of being educators at a time when A.I. is being foisted upon almost every creative discipline. We all get into a very animated discussion about how much we hate Chatgpt. We yell about how its data centers are sucking up all the water as we drive through the flat, beige, dry landscape.

We are on our way to the Adelanto ICE Processing Facility near Victorville, CA. We are volunteering as part of the Adelanto Visitation and Advocacy Network. Our job today is to meet with detained immigrants and then relay any information or questions back to AVAN, to see if we can connect them with someone who can connect them with resources. Our job is to make the confounding, byzantine, immigration and asylum-seeking process just slightly less confounding and byzantine. Mostly, our job is to talk and listen. Mostly, our presence is a refusal of disposability.

A few of us have done this before. Before the pandemic, we made the drive once a month, met maskless with detained people in a crowded visitation room, did our best to remember the information they provided us about their bond hearing dates, whether or not they had a lawyer, etc. Now the political landscape is even more bleak. Same president, different administration. Same carceral logics, even harsher system.

Adelanto is a formidable campus of chain link fences and razor wire, surrounded by desert. I am trying to not reach for the cliche metaphors of “scary empty desert” but the facility is isolated, and most of the people detained here have been taken from their homes hours away. The environment is hot, bright, and exposed. Like many prisons, it is remote and isolated by design. We are not supposed to see it or think about it. We are not supposed to think of the people inside.

We split up into pairs so we can each meet with one person. We have to leave all of our belongings in the car, because no possessions are allowed in the visitation room. We are each in different buildings of the facility, and because we all had to leave our cell phones in the car, we just have to hope that we’ll find each other in the next hour.

As of June 2025, there were 1200 people locked up in Adelanto, and there are reports of overcrowding. Advocates have called attention to poor conditions and neglect. This week, 39-year-old DACA recipient Ismael Ayala-Uribe died at Adelanto. He was the 14th person to die in federal immigration custody this year.

Each pair meets with a detainee for an hour in the visitation room, after going through double locking gates in the high fence, checking in at the lobby, and attaching the visitor badges to our clothes. We wait with the other visitors until we are called in. I hope that my rusty Spanish will be understandable through the KN95 I wear. I hope that I will catch all the details I need to catch.

When people in Adelanto have visitors, they are guaranteed clean clothes and a shower, which they might not have received in days.

Because it’s Saturday, there are many families here for visits. I think about how far many of them had to drive to get here. If any of them had to lose work today, if they had to find childcare, if they had enough gas money. All for a one hour visit in a common room, supervised by guards.

Adelanto is privately run by Geo Group, which is currently valued at $2.96 billion. In the second quarter of 2025, Geo Group raked in a net income of $29 million, and a total revenue of $636 million. They are ICE’s largest contractor.

At 1pm, our visits are concluded. The visitation room is at capacity so we can’t meet with anyone else. We retrieve our belongings from the trunk of the car, guzzling our water bottles and chomping on melted, smashed cookies while standing in the sun. We do our best to remember all the pertinent details from our meetings. What do they need? Do they have a court date? Do they have a sponsor? Are there forms they are still waiting on? Do they have family? Has anyone else visited them? This is all useful information that AVAN will be able to use in their advocacy and aid work.

We drive out of the facility and into Victorville. We take notes over lunch at a Sinaloan restaurant that used to be a Oaxacan restaurant when we did this in 2019.

We are less talkative on the drive back to L.A., zonked by the sun, the heat, the miles, the concentration. It is around 4:30 when we return to Los Angeles.

The “GOP Murder Bill,” passed on July 4, 2025, grants ICE $75 billion to triple in size, a pot of funding to capture and imprison over 100,000 immigrants. I use these words specifically because I do not want to use the sanitized terms of “detain and house.”

The plan is to do these visits once a month, knowing every visit will be different. Sometimes we will be able to help. Other times we will only be able to sit across from someone and let them know that they haven’t been forgotten.