ICE

The Guardian - Teresa Reyes drove 300 miles to be with her son on his 32nd birthday in May, but she couldn’t give him a gift, share a meal with him or give him a hug. She couldn’t even touch him.

Her son, Guillermo, a tattoo artist from San Jose, is locked up in the California City immigration detention center, California’s largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility, and the only way he can see his mother is behind a thick pane of glass.

The detention center, housing roughly 1,600 people in a desert region north of Los Angeles, has denied contact visits to all people held inside since the Trump administration opened the site one year ago. That means no one inside the facility, which is run by the private prison firm CoreCivic, can sit with or embrace family members who travel to the remote site for visits. Instead, families are left talking through phones while their relatives sit in an adjacent room, separated by glass barriers.