Poisoned Dreams

Federal Court Greenlights Suit Alleging GEO Poisoned People Locked Inside Adelanto as New Podcast Surfaces Water Quality Concerns

“Poisoned”

One of ICE’s largest detention contractors poisoned humans locked inside California’s largest detention facility, according to a putative class action suit filed by several people previously caged there. According to allegations contained in the suit, not only did The GEO Group, Inc. poison thousands of people in government custody by spraying an unhealthy concentration of HDQ Neutral at frequencies and using methodologies outside legal limits, but its officials repeatedly deceived detained folks about their safety.

These are shocking, if not surprising, claims with even more harmful alleged consequences for the seven named Plaintiffs and thousands of people whose interests they and their lawyers at Social Justice Legal Foundation seek to represent. You kind of have to read the allegations to believe them: Headaches, dizziness, bloody phlegm both through coughing and mucus:

Skin irritation, rashes, burning eyes. Constant coughs and irritation:

These harms were not lost on GEO staff, according to the allegations. Instead of helping, they chose to spray people who argued with them with the toxic chemicals:

At this point, anyone claiming even passing familiarity with eugenicist poisoning of people at the border by US officials a roughly century ago (and after) might begin asking whether this is history rhyming, if not repeating.

Like many, apparently, at ICE and DHS, GEO has dismissed the allegations out of hand. Which is unfortunate, given that the US Environmental Protection Agency investigated and concluded that there was something to these concerns. In addition to the great work of Earth Justice and SJLF, our #DetentionKills Transparency Initiative sought and received FOIA records from EPA about these GEO investigations through FOIA. EPA is currently about a week overdue in completing a promised production of records about GEO’s alleged failure to properly dispense harmful, federally regulated chemicals at its Tacoma facility in Washington state. But we have many records about what at Northwest Detention Center, too, where the Trump EPA warned GEO for misusing harmful chemicals.

Earlier this month, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California at Riverside denied GEO’s attempt to dismiss the Plaintiff’s suit.

“The many specific deceptive acts Plaintiffs allege in the Complaint of lying and covering up the scope of Defendant's use of HDQ Neutral further demonstrate knowledge of the falsity of its safety-related representations.”

The assurances GEO’s Chairman and former CEO, George Zoley, gave Congress amidst the pandemic hit different in light of the Court’s decision denying GEO’s motion to dismiss.

The case will now proceed to discovery, and likely, class certification, where GEO will get a chance to make a full and fact-based defense to the Plaintiff’s allegations. Perhaps its Chairman will be as eager to defend these town halls, education, and cleaning under oath in a deposition as he was to brag about them in Congress. We’ll see.

To recap: for years, vulnerable people in Adelanto complained about environmental harm, got ignored. Corporations profited, and to a lesser degree, certain elements of Adelanto city government did, too. Then, suddenly, science intervened. Evidence changed the conversation, lending credibility and corroboration to the complaints of everyday people.

Dreamtown

Nearly the same storyline emerges in the last episode of a new Crooked Media podcast about Adelanto. As someone who’s spoken to several of the key characters in this work (with a couple of these conversations having happened under oath), I was eager to dive into this new work. As a person who once aspired to do a podcast about the epic, marathon, 7-hour Adelanto City Council meeting where GEO effectively hoodwinked the City into approving a use permit to continue operating the Adelanto detention center in violation of California law, I listened with well-informed circumspection and a tinge of jealously. Anyone following the fight to close Adelanto and hold its owners accountable for the harm the system inflicted there should listen. It’s incredibly revealing.

The most revealing thing for me was an interview during the final episode with City Mayor about new evidence former Mayor Pro Tem Evans uncovered regarding the City’s toxic water supply. The Mayor who was promoting his business on Instagram during that 7-hour detention center contract city council hearing, only to be called out by the people who called in opposing the approval of GEO’s application, makes a staggering admission. Basically, he says it’s not the water in Adelanto that’s harmful, it’s the pipes they must pass through. It’s sort of like a doctor saying your blood is totally fine, don’t worry, but rather, your clogged arteries that are causing your heart not to work. If former CM Evans is to be believed, her efforts to get the City to investigate water quality officially were stymied. Now the City is apparently exploring litigation to get the problem remediated.

Which it should. Because the science, once again, has intervened. And it has changed the conversation. Adelanto is in the 100th percentile in California for low birth weight. That sounds very much like something in the environment there is visiting generational harm upon residents. It sounds like the future healthy of any child born there is statistically more at risk than it is for children born anywhere else in the state.

A report CM Evans convinced Pitzer College’s Ella Mayer to complete reaches dire conclusions about the presence of so-called ‘forever chemicals’ (PFAS) in Adelanto’s water. They likely came from firefighting foam at a nearby former US Air Force base site and present Superfund site.

Cancer rates are allegedly higher, too. This is a public health and environmental justice crisis as much as it is one of governance and democracy. Adelanto’s private water contractor didn’t reveal this. Its Mayor and Council apparently didn’t reveal it before Evans’ student. Its City Manager certainly didn’t reveal the problem, according to the podcast.

And apparently the State of California and US EPA didn’t believe it was important enough to conduct this research on the water in the prisons and detention centers there before putting that water inside and on the bodies of humans locked inside.

This is intergenerational harm. It is a form of environmental violence that defies credible justification, and demands intervention and interruption.

Failing to intervene and remove the bodies from cages in Adelanto is accepting the scientifically demonstrated risk of harm that flows from poisoning people with illegal concentrations and methodologies of toxic chemicals, and then forcing them to wash them off with poisoned water.

It is a larger representation of the poisoned dream so many rural areas are sold that locking humans inside boxes for profit will be the cure to those areas’ fiscal woes. Indeed, the larger premise of Dreamtown is that Adelanto was effectively on the outs economically, despite the promises of private and public prisons to keep the City of afloat. That’s why bringining in the marijuana production industry was necessary in the first place.

Wake up and Thrive

When your reality is poisoning folks with intergenerational harm, the economic dream you’ve been sold is actually nightmare. It’s time for people of conscience in Adelanto, in California, and in the Biden administration to wake up. In the landmark new report from Innovation Law Lab, Thrive, experts in the lived experience of harms the detention industry visits upon rural communities, and the harms that can befall these industries when detention money goes away, lay out a blueprint for positive rural economic development. Anyone interested in exploring solutions that help communities prosper without cages should read it cover to cover, and then hand it to your city council. Perhaps that will begin with Adelanto.