Concerned about conditions in federal immigrant detention facilities but often barred from entering them, some Democratic-led states are fighting to enforce their own health and safety standards at the sites.

The Trump administration, citing the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, argues that states don’t have the authority to regulate federal facilities.

But states counter that because the federal government has contracted with private companies to operate the sites, they have the right — and the responsibility — to make sure those companies follow state health and safety rules.

Washington state, for example, is embroiled in legal fight with the Florida-based GEO Group over a 2023 law that directs state health officials to regularly inspect privately run detention facilities, including those holding immigrants. The GEO Group operates nearly two dozen immigrant detention facilities nationwide.

Despite the law, state health inspectors have repeatedly been denied access to a GEO Group facility in Tacoma, where there have been allegations of medical mistreatment, abuse and neglect and concerns about water quality and food. In an April legal filing, the state cited complaints of rotten, bug-riddled food and only two working bathrooms for 100 people.

The state health department says it has received more than 3,500 complaints about the Northwest ICE Processing Center, but has been denied access 10 times since 2023.

“Our point is that GEO is a private entity, and so it doesn’t get to claim these federal preemption defenses because those are reserved for the federal government,” said Ellen Range, a section chief in the Washington Office of the Attorney General.

“You can’t contract around the law,” Range added.

The GEO Group did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But during a May earnings call, George Zoley, the CEO, chairman and founder of the company, decried what he called “unwarranted litigation” and described state efforts to inspect the detention facilities as “fundamentally unconstitutional.”

“As some blue states are considering more active involvement in oversight of facilities, I think the logical solution to much of that is federal ownership of the facilities. They are federal facilities to begin with, in my opinion,” Zoley said.

Federal ownership “will provide stronger credibility in the courts…that these are federal facilities carrying out the congressional priorities of immigration programs and policies that Congress has passed,” Zoley added, “and that states can only have very limited involvement in those policies and programs.”

At least two other states have enacted laws this year that are similar to Washington’s.

Massachusetts Democratic Gov. Maura Healey last month signed a law that empowers the state auditor to inspect immigrant detention facilities to make sure they are following local health and safety rules. And in June, Colorado enacted a measure that strengthens the authority of state and local health officials to inspect immigrant detention facilities, ratchets up the frequency of unannounced inspections and specifies what inspectors must look for.

The Colorado law also includes a civil penalty of up to $50,000 for facilities that refuse to allow an inspection.

“Our community has been outraged by the conditions in these holding facilities and in these detention centers,” Colorado Democratic state Rep. Elizabeth Velasco, who authored the bill, said.

“I think that it’s important for the state to set guidelines and guardrails, and for contractors to follow the law,” Velasco said. “The issue is that they’re saying that they are exempted from the law because they are a federal contractor. So that has been very frustrating.”

Colorado and the GEO Group also have been facing off in court. Last month, Colorado sued the company for refusing access and information requests related to a confirmed tuberculosis case at its facility in Aurora. The next day, a federal judge blocked part of Colorado’s law in response to a GEO Group lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the measure.

And in California, Democrats are trying to renew a law that directs the state attorney general to regularly review conditions in detention facilities and report back to lawmakers and the governor. That law is scheduled to expire next year, but Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta is pushing legislation that would extend it indefinitely.

In an email, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said that the U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement “is regularly audited and inspected by external agencies.”

“All detainees are provided with proper meals, quality water, blankets, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers,” the spokesperson wrote. “In fact, ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens.”

Disturbing reports

In May, the Trump administration shuttered the Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman, created by Congress in 2019 to investigate detainee deaths, access to health care and other issues.

But another government watchdog, the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security, last week released a report on its January 2026 inspection of the Florida ICE facility widely known as “Alligator Alcatraz.” Inspectors found that detainees were kept in small metal enclosures for up to two hours, and didn’t have clean drinking water, daily showers, or safely stored food. The facility closed in June.

Earlier this year, U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat, issued a report citing “over a thousand credible reports of human rights abuses” in immigrant detention facilities since President Donald Trump began his second term. Investigators from Ossoff’s staff found 44 reports of family separation, including mothers being separated from their breastfeeding infants; 206 reports of medical neglect; 88 reports of physical and sexual abuse; and 139 reports of denial of adequate food and water.

The reports come as ICE, using new tactics and striving to meet daily arrest quotas, is detaining more people: Federal immigration authorities say they arrested 51,000 immigrants in July, more than any other month of the Trump administration.

The number of people in detention soared to more than 65,700 in mid-July, compared to 37,000 two years ago, an increase of about 70%, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a Syracuse University research group.

“It is worth saying that the detention system has changed a lot in the last year and a half. It’s roughly doubled in size,” said Scott Shuchart, who served as assistant director for regulatory affairs at ICE from 2022 to 2025.

“We’re basically holding people who either haven’t committed a crime or who aren’t being detained for having committed a crime as though they were criminals, and then we do it very badly,” he said. “ICE is not constituted or equipped to manage the contractor facilities well — it has never done it well.”

Taking responsibility

Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, senior policy counsel at the National Immigration Law Center, which advocates for low-income immigrants, said states that are trying to enforce health and safety rules in detention facilities are struggling to fill the oversight role that federal immigration authorities have abdicated.

“It has created this tricky litigation issue, where a state trying to protect the people in ICE facilities has to sue both the federal government — ICE — and a private prison company,” Whitlock said. “And what these two entities often do is it’s a little bit of like hot potato, where the private prison company says, ‘Oh, we’re not the right defendant.’”

Claire Trickler-McNulty, an assistant director in the Department of Homeland Security during the Biden administration who helped oversee ICE detention facilities, cautioned that there could be some unintended consequences of the new state laws.

Federal contractors might opt to move detainees out of a state where there are a lot of restrictions to one with fewer restrictions, said Trickler-McNulty, who is now an immigration policy fellow at Hyphen, a nonprofit group. That would make it more difficult for families of detainees to support or even find their loved ones from a distance.

She also suggested, as Zoley of the GEO Group did, that the federal government might buy more facilities to thwart state oversight. In that case, states would have to think creatively about what they can control.

For example, she said, federal facilities will still have to use local resources, such as sewage and water lines, and likely would have to hire private contractors to handle security.

“The actual facility is quite dependent on the state and local resources. So ideally, it would be a collaborative arrangement,” she said. “If you want it to be better and have improvements, you really need a willing partner on the other side.”

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Stateline reporter Shalina Chatlani can be reached at schatlani@stateline.org.

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