All signs point to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) preparing to take over a shuttered Bay Area women’s prison to house immigrant detainees — despite toxic living conditions and a documented history of abuse.
Federal Correctional Institution Dublin (FCI Dublin), located an hour from San Francisco, was closed in April 2024 following lawsuits, whistleblower reports and inspections that revealed rampant sexual violence, mold, asbestos and sewage leaks. The prison was so notorious that it was dubbed the “rape club” by both the incarcerated women and by BOP staffers working at the prison and across the nation.
Now, despite its dangerous condition and horrific legacy, ICE appears to be eyeing the facility for renewed use.
A federal document dated August 14, 2024, shows that ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a request for information to help “identify possible detention facilities to house noncitizens and immigration violators” within a two-hour commute of ICE field offices, including the San Francisco office.
While there is no public contract between ICE and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) for FCI Dublin yet, Bay Area advocates cite this request as well as a pattern of increased collaboration between the two agencies as the basis for their fears that ICE will reopen the prison. A Memorandum of Understanding ensures maximum cooperation, and several other federal prisons — including FCI Miami, FCI Atlanta, and FCI Philadelphia — have recently been contracted out to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for ICE use.
The BOP has a record of working with ICE to house immigrant detainees in already overcrowded facilities. In 2018, ICE began detaining hundreds of immigrants at Victorville Federal Prison in California, over the objections of prison staff. Many BOP employees remain opposed to such arrangements, citing chronic understaffing, lack of training to work with migrants, reneging on financial promises, and personal moral objections.
According to one union member, who asked to remain anonymous, ICE uses federal prisons “as a way around certain obligations they have to detainees. Once you throw a detainee into a prison, they have to operate under the prison system … and that changes everything as far as what the needs are for those detainees.”
If ICE takes over FCI Dublin, it is likely the agency will contract operations out to a third-party, private prison company. A 2024 ACLU report titled “Resistance, Retaliation, Repression” notes that all six ICE detention centers in California are operated by for-profit contractors. Since launching its California Immigrant Detention Database in 2023, the ACLU has received 485 abuse complaints from detainees housed in these centers, including reports of hazardous conditions, medical neglect and retaliation for speaking out.
One former detainee, José Rubén Hernández Gomez, spent more than a year in ICE custody, shuffled between facilities before arriving at the Golden State Annex.
Hernández Gomez detailed his and others’ treatment at the Annex: he and other prisoners “went on a 35-day hunger strike to protest dangerous conditions inside. [They] went on a hunger strike because no one should be subjected to ICE’s unrelenting and dehumanizing cruelty.”
As a result of ICE’s and Geo Groups “brutal response” to their hunger strike, Hernández Gomez, who entered detention as an able-bodied man, now requires a cane to walk and suffers from multiple mental health issues. He is suing GEO Group Inc., with support from the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice (CCIJ), to increase detainee wages and improve conditions.
Toxic conditions, ignored warnings
Staff still working at FCI Dublin report that a crew of people began dismantling parts of the facility in the last two months, “tearing up the tile and disrupting the asbestos.” Whom this crew worked for remains unclear — the only certain fact was that these weren’t BOP employees. Moreover, the way they went about the “decontamination process” not only increased the staffers’ exposure to the mold and asbestos, it also ensured that asbestos contaminated whatever furniture and equipment was removed and transferred to other prisons.
While daily exposure to these toxic materials in a falling-down building wasn’t the central issue in the lawsuits that led to the prison’s closure, a court ultimately ruled that FCI Dublin was not safe for habitation. Inspections revealed black mold, open sewage, water-damaged walls and asbestos that became airborne when the floors were buffed. The administration’s solution, according to multiple whistleblowers? Stop buffing the floors.
One whistleblower, referred to in court as Ex1, identified worsening mold in the Education and Drug Treatment buildings. Smaller patches were present throughout the Special Housing Unit, administrative offices, and prison camp. Another staffer, Ex5, described working in a portable unit that “smelled of mold” and leaked during rainstorms. After testing mold levels using a home kit, he said he was threatened with criminal charges for “stealing government property.” He later secured workers’ compensation for chronic sinusitis linked to mold exposure.
Two March 2024 surveys by Titan Environmental Solutions — a firm regularly contracted by federal agencies — confirmed widespread mold and asbestos in units A, B, and C. Inspectors found mold in nearly every high-traffic area, including showers, restrooms, the kitchen, medical unit, corridors, and staff offices.
Then–BOP Acting Director William Lothrop testified in court that the facility required “tens of millions of dollars” in repairs before it could be reopened safely.
In a joint letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, U.S. Reps. Mark DeSaulnier and Zoe Lofgren wrote: “By BOP’s own admittance, FCI Dublin simply is not safe for habitation, and as such it should be closed to any and all inhabitants or government purposes.”
Community response and resistance
Advocates say turning the site into an immigrant detention center would not only put people at risk — it would undo hard-fought community victories. Seven years ago, grassroots organizers successfully pushed to shut down the last ICE detention center in Northern California.
“The community is already mobilizing to say, we will not accept this,” said a lawyer with CCIJ. “We do not want ICE incarcerating people in our communities.”
She added that should FCI Dublin be reopened, ICE would be vulnerable to the same type of legal challenge CCIJ brought in 2023, and the facility could once again be ordered to close due to ongoing environmental hazards.
On March 1, about 500 demonstrators protested outside FCI Dublin. “No somos criminales,” read one protester’s sign. “We are not criminals.”
This week, the San Francisco Interfaith Council issued a statement calling for “the permanent closure of FCI Dublin” and rejecting any plan to convert the prison into an ICE detention center.
As legal challenges and local organizing efforts grow, advocates say ICE’s plans will not go uncontested and that the fight to keep FCI Dublin closed is just beginning.
