The Otay Mesa Detention Center has a new owner — the federal government.
Private prison company CoreCivic announced Monday it has sold the Otay Mesa and California City detention facilities to the Department of Homeland Security for a combined $1.5 billion.
The nearly 2,000-bed facility in southeastern San Diego holds Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees and U.S. Marshals Service detainees.
CoreCivic sold the San Diego facility for $739.2 million and the California City facility for $732.6 million but said it expects to keep managing them both for Immigration and Customs Enforcement as President Donald Trump wages an unprecedented mass deportation campaign.
“CoreCivic expects to continue managing both facilities under existing contracts with ICE, with full continuity of our existing operations, staffed by our current CoreCivic workforce,” spokesman Ryan Gustin said in a statement.
“Asset transactions of this nature are not uncommon for the government,” he added. “We have previously completed facility sales to government partners, and operating government-owned facilities is a well-established model within our business.”
DHS said in a statement that the purchase of the two facilities was made possible by President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which dramatically increased funding to DHS and allowed them to expand detention space.
The statement said “unlike in states like Florida and Oklahoma, ICE can not rely on local state and county partners for detention space in California. The state’s sanctuary politicians continue to push legislation to outlaw or make private prisons financially infeasible. Now, with federal ownership of these detention centers, which are crucial to ICE’s detention network on the West Coast, ICE retains the detention capacity needed to arrest, detain, and remove illegal aliens.”
Democratic members of Congress and the San Diego County Board of Supervisors have sued DHS for access to the facility after they said they were prevented from completing inspections on multiple occasions.
Terra Lawson-Remer, the chair of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors who was denied access to the facility and pushed for the county to sue in response, criticized the sale.
“This is Trump’s mass detention agenda getting bigger, more permanent, and more expensive — with CoreCivic getting a billion-dollar payday while still running the cages,” she said. “DHS may own the building, but it does not own the law. San Diego County will keep fighting for oversight, transparency, and due process at Otay Mesa.”
CoreCivic bought the 37-acre site in San Diego for $10.3 million in 2010 and opened a detention center to hold immigrants along the U.S.-Mexico border in 2015. The company built the California City site in 1998 and has used it for immigration detention since last year.
“We are pleased with the sales of these two mission-critical facilities for the Company’s government partner,” Patrick Swindle, CoreCivic’s president and chief executive officer said in a press release. “The process was marked with rigor and integrity. The facility valuations were established through the federal government’s required appraisal process.”
The press release says that about half of the proceeds will be used to pay down debt while the rest will be used for “general corporate purposes.”
health check: an inewsource investigation
Last month inewsource published a three-part investigation into allegations of deteriorating health and inadequate medical care at Otay Mesa Detention Center described in court records. Similar allegations have dogged the California City facility in Kern County north of Los Angeles.
The inewsource investigation uncovered nearly 70 cases in which court filings mentioned concerns over health or medical care at the Otay Mesa Detention Center and diabetes care that experts described as potentially life threatening.
Dozens of immigrants described deteriorating health, inadequate care or missed surgeries and procedures they’d planned before being detained at the Otay Mesa Detention Center, according to federal court records and interviews with former detainees.
The inadequate care they describe is happening as populations at ICE detention centers across the country swell with immigrants. The average population of Otay Mesa has more than doubled over the last five years.
inewsource sent ICE and CoreCivic letters describing allegations about Otay Mesa’s health conditions and seeking comment. Both declined interviews and sent statements in response.
ICE said detainees get “the best healthcare that many aliens have received in their entire lives.” CoreCivic said it follows federal guidelines, is monitored by the government for compliance and that “the safety, health and well-being of the individuals entrusted to our care is our top priority.”
The county conducted an inspection in June, but a report on their findings has not yet been made public.
A May California Department of Justice report on detention centers in the state found that conditions worsened inside centers and “led to overcrowding and strained resources, especially around access to medical care and conditions of confinement.”
CoreCivic has a contract with ICE to run the California City facility through August 2027 and to run the Otay Mesa center through December 2029 with a five-year option through 2034.
CoreCivic reported $2.2 billion in total revenue last year, up 13% from $1.96 billion in 2024.
Type of Content
News: Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
