It Could Happen Here - Why is DHS buying private prisons?

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

James is joined by Wendy Fry from CalMatters to discuss her story on DHS buying Core Civic facilities in California and what this might mean for immigration detention.  Sources:  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And we're going to talk about a piece that Wendy did for CalMatters about the Fed's DHS buying detention centers in California. Hi, Wendy. Welcome to the show. Hi, James. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Okay, so let's begin, I suppose, by summarizing this article. We'll link to it, right? I think everyone should read it. It's a really good piece of reporting. But can you explain, like, what is happening here with these two detention centers? Sure, yeah, thank you so much. So last week, Corpic, one of the largest private prison companies in the country and the nation, a publicly traded company, announced that they had sold two of their properties to the Department of Homeland Security for a billion and a half dollars. And those two facilities are two of the largest immigration detention facilities in California, Otai Mesa Detention Center in San Diego County that has a capacity to just a little under 2000.

beds. And then the other one is the newly opened California City facility up in Kerm County. And that one's just a little bit bigger with the capacity of 2,500 beds. And we learned the details about the sale through this filing with the Security Exchange Commission. Like I said, because it's a publicly traded company, they have to make some of the information about this deal public. And we learned that the federal government paid $739 million, I think, for Otai Mesa. And then the other one was, I think, about $730 million for California. city. And we've done some additional reporting too since that article came out. And we just last Friday, we're talking with the San Diego County appraiser, the assessor's office. And Kern County

found out that the last appraised value on these properties was about a quarter of what the federal government paid for them. So the last appraised value, I think about $160 million for Otai Mesa. I don't have the exact number, but around that. So they paid, you know, maybe four times. And of course, appraised value, we have to take it sort of with a grain of salt because it's not the market value, but it would be very hard to figure out what the market value is on a property like this because there just aren't very many of them. Both places are these huge sprawling federal prisons that don't get sold very often. So it's hard to figure out what the market value is, but those were the last appraised value. Yeah, sure. Not much market for giant prisons, I suppose. So best guess.

Yeah, not much to compare it to as far as the sale, right? Right. And on the federal government side, on Coursivic side, they said that this whole thing went through a very rigorous process of governmental review and that everything is above board there. Yeah. Of course, they'll say that. Yeah. So these facilities, like, they spend a lot of money on them, right? And they have a lot of money right now.

They're sitting on a giant pile of money. Actually, before we talk about what they spent on them, people will remember when President Biden came into power, him saying he was going to end private prisons, right? So we should just, I guess, begin by explaining how that didn't include immigration detention and how these places have, like, as you say, they haven't just continued. But in the last two years, I guess they're trying to expand immigration detention capacity, right? Right. Yes. So in California, particularly, California state officials have tried to ban private prison

companies from operating within the state of California. And the Ninth Circuit didn't uphold that. Like, the California passed a law, government knew some science. it ended up in court, geo group and Corsivic, the two largest private present companies were fighting against this, and they won. The Ninth Circuit

upheld that California can't ban these facilities from operating, but they have pushed back a lot. And California lawmakers are trying to write a series and pass a series of laws that would require more of the tax revenue from these companies

to be, you know, absorbed by the state. And disincentivized, basically, financially disincentivized these private prison companies from operating. And that is one of the reasons why DHS in a statement that they put out, Jason Sweeney with ICE told me, you know, it's financially infeasible, has become too burdensome from their point of view for the private prison companies to operate in California because of all the oversight and because of all the, you know, pushback that California officials have tried to do and have done as much as I can, basically on.

Let's talk about this new attempt to grow detention capacity, right? Because their previous attempt was these warehouses, where we spoke to some folks in Social Circle on this show, Social Circle, Georgia, a while ago about that. So can you give people who haven't been following this little synopsis of why they've moved away from the putting human beings in warehouses models? Sure. So the spending bill, the federal spending bill that President Trump signed last year included just the insanely unprecedented. president amount of money for immigration enforcement. More than even the entire budget of the entire federal prison system, right? It includes about $45 billion just for detention capacity alone.

So they poured a ton that, like you said, they're sitting on just this huge pile of cash that they have to spend. They have to do something with that money. The plan at the beginning of the year were, as you mentioned, these warehouses, right? that they wanted to, from their perspective, sort of more intelligently design both detention capacity and the deportation machine. I'm not 100% sure which DHS official said this.

I think it was Tom Holman in Phoenix, but it could have been another DHS official. But basically they said they wanted to design the quote, Amazon Prime for humans. So they want to make this as fast and as efficient as possible. they want to have a capacity to say up to 100,000 people on any given day. And they have a ton of cash, cash that they've never even seen before, right? So buying up this billion and a half dollars of real estate in California is feasible to them.

And they've signaled that owning it rather than leasing it or having Cors Civic run it is more beneficial to them in not having to comply with the oversight, the different inspections and laws that California officials have tried to put into place. that allows, for example, inspectors with the California Attorney General's office, and there was a 2024 law that California passed that would allow local health inspectors to go in and do a health inspection. San Diego County is the only place where they've actually tried to do that, and the private company pushed back. So they've said, DHS have said in their statement that, you know, owning this rather than

another entity owning it, gives them the upper hand as far as avoiding some of this over. site and the federal courts have upheld that actually. Right. So. Let's dig into that a little bit, right? A lot of people have started paying attention to immigration detention, approximately halfway through January in 2025, right? Right.

And if you had been paying attention before in California, you would have known that thousands of people were detained without food, water, or shelter in the open air for months. Not like an individual duration stay was at most like a week, but the practice continued. In Hacumba, right? Yeah, in Hacumbah, and then down in Isidro. Yeah.

In at least three places in Hacumbah. I believe there were also other OAD sites that we didn't find. At least I didn't know about it. And then they'd also happen in Arizona as well. But at that point in time, there was not a great deal of inspection by the county. I saw a Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman person once. their visit didn't seem to result in any changes.

But has California committed on why they suddenly care about the, I guess the conditions migrants are detained in when they didn't seem to care in a way that mattered three years ago? Right. They certainly weren't coming out in statements and pushing back as hard as we have seen them push back against the Trump administration. That's true. And I have asked, like top California officials that in an interview I did with the

California Attorney General. Ravanta. I did ask him. I was like, this is my really hard question for you is, you know, it didn't seem like you were pushing back in this same way when, you know, there were babies sheltering in porta-potties, right? Oh, yeah. One night in September, I remember a lady breastfeeding a baby, the baby was shivering, which, like, it's not a good sign when babies are shivering. And, like, I was warming up milk in the camping stove in my truck. And my friend was cycling toddlers in and out of like a little warming station they built. Like I've been through the Darien Gap and that's still some of the worst shit that I've

ever seen. It was horrific. Right. I remember thinking like where is the UN? Like where is like the Red Cross? Like this is a humanitarian crisis out here. And it was in such a remote area. It lacked so much visibility both from the media and you know public officials. So we did talk about that at one point. And Bontas' response was, you know, we had a working relationship with the Biden administration that wasn't controversial or wasn't adversarial in the way that our relationship is with the Trump administration. And so we could work on that stuff behind the scenes. Now, I know you were out there. Anybody who is out there would say nobody really ever saw the results of that collaboration or that work, right? And, you know, it is a concern for sure

that it does seem like California politicians do get more bang for their buck in opposing the immigration policies of the Trump administration. And it's important to note that a lot of this infrastructure, including especially a lot of the AI infrastructure that are being used to surveil, people who are against these policies, and the Palantir, the AI technologies that is being used right now to find people and detain them without making the headlines in quite a high profile way, as we saw last year, all that was put into place by the Biden administration, right? And so it is important to note that for sure that a lot of these systems that now the Trump administration is able to utilize were handed to them. You've heard the chaos. Now you can see it.

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podcasts. Let's entertain the idea that we have a midterm election and the presidential election and they are conducted in a way that we kind of are accustomed to with elections and the results are respected. Let's imagine we have a Democrat in 2008. I intend to do the math there. The feds will still own these two giant detention centers, right? The way that immigration in my experience works is like it only seems to move in one direction.

I guess like this is why. this is such a concern. They're saying themselves, DHS is saying themselves, that this is a deliberate strategy to make their detention build out more permanent and harder to roll back with the changing political winds, right? Yeah. And so they're acknowledging that, that's what they're trying to do.

That's not great. Yeah, yeah, that's... But yeah, so it's from their own mouth, right? Yeah, deeply concerning. I wonder, though, like, previously they've had a practice of moving people out of San Diego County I guess a practice is the wrong word. There is like a number of incidents that I'm aware of where they've moved people away from their lawyer in San Diego County, right, to a detention facility like Dilley or somewhere in Texas or somewhere like that.

I guess I wouldn't make that impossible. It's the same as it was before. It'll just be from a federal prison to a private prison, maybe. Well, it's a less favorable federal jurisdiction, right? A district. So in San Diego, I would say probably it's a more favorable outcome to go before a federal district. judge in San Diego for a possible habeas petition and to slow down the process as far as being deported, right? I think that that probably happens faster in a federal district in Texas than it

would here. Yeah, yeah. I have heard a lot from families about family members being moved out to, you know, these very remote. I mean, there's been an effort for a long time to make sure that these facilities are set up in very remote areas of California and in other parts of the country in remote areas that are hard for advocates, hard for attorneys, hard for journalists like me to get to to report what's going on in them. You know, it's like six hours to get to California City. As a drive, I've made way more times than I've want to now at this point, right? So, you know, it does. It does impact the amount of resources that people can be connected to. It is the biggest expense that ICE has is moving people around the country. I remember Senator Padilla

did say like it seems sort of illogical the way they're moving like they're moving people from California out of California while they're moving people in other places into California. And it seems illogical the way they're moving people around. But the impact of that, I don't know what their purpose or their intention is of doing that. But the impact of is it really disorients people, right? It's like, where am I? What am I doing? What are the rules here? How do I get my phone card set up? It takes them days where they're kind of pushed back on their heels, trying to figure out what the system and the guards and the new place where they go. And then, like I said, it definitely makes it harder for people when they get moved around to these different facilities. And it's

something that we're definitely seeing happen a lot more. Definitely hearing it from a lot of families in L.A. They have concern about people being moved way out to California City, which is like in the middle of the Mojavee Desert, right? It's hard for families to get out there. Yeah, yeah. It's like, it's up in Kern County, I think, right? But like, it's a hike from anywhere, from any major population center in California. It's a long drive. Yeah. It's like an hour and 40 minutes from like the farthest eastern community in L.A.

Like Chirla, they have an office in like eastern L.A. And I think it was like an hour and 20 to an hour and 40 to get to that office from California city. So it's just remote. It's in the middle of nowhere, you know? Yeah. And if you think about where would I put a place that's in the middle of nowhere where I'd have the least amount of oversight, right?

Like that's the place. Like that's definitely where you would. pick. Yeah, definitely. Compared to like Otai Mesa Detention Center, there are many bad things about what happens there, but like it is relatively close. People can get to it. There are almost always people there, like outside if someone is released or people protesting what's happening there. Like you say, like it's hard even to do things like for someone to get money on their, on their phone card or like someone I've reported on many times on the show was detained at Dilly. And like, it's difficult to work out how to like put money on their commissary so they can buy food because

the food they get is absolutely awful and things like this. And every time you move, that, that's different again, right? Like it's, I was talking to an individual in El Salvador and, and they were saying that, you know, they were moved around maybe nine times before they were deported. And each time they got to the different facility, it was like, where am I? And who, who are kind of the leaders in this, in this place? Or like, who do I talk to? Because I need to get, I need to get this worked out. And sometimes they wouldn't even be able to get, the phone card set up before the next time they got loaded back on a bus to go somewhere else. Yeah.

So even let their family know where they are. And that's why it's so concerning that ICE is going around opening facilities. Like we had one facility open. I think also in Kern County, it's like right next to Golden State Annex. So it's like kind of part of that property. Okay. But they didn't tell anybody, right? Like nobody knew that this facility was open until we reported on it opening.

And, you know, if you're a family member and you're looking on that ICE detainer, you're trying to find your family member, if we have these. you know, almost like black site ice detention facilities opening up that nobody knows or running, how are you going to find your family member if it's not even listed there in the facilities, right? I mean, there's been a lot of reporting about how sometimes people are disappearing into these systems, but that's one of the reasons why California has tried to set these laws to say, like, you have to give the public a certain amount of notice before you open a new facility so that people are aware that it's coming and they can have an opportunity to, you know,

they go to the California City Council meeting and make their opposition known. But we've seen both ICE and the private detention companies have, in some cases, been able to find ways around those rules. Yeah. One of the, I guess, the interesting things that we have seen in the last maybe six months even, maybe somewhere that, mostly this year, right, is like communities coming together to oppose these things and data centers. Right.

Or like across a wide swath. of American politics. A lot of the folks organizing in social circle and not people who I think would generally identify as progressive politically, but they were opposed to all the local consequences as well as the abuses that happen in these detention centers.

It's definitely getting harder, I guess, for them to build from scratch detention centers, right? That's correct. I mean, some of these, at the beginning of the year, when they had the warehouse plan and they were planning some of these mega detention centers, which they were trying to hold

you know, 10 to 12,000 people, which is more than Rikers, right? Right. Yeah, like the largest would be the largest facility anywhere. And, you know, they were talking about even making their own wastewater treatment plants, bringing in their own services because the cities where the local municipalities wouldn't be able to handle the influx of people, of employees, of, you know, the roads, all the different services. And so I think that's one of the things that people are realizing is that

these properties have an impact outside of just the people that they're detaining, right? They have an impact, a ripple effect on the entire community. And I think people are becoming aware of that now. Yeah, definitely. And it seems like, yeah, they're trying to do other things. I know they sold some of those warehouses a loss as well, but it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of how much money they have. Yeah, they have to get rid of $45 billion.

So they really aren't stressing the losses. You know, it's a weird problem. problem to have, but they feel like they have to spend this $45 billion or it's kind of like use it or lose it if they don't buy the next. I think it's three years that they have. Yeah. So I think we will see them buying more properties for sure. I think they really have their eye on Adelanto. I set a script that scans the SEC to like automatically alert me if any of those companies sell anything, right? Oh, cool. The other thing to keep in mind, too, about this is, you know, the federal government doesn't pay local and state taxes. So where they go into these small cash-strapped cities like California City and say, hey, you're going to get $2 million a year in tax revenue from this facility opening. And that's kind of how they convince or like they try to win over the local politicians with, hey, we need this money. We need this facility to lower our water bills and stuff like that. But none of that is going to, it's like a bait and switch, right? They're not going to be getting that $2 million tax revenue anymore because, you know, other than the income tax of the employers, maybe that might.

But yeah, so that's another, you know, part of it. Yeah, yeah, bait and switch is a good way to describe it. Like, people think they're getting one thing, or they end up getting another thing. You've heard the chaos. Now you can see it. Do we want to jump right in? Watch all your favorite podcasts from start to finish

right inside the free I-Heart Radio app. Make some noise. Woo-ee! Catch every laugh and eye roll on shows like Bestie Listen, Hey Jonas and Las Cultureistas. Now with full video. I'll just leave that there. It's the same hosts and the same chemistry.

with all the hilarious moments you've been missing right on your screen. Open the free IHR radio app. Search video podcasts and tap watch. At concerts, we dance to the same tune. At games, we hug total strangers. And yet, in these moments, there's also something we don't do. We don't act based on how they look, who they love, where they're from, or what they believe. We just act.

Because the things that make us different, We'll never change what makes us human. Go to Love Hasnobles.com to learn more. Brought to you by Love Has No Labels and the I Council. Betrayal Weekly is back with brand new stories. From threatening text messages disturbing a small Midwestern town. It was from an unknown number. Who else is getting these messages?

Why did it start with us? To long cons and stolen identities. Who lies about being this sick? This was the last time I asked. ever believed a word she said. New voices, each with the courage to tell their own story. He said, I had been kidnapped. Okay, just trying at normal.

He was essentially on the run. Every family has secrets. The rug had been pulled from underneath me. Oh, my God. It was right in front of my face, and I didn't even see it. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Emily Oster. I'm an economist and data expert.

And I'm Perry Wilson. I'm a medical doctor. And this is our new podcast, Wellness Actually. Because you're getting a staggering amount of health and wellness information nowadays, and some of it is awesome. And some of it is, well, actually, bullshit. Fortunately, we're both people who know how to read studies, parse data, and can tell you what's worth trying out and what you can safely ignore. Each episode, we tackle the health news of the week and then take a deeper dive.

into a misunderstood health and wellness topic like... What's the deal with peptide? What's the deal with GLP-1s? What's the deal with creatine? What's the deal with cupping? What's the deal with sleep? So join us for a weekly dose of sanity. It might actually be just what the doctor...

Or the economist. Ordered. Listen to Wellness Actually on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You talked about the employers. Like, when these facilities change hands, will it then be, like, federal employees or will they still be staffed by CoreC Civic?

Yeah, so that's the interesting thing is the federal government is going to own the real estate, but CoreCC has said in its SEC filings that it expects, it thinks that it's going to be keeping those contracts to continue operating the facilities. So the contract for California City runs through August 2027, the one for Otai Mesa is supposed to end in 2029, but there's an option to extend it another five years. And my impression is that ICE is quite happy with the way CoreC Civic is running these facilities and Geo Group is running these facilities. So that would mean the same guards, the same medical directors, the same kind of operations and day-to-day at both facilities.

And they plan on keeping their existing management contract. Now, they acknowledge in the SEC filing that there's no guarantee that they get to keep it. But it sounds like that's the deal that they've worked out and negotiated with the federal government. Sure. Like even when they've done these, like they stood up that one Camp East Montana, they call it, which is still run by a contractor, even though it's on Department of Defense gland. And the conditions there are atrocious from what we saw with the Inspector General report. And it doesn't seem to be a concern. Yeah. That's someone outside of El Paso? Yeah. I've seen it. The tent camp. Oh, okay. Outside of Port Blis. Yeah, the white tent camp. Yeah. You know, seems like they're violating their own rules, right? when they have these rules, they have these set of standards that they have set up. And that's the first thing, course, Civic or Gio will say is like, hey, we follow all the federal standards that are set up for us, right, for detention standards.

Yeah. But it seemed especially with that one that you're mentioning that they violated all their own standards and setting that place up. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that place is particularly egregious, like even among the immigration detention facilities, some of the stuff in that Inspector General's report was genuinely shocking. I thought I'd lost the capacity to be shocked by this stuff. But yeah, lots of terrible things have happened.

Like, I think you reported on the Mongolian person, right, who used sign language and was detained for, I think, months without an interpreter, if I'm remembering correctly. Right, yeah. He had never gotten a chance to even tell his story on how he'd cross the border because CBP had, like, really confused his story. He was telling them about his sister, and they thought that that it was his daughter. And they were using, like, a, I don't know, AI, some kind of. of online translation thing that was not even close to what his actual story was.

And yeah, he spent months without able to tell anybody what happened to him. And, you know, finally, yeah, after we did our story, like, finally, the ICE attorney was trying to set up like a relay team of translation. But the federal judge was just said, like, doesn't he have a right to participate in his own proceedings? Like, doesn't, isn't he, shouldn't he be an active participant in the proceedings against him, right? Yeah.

And not just a bystander in that. And then so then the judge ruled that they had to get him. And then interpreter, I guess they decided it was too hard to do that because they let him out fairly quickly after that ruling. But yeah, I mean, some of the conditions that we've heard about, I mean, obviously I think everybody's heard like overcrowding, really severe lack of access to medical care. Yeah.

The horrific food. We've been hearing about how bad the food is for decades now in there. Yeah. You know, smelling moldy waters, particular problem in California City. And just sometimes just like kind of the retaliation that people face or if they try to bring an issue up or if they try to, you know, advocate for somebody else. They feel like oftentimes they say they tell us that they feel like, you know, they get sort of retaliated against for that. You know, Mesa Verde is one of the have one of the most egregious violations that we've ever heard of like the hunger strike. The hunger struggle got dragged out and according to them, you know, beat up or handled very roughly and then taken to Texas.

and force fed with a tube down their nose, right? Like, yeah, there's definitely been some very egregious things that have happened inside these detention centers. And that's why it's so important for people to be able to, you know, especially the Congress members and the local state inspectors, it's very important for somebody to be able to get in there and see what the conditions are like inside. Yeah, this court case doesn't matter anymore.

With this new development, right, the court case, at least it matters in other detention facilities, but not in in Otai, Mesa, specifically in San Diego County. Yeah, it's going to remain to be seen, I think. Like I said, the federal courts have upheld that state can't overstep their authority and like step on federal authority to carry out immigration enforcement, right? I think that those health inspectors, they already have done their health inspection. So they already did one. And the report, I think is coming out at the end of July. So there will be that. And then I think my understanding is San Diego County plans to fight. That's where I thought they were going to appeal it. Yeah. Yeah, they're going to try to pass the issue in court to see if they can continue going in there and doing their inspections. But like I said, you know, the courts haven't tended to rule that way. And DHS thinks, like we know from their own statement that they think that this will sort of put an end to the different inspections and oversight stuff that the state and the local officials want to do. Yeah, yeah.

It's a pretty bleak, pretty big outlook for immigration detention, which was not really a great outlook. to begin with, I guess. Yeah, but it's not come 100% decided. Like, it still is an open question, whether these inspection laws will survive the federal ownership or not remains to be seen, I think. Right. Yeah. You said they had plans for other locations.

I'm guessing they have plans to geo-group locations as well. Do you think this is their plan going forward to try and acquire all of these private immigration, they have the money to, I assume? Yeah, I think everything points to yes on that. I think CoreC Civic said in their state, that they are already in talks with ICE about selling more of their facilities. Geo Group has said on earnings calls that they would like to sell their facilities.

And like you mentioned, you know, DHS definitely has the money, thanks to that massive appropriation from the federal government. So, you know, really they've already said that it's kind of their preference to outright own them rather than lease them or have a private company operate them in California. Yeah. So, yeah, I think we will see more of it, and I'm definitely, you know, trying to monitor it as much as possible to see when that happens. I wonder if this also changes the legal environment for people who are either protesting or, like, they're in a sort of mutual aid capacity for the migrants. Sometimes people can hear migrants shouting from inside and they can hear them, like, asking for someone to put money on their phone card or what have you. Right.

Or just describing their conditions relating them. will it being a federal-owned facility? Do you think that changes? Because it's legal to stand outside a thing, right? But if it's a Fed facility, maybe it's even harder. Yes, I do think it will change. I do think we'll see the federal government trying to crack down harder on protesters that come.

You know, in Ote Mesa, they had the people were putting information about how they were being held in bottles and throwing the bottles over the gate. I do think for sure that the federal government will operate differently. that it's federal property. Another thing that's very interesting, you know,

they already hold people who are not immigrant detainees in California City. So they have a section of that facility that are like people who are in the custody of the U.S. Marshals already. So there are already people in there who aren't immigrants. I wonder if we might see more of an effort

to detain more people in these facilities who are not immigrants, right? Yeah, yeah. Because they have promises made to Coursivic and GEO Group that they are going to try, I do give them a certain population of detainees per day, right? Right.

So that's another part that remains to be seen. Yeah, that's also super concerning. Yeah, it really is super concerning of where it could all go, right? Like, especially you see, you know, the federal government calling protesters, domestic terrorists and stuff like that. It is really concerning. Yeah, and we saw that in like I was in Minneapolis in like late January. And the same thing happens there, right?

They have their federal building. It's called the Whipple Building. And they do immigration detention there. But then that was also where people who were detained for protesting against that immigration, those immigration accidents were taken. They used the same facility. And there's a certain kind of menace to that, right? It's really alarming where it could go if you think about it, right?

Yeah, it's really concerning. This is one of those things that's where little people can do much about, right? It's a willing seller, willing buyer kind of situation where unfortunately, like, there's pretty few means for redress. Like, I hope California is successful with being able to inspect them. At least that would be something. And I know there are lots of really good groups doing work to keep people out of detention, to help with habeas, to improve conditions in detention, et cetera.

So, like, people can help out those groups if they want to. Yeah, it does seem like this is a particularly kind of bleak. area of immigration enforcement right now. Right. And especially since, you know, one of the first things that Trump did is shut down the mechanisms that people can appeal or report. Like, you know, when you have a complaint about something that's happened to you within immigration detention, you complain about it either to the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. There's another DHS and both of those have been shut down right now and not funded right now. So those mechanisms with which you

can get any oversight from within the federal government right now or not operating. Yeah, yeah. It's OIDO, the other one. Yeah, that might be it. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I've seen them precisely once. Wendy, if people want to follow your work, you've done lots of good stuff on California. CalMatters does some really good reporting. You had great reporting about the operation return to sender, for example, back when that was shocking. Thank you so much, yeah. How can people find you? Yeah, that's right. So all our stories are there on calmatters.org.

Thank you for that. And then our Operation Return to Sender Documentary is on YouTube. So you can find that there. We did a lot of work to show kind of what Bovino was saying and what was actually happening on the ground. So that's a really good one to watch. Yeah. And you guys published also in Spanish, right?

Yes, we do. More recently we started translating more of our stories into Spanish so that folks who want to read it in Spanish, can find that there too. Yeah, that's great. That's super nice. And I speak for in Spanish. If people need to contact me in Spanish, I can communicate there too. Nice. Yep. And there's a contact link for you on the website. I'm guessing if people want to talk to you about some of this stuff, right? Absolutely. Or, yeah, I can just share my email for sure. It's Wendy at how matters.org. And I am always hoping to hear from people so we can do more in-depth reporting about what's going on inside these facilities. So thank you so much for that opportunity to share that. Yeah, of course. Thanks for doing this.

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