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In early October, Fernando Gomez Ruiz was eating at a food truck in Los Angeles when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents grabbed him. The 61-year-old was taken from the city where he had lived for 22 years. He was brought to California City Detention Facility, where he says he was denied insulin. Soon, his blood sugar spiked. An ulcer spread across his foot. It’s still there today; he tries to clean the oozing blood as best he can with dirty, bloody gauze. But because of the way the facility restricts legal calls, he hasn’t been able to fully explain any of this to his lawyer. This denial of one of the most basic rights in America, the ability to speak with an attorney, has became an instrument of the ICE detention system itself.
Attorney-client privilege is the oldest privilege in American law. “It is a sacrosanct privilege,” said Eunice Cho, senior attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project. “For people in government custody, it is quite important to be able to speak with attorneys in a privileged, confidential manner.”
ICE insists its system protects attorney-client privilege. Every detention facility is supposed to follow ICE standards that promise private meeting rooms, unmonitored legal calls, and secure legal mail. But the record inside tells a different story.
In the past year, class-action lawsuits from California to New York to Florida have asked federal courts to intervene because ICE facilities monitored legal calls, copied privileged mail, and denied access to attorneys. Taken together, these filings depict a system where confidential communication with an attorney is structurally impossible.
Earlier this month, Gomez Ruiz and six others sued California City Detention Facility for denying access to counsel, among other violations. Their case lays bare a broader pattern that starts the moment someone is detained. Attorneys often cannot find their people for days because ICE’s Online Detainee Locator System is delayed and sometimes does not list them at all. Families are left calling hospitals trying to learn where their loved one is. Once someone is found, confidential communication is almost impossible.
Attorneys describe weekslong delays for legal calls. When virtual calls do occur, they are capped at one hour, which means detainees may wait another week or two before speaking to counsel again. Tablets, which allow people in California’s state prisons to make calls from their cells, are only allowed in dayrooms. And in many ICE facilities, the tablets that are intended to be used with legal representatives are monitored and recorded. Even in-person “confidential” conversations take place under guard surveillance in crowded rooms where the sound carries.
Marisol Dominguez-Ruiz, one of Fernando’s lawyers from the ACLU, is used to sitting in the same room as her clients without barriers. But at California City, she was forced to bend forward to talk with Fernando through a small sliver between the glass. “You’re kind of crouched down and yelling to make sure that each other hears,” she said. “It doesn’t sound to me like it’s a confidential kind of conversation.”
Immigrants in ICE custody are trapped in a paradox. They have no Sixth Amendment right to an attorney—that applies only to criminal defendants. But an attorney is often their only “contact with the outside world,” and only hope of reaching their family members, as a federal judge underscored in 2019. In that case, the court held that the government cannot make it harder for an immigrant detainee to exercise their right to counsel, and that doing so could violate their First Amendment right to communicate with the outside world. The stakes are clear: Without a lawyer, people are twice as likely to be deported, according to a study earlier this year from the American Immigration Council.
“Arguably immigrants in civil detention should have at least as good if not better access to their attorneys than people in criminal custody,” said Emma Winger, deputy legal director at the American Immigration Council.
Because they are civil detainees in immigration court, there is no mechanism for courts to rapidly intervene when their rights collapse. In a criminal case, if a jail interferes with attorney-client conversations, you can go straight to federal court and get a judge to stop it. Immigration law works the opposite way. People must wait until they lose their case, then file an appeal, and then and only then ask a federal court to review what happened. “Any claims that come out of someone’s deportation proceedings can only be raised on a petition for review of their removal order,” said Winger. “It makes it more difficult to quickly prevent ongoing abuses in the deportation process by bringing a lawsuit in federal court.”
What exists is a system that treats people worse than criminal punishment while it uses its civil label to evade the constitutional limits that govern punishment. That’s nothing new. ICE has been warned about attorney access violations for more than two decades. A 2006 report by DHS found that detainees in multiple ICE facilities had to make legal calls from dayrooms or offices without privacy panels where staff could overhear them, and that some facilities delayed or denied requests for attorney calls for more than two weeks. Six years later, the American Immigration Council found that ICE restricts access to attorneys and that agents were telling people they aren’t entitled to one. Most recently, in 2022, the ACLU’s No Fighting Chance report found that at least 58 (out of 199 at the time) ICE facilities block attorney calls, provide no private space for meetings, and create delays that cause attorneys to miss critical deadlines.
What’s new is the scale: The Trump administration has demanded more than 1 million deportations. To reach that quota, “ICE wants people to self-deport,” said Amy Godshall, an ACLU of Florida attorney. Without a lawyer, people may feel they have little hope of contesting their case and may want to escape the horrifying conditions of detention at all costs, even if that means leaving the country.
At facilities like Broadview in Illinois, detainees say officers have been asking them to sign ICE Form I-210—a “voluntary departure” order—that is completed by officers themselves. “People are signing these life-altering documents without the benefit of talking to counsel,” said Cho.
More than a series of isolated violations, this is a structural design. Civil detention erases the attorney-client privilege at the core of due process and then uses that void to pressure people into signing their own deportation orders. The machinery works because people are made to disappear before they ever get to speak.
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