Sen. Alex Padilla and Rep. Jim Costa showed up unannounced at Golden State Annex in McFarland on Monday hoping to inspect the immigration detention facility, but they never got past the front gate. After waiting roughly 50 minutes, the two lawmakers left without setting foot inside.
The visit was part of what Padilla's office described as an effort to conduct congressional oversight of the facility, according to The Bakersfield Californian. A facility supervisor told the lawmakers that ICE staff from Fresno needed to be on site before they could be granted access, and that it could take at least a couple of hours for those personnel to arrive, as reported by ABC30. Padilla said he pressed the supervisor for a legal basis for the delay and came up empty. “He could not point to a section of the law. He could not point to a section of their contract,” Padilla said, per the outlet's report.
Senator Cites Reports of Troubling Conditions
Padilla said his office regularly receives reports describing alarming conditions inside the facility, a concern that shaped why the two lawmakers chose to show up unannounced. Facility officials said no ICE agents were present on site to admit Padilla and Costa, according to Padilla's office. Costa, who represents Fresno, argued the runaround undercut basic transparency. “Members of Congress have the right to conduct oversight,” Costa said, according to the Fresno Bee.
Costa went further, saying the episode pointed to systemic unaccountability rather than a one-off scheduling snag. He said the pair were denied access to basic information and given the runaround, and that the denial demonstrated a lack of accountability at the facility. Golden State Annex did not immediately return a request for comment Monday, per the seed reporting.
What a June Inspection Already Found
This was not the first time Golden State Annex has drawn federal scrutiny. ICE inspectors visited the facility in June, after giving four weeks' advance notice, and the resulting report documented a detainee with a fractured foot who waited roughly six weeks for an X-ray, ABC30's reporting notes. That same inspection found that none of the 18 detainees interviewed alleged discrimination, mistreatment or abuse, offering a mixed picture even under a scheduled, cooperative review.
Golden State Annex is one of four immigration detention centers operating in Kern County and is run by GEO Group, a Florida-based private detention company that operates three such facilities in the county. The disputed Monday visit comes amid broader reports of increased immigration enforcement activity across the San Joaquin Valley, which Costa's office says began Oct. 5, a timeline detailed in a letter covered by goldrushcam.com.
Part of a Wider Pattern of Access Fights
Monday's standoff fits into a national pattern of friction between ICE and lawmakers seeking to inspect detention sites. ICE facilitated roughly 45 congressional visits to detention centers annually in the decade before 2025, but that number jumped to more than 150 visits in fiscal year 2025 and had already reached about 200 by May 11 of this fiscal year, according to the Los Angeles Times. The same report noted that members of Congress from California, Illinois and New Jersey had recently been denied access to detention facilities in their own states.
Similar access disputes have surfaced elsewhere this year. Rep. Veronica Escobar said federal immigration officials blocked her from speaking with any detained immigrants during an oversight visit to Camp East Montana in Texas, according to The Guardian. Padilla has made these inspections a recurring part of his oversight work; in January he and Sen. Adam Schiff visited an ICE detention center in California City that is operated by CoreCivic.
Civil rights advocates have separately raised concerns about conditions inside detention centers nationally, including the timeliness of medical care for detainees. An ICE facility access form indicates that the agency's standard seven-day advance-notice requirement for members of Congress did not apply “at this time,” citing a March 2026 court order, though the excerpt does not spell out the complete current access rules or address what happened in McFarland. Padilla's office has said agency officials would not answer basic questions about due process protections and detainees' fundamental rights, a complaint that echoes Monday's unresolved standoff at Golden State Annex.
