Ninth Circuit Unanimously Denies DHS Stay of Adelanto Conditions Injunction in L.T. v. ICE

A unanimous three-judge Ninth Circuit panel — Margaret McKeown, Michelle Friedland, and Eric Miller — denied the Department of Homeland Security’s emergency motion to stay a preliminary injunction in L.T. v. ICE on August 21, 2026. The class action, brought by Public Counsel, CHIRLA, and the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, challenges conditions at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County, California. The July 2026 district court order the government sought to freeze requires ICE to provide detainees with clean drinking water available 24 hours a day, nutritious meals, outdoor recreation, clean clothing, mattresses, and hygiene products at no cost — a list whose banality is the point, since each item names something the plaintiffs established was not reliably being provided.

The load-bearing holding is the panel’s reliance on West v. Atkins (1988), the Supreme Court decision that a private physician under contract to a state prison acts under color of state law and remains subject to constitutional constraint. Applied here, contracting the operation of Adelanto to GEO Group does not relieve the federal government of its own constitutional duty toward the people it detains. That forecloses the structural defense the detention-contracting model is built to supply: that the agency holds the detainee while the vendor holds the obligations, so that neither is fully answerable for conditions. The panel separately rejected the government’s argument that the injunction ran afoul of limits on nationwide injunctive relief — a procedural theory the administration has used successfully elsewhere in this cycle, and which failed here because the order binds the government’s treatment of a certified class at one named facility.

The ruling reads against a Colorado decision one day earlier that cut the other way for the same contractor. On August 20, Chief Judge Daniel Domenico enjoined Colorado’s expanded health-inspection mandate over GEO’s Aurora facility on federal-preemption grounds (2026-08-20–federal-judge-blocks-colorado-health-inspection-authority-geo-aurora) — GEO won the argument that federal contracting displaces state oversight, while the government lost the argument that federal contracting displaces its own constitutional duty. Both propositions cannot expand indefinitely without meeting: if states may not inspect and the outsourcing does not transfer responsibility, the federal courts hearing conditions claims become the only remaining forum. Adelanto is where that matters most concretely. The facility recorded its fourth death in seven months in March, a California record (2026-03-30–adelanto-geo-fourth-death-california-record-seven-months), and this month the corpus documented Carlitos Ricardo Parias held roughly 300 days there with an untreated gunshot wound (2026-08-16–parias-shot-journalist-300-days-adelanto-untreated-wound) — the specific pattern of medical neglect the injunction now obliges the government, not merely its vendor, to correct.

Correction, 2026-08-28 — name. This entry referred to “Mario Parias.” His name is Carlitos Ricardo “Richard” Parias, per the dedicated canon entry 2026-08-16–parias-shot-journalist-300-days-adelanto-untreated-wound and both of its tier-1 sources (The Intercept, NPR). No source uses “Mario.” Corrected. Caught while adding him to the victim-story deployment index; the error appeared in two canon entries and in a ticket title, so it had begun to propagate.