There’s an illegal detention center operating out of a small desert town in California called California City. There might be one in your state too, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d never heard about it. CoreCivic, the second largest private prison company in the US, runs 82 prisons, 16 of which are Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities. ICE is CoreCivic’s largest client. As of this month, the company has reopened a former correctional facility that Governor Gavin Newsom shut down two years ago (as part of an effort to reduce California’s reliance on private prisons). The once-closed prison is now a CoreCivic immigration detention center which disregards California Senate Bill 29. Under that bill, local governments are not allowed to issue building permits to private federal immigrant centers without a 180-day public notice period and at least two public hearings.

There have been zero public hearings with CoreCivic in California City.

***

California City’s population is less than 15,000. It is home to two airports: the aerospace testing site known as the Mojave Air and Space Port and the California City Municipal Airport. The re-opening of the prison means there are 2,560 beds to fill to make operating the place cost-effective.

On September 4, KQED confirmed that the center, which would be the largest in California, was receiving detainees without a business license and without passing fire department and building safety checks. CoreCivic admitted they had started taking in detainees but would not say when intake had begun. Lawyers heard that their clients were in California City at the end of August, according to KQED. On Monday, The Fresno Bee reported that the center is in fact open without the proper permits and that conditions inside have been called “chaos” by detainees, activist groups, and lawyers. (This entire article is well-worth a read.)

The facility also failed a fire department inspection in July, KQED reported. CoreCivic’s spokesman Ryan Gustin told the reporter there that all problems at the center have been addressed and CoreCivic has resubmitted their permit application. Yet, they are still open and taking in prisoners without one. Gustin implied there wasn’t time to follow Senate Bill 29 because the company was responding “to an immediate need from the federal government for safe, humane and appropriate housing and care for these individuals.”

On September 9, myself and two fellow activists drove two hours outside Los Angeles to attend what ended up being a five-hour city council meeting in California City.

Along with other activists and a roomful of concerned citizens, we each stood at a podium, and one after another, and asked the city council to force the ICE facility to stop operating given the failed permit inspections and their lack of a business license. Close it down like you would close any other business that was without the proper permits and licenses. What makes this any different?

***

During public comment at the California City city council meeting, two different mothers call in over Zoom begging in Spanish (translated by relatives) for help or information about their sons. One knows her son is being held in the facility, having been transferred there without notice, she explains. She didn’t find out where he was for three days. Then, she was able to speak to him about the un-livable conditions in the center.

“They are only allowed to leave their cells for 10 minutes,” she says, voice breaking. “My son says there is no clean water.” This is validated by KQED’s interview with Jonathan Montes Diaz, a 33-year-old California man who was once in prison at the facility, and said when a water line ruptured in April of 2023, prisoners had to use plastic bags to relieve themselves. (The prison’s spokesperson confirmed the loss of water, but not the aspect about the plastic bags.)

The woman on Zoom pleads, beyond distraught: “Por favor. Por favor.”

A little girl calls in and begs for information about her father. She’s called before, activists tell me. When her time is up, the mayor replies with the standard “thank you,” and the council moves on to the next caller.

***

It was all hard to listen to. The girl’s voice had made me lightheaded. For a few minutes mid-public comment, I walked around the building to get some fresh air. I looked up at the desert stars. My hands were shaking. It is strange to be at all the city council meetings I’ve been to in the last four months both in Cal City and LA and still feel the detachment from the council members. They hardly ever visibly react to the pleas of their constituents.

At that meeting, I learned California City is in serious debt. Mayor Marquette Hawkins’ stated reason for allowing the center open is to bring in revenue and jobs to a drowning town. Fellow LA-based activist Catie warned the council that when a big company comes into a small town and becomes the residents’ main source of income, that company owns the town. Even if the center does provide jobs, it means that the people of Cal City will be completely beholden to a private corporation. CoreCivic could hold everyone’s jobs hostage and have free reign. No oversight. No accountability.

All of us at the meeting have our own reasons for fighting this and wanting to convince California City that letting the detention center stand is a huge mistake, both financially and morally.

I personally believe California City, vulnerable with a small population and desperate because of debt, is being stripped for parts by a private prison company known for forced labor. CoreCivic has been sued for it. These residents are being sold the lie that allowing this facility in will save them from their debts. I believe this is not true. The city will bear the brunt of electric and water usage. They are opening themselves to more lawsuits they can’t afford. Detainees will get sick or injured without the center passing proper inspections, and California City’s emergency services will be overrun. Inviting ICE in will allow people to be swept off the streets, especially after the Supreme Court’s recent ruling allowing racial profiling. No one in town will be safe. CoreCivic will eat California City alive while working overtime to indiscriminately fill 2,560 beds.

By the end of the exhausting five hours, one of the city council members Michael Hurles at least said he now felt the city needed to ask more questions about the center. Whether he’s sincere or not remains to be seen.

***

I’m not an expert. I’m not writing this as someone who has studied local government or can cite all the rules and statutes. I’m an outsider who has decided to back up activists from the area who know better than me. Maybe there truly is nothing anyone on any city council in the whole country can do — beyond slogans and platitudes — to fight ICE and the federal government from invading. Maybe there are ways to fight and they don’t want to do it. Maybe they see fighting as overstepping — go outside their jurisdiction or roles. At the city council, activists named a few grants and programs that could ease Cal City’s debt so that they don’t have to rely on a detention center. They told the members if they needed help with any part of it, the activists were here to guide them. I didn’t see any indication the members were interested in that.

Everything I’ve heard at city councils in multiple California cities leads me to think they don’t see or hear the fire alarms of fascism whirring as closely as I do. Maybe they do hear them and their cost-benefit analysis says they benefit. Mayor Hawkins keeps throwing his hands up or passing the buck. But who cares about procedure right now? When one side is breaking the rules, our side has to think outside the box and maybe, God forbid, break decorum ourselves. Why aren’t our politicians using their bodies? Why aren’t they lining up as a group and standing with activists outside the facility? I don’t get it.

I write this as an offering to you, the readers. My biggest, most unique asset in this fight is that I have the privilege of avenues to gather and report this information.

This private prison company can not continue to operate an illegal detention center in California City. There are around 500 or so detainees currently held there in inhumane conditions. CoreCivic cannot do the same in your state or in your city — Laredo, Texas or San Diego, California, or Eloy, Arizona or Lumpkin, Georgia. Look for any that are close to you. At least try to get on Zoom or show up to a local city council meeting and call it out on the record. CoreCivic can not come into these towns, open its gaping maw and move in darkness to swallow people whole.

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Up until June this year Habryn was living what many would call the American dream. She had a job at ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, surrounded by some of the brightest minds in artificial intelligence. Her pay was comfortably in the six-figures, and she owned a house in San Francisco, the first city she had ever lived in which felt like home.

Her six-year old daughter, Steffi, was enjoying school and her wife, Eden, was thriving in her career as an artist.

But the family couldn’t shake their concern about the direction U.S. politics was moving in. While Habryn was born in Poland and raised in Australia from the age of five, her partner and child had only ever known life in the States.

When President Trump returned to the Oval Office, the family made the decision to leave San Francisco—and Habryn’s dream job—and move to Stockholm, Sweden. There they hope to stay indefinitely.

Habryn said she made the choice to leave the the U.S., where she had lived since 2007, one night in March. She said: “My wife was traveling on the East Coast and I was home with Steffi. And something about that particular night, I was awake worrying about things which was not uncommon, and I just got to the point of: It’s time to go, I can’t just stay here and do nothing, but doing anything comes with such terrible risks for me because of my status.”

“If I came to the attention of, or got arrested by the federal authorities, the outcome of that could be tragic. It turns out that my wife, on the same day, reached the same conclusion.”

Habryn explains the “status” she refers to: “During the campaign it was immigrants and transgender people that was occupying the airways and since I’m both, they’ve got me coming and going effectively.”

The family are not alone in their decision to leave Trump’s America. While it’s hard to pin down the number of people leaving the U.S. every year (the Department of State previously told Fortune it does not keep such records) in 2024 applications from Americans to live in the United Kingdom alone spiked 26% compared to a year prior. More than 6,100 Americans applied for British citizenship last year, a record number.

Immigration experts also previously told Fortune their phones had been ringing off the hook—particularly since that infamous Trump and Biden debate, when many people felt the fate of the November election had been decided. Montreal-based immigration experts Moving2Canada, for example, saw inquiries spike in both 2016 and 2020 and in 2024 saw enquiries triple in volume after the Trump vs. Biden debate.

Life at OpenAI

Habryn is no stranger to working in America’s tech elite: She moved to the U.S. originally to work for Google in Mountain View where she stayed for the next 12 years. Her experience at OpenAI, where she worked from May 2024 to July 2025, is a familiar story to many in Big Tech: An intense atmosphere, “wonderful” people and riveting work.

“It’s challenging,” Habryn said. “I think it’s exciting but I was lucky enough to have a lot of security and confidence in my own abilities—I think without that it would have been very, very hard.”

The prospect of losing her dream role in the research department of one of the world’s most-talked about companies was a key issue which held Habryn back from making the move earlier. While her team was supportive of the decision, ultimately the legalities of Habryn’s work meant it couldn’t move with her.

“It was really hard,” she said. “That was probably the reason it took me as long as it did to make the decision, because honestly I had this period of grief stepping away from this. I’ve been working in tech for a long time … and really the only thing I want to be working on is AI.

“It was hard and I didn’t love making that decision but, ultimately, it was just a question of priority.”

Habryn is confident she will find interesting work when she needs to, and the family are settling into their newly purchased home in Stockholm—the family doubt they will ever return to the U.S. That comes with “guilt”, Habryn says: “I buy the narrative that you should fight for the things that you believe in and that there is value to staying and fighting for that. If it were not for Steffi, I think we would have.”

Ultimately her six-year-old daughter is their focus: “We set aside a lot of things that we love to do [because] we want Steffi to have a routine, a stable home, a stable school and all those things. The hardest thing about this whole move has been worrying about the impact on her and so the priority was that we don’t want to do this again, we’re going to move once, and we want to put down roots and spend the next 15/20 years there.”

Last Week, Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB) — a wide-ranging, 1,000-page domestic policy bill that would affect everything from taxes to SNAP benefits to Medicaid and more — eked through the House with just one vote to spare.

Among the “50 Wins” touted in the legislation by the White House (many of which have been contested by analysts and policy experts) is an increased child tax credit (CTC), from $2,000 per child under the age of 17 to $2,500… but there’s a catch. The OBBB would, in fact, revoke the child tax credit for millions of American children and permanent residents. Estimates range from approximately 2 million to 4.5 million.

The $500 boost per child would go through 2028, at which point it would be adjusted for inflation so that it would retain its full value. But there’s a new requirement: both parents must have a Social Security number (SSN) for the family to claim the credit.

U.S. citizens, green card holders, and H1B visa holders can receive SSN. For the latter two groups, this number is for the purpose of filing taxes and other work-related business only. However, undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers, students, and workers on a number of other work visas, pay taxes with an individual taxpayer identification number (ITIN).

Under the OBBB, if one parent were a U.S. citizen with a social security number and the other were an asylum seeker, and they had a child who was an American citizen, that family would not have access to the CTC. This is true regardless of whether the family had received the CTC in the past.

In general, CTCs, and even the idea of expanding them, enjoy bipartisan support. Indeed, CTCs have been shown to help reduce the effects of poverty in families and improve children’s overall well-being. But Republicans have balked at the idea of undocumented immigrants receiving any benefit in

According to the Tax Policy Center, this move would dramatically reduce costs by about $40 billion over the next decade… but questions the long-term cost, not just on families and children, but on the economic strength of their communities.

The OBBB is expected to face challenges in the Senate, and already some who voted YES in the house have walked back their support, including some of Trump’s most ardent supporters in Congress. While changes are expected, passage is a distinct possibility.