“Good afternoon. My name is [Redacted/Scribbled Out] my wife and I have been in ONDC since April 15 2025. It’s cold here, the food is very poor. For 290+ days we haven’t eaten a single piece of fruit, banana, orange or anything else. We’re in one big room with no doors or windows. We can’t see any grass or trees. We’re constantly sick.
There’s no internet, my lawer wasn’t given my phone, and I wasn’t able to properly prepare for the final trial. Our judge changed, he retired. The final court date was postponed three times. After 290+ days, we still don’t have a final court decision. The judges are very busy, there’s a lot of work.
We don’t have a next court date - sitting indefinitely. They won’t give us a court date for bond hearing or parole. The lawers aren’t doing their job, and there’s no way to influence them. The library only has English-language books. There’s no sports.
We received positive feedback in our TORTURE INTERVIEW. We were tortured in our country and are now being held in prison indefinitely without the opportunity to properly prepare for trial. We are in dire straits and are pleading for help. Many people here have been sitting for 12, 14, 16, 18 months without a final court decision.”
They are not passing notes. They are launching distress signals.
At Otay Mesa, a GEO run immigration prison in San Diego, captives have been throwing lotion bottles over the fence, each one wrapped in a handwritten SOS. Not metaphorical. Literal bottles. Literal pleas. The kind of message you send when every official channel has been welded shut.
Use this: search for “Otay Mesa lotion bottle notes LA Taco”
Pick the photos LA TACO published of the bottles collected by organizers.
Why: these are the primary artifacts, the physical evidence of distress.
One note reads:
“For 280 days we have not eaten a single piece of fruit. We are all in one big room with no doors or windows. We cannot see any grass or trees. We are all constantly sick.”
Another:
“It is cold here all the time and the food is poor.”
Organizers outside the facility have collected fourteen lotion bottles, two deodorant bottles, and one AA battery, all used as makeshift message capsules.
Inside, people describe a warehouse style dorm with no windows, no fresh air, no fruit, no medical care. A sealed box designed for maximum invisibility and minimum accountability. CoreCivic says a detention center. The notes call it what it is: a slow motion collapse.
And the cruelty is not incidental. It is structural. CoreCivic is simultaneously arguing before the Supreme Court that it deserves sovereign immunity, claiming it should be shielded from lawsuits because it operates like the government.
Translation:
They want the power of the state with none of the liability.
A private corporation trying to cosplay as a federal agency while people inside are throwing lotion bottles like lifeboats.
This is the part of the iceberg the public is not meant to see. The part where human beings have to smuggle out their own suffering in plastic containers because every official oversight mechanism has been engineered to fail.
This is not mismanagement.
This is not a glitch.
This is CoreCivic Hell by design.
Primary sources and reporting
LA TACO reporting: Exclusive: Detention Center Captives Are Throwing Lotion Bottles...
ICE facility page confirming CoreCivic operation: Otay Mesa Detention Center
CoreCivic facility roster: CoreCivic Facility List
DHS OIG inspection reports: OIG-21-61 (Otay Mesa Inspection)
Class Action Lawsuit (Forced Labor): Owino v. CoreCivic coverage via Voice of San Diego or ACLU San Diego
San Diego Union-Tribune reporting: Conditions at Otay Mesa
NBC 7 San Diego: Rep. Vargas Denied Entry
