By Nick Valencia | May 18, 2026
MIAMI— When he fell inside an immigration detention facility last December, Justo Betancourt didn’t tell his family what happened. He didn’t want them to worry. And despite his medical history and poor mental health, doctors connected to the ICE facility never bothered to tell his family either.
It wasn’t until this week when Justo walked free after months at Alligator Alcatraz that he told his daughter Ari what really happened. The fall was a near-fatal stroke.
The facility knew and never told his family.
It gets worse.
As of this morning, Betancourt was hospitalized again, presenting with stroke-like symptoms.
Betancourt’s case is not isolated.
Across the country, at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, located roughly 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles, detainees are engaged in a hunger strike, according to multiple reports. The conditions there, as described by those with loved ones inside, amount to what one husband calls a human rights catastrophe unfolding in plain sight.
Amir Modaraei whose wife, Tanya Zamataykina has been there for weeks, says she is living through hell.
“They give them dog food to eat,” he told NVN over the phone Sunday evening.
Modaraei has filed a separate lawsuit against the facility, alleging his wife Zamataykina has been subjected to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse by a female guard. He did not identify the guard by name.
NVN has not been able to independently verify the abuse allegations, which are also part of the pending litigation.
During recent appearance on NVN’s live show, Modaraei reached for a stark comparison to describe what he believes his wife is enduring. “It’s like a concentration camp,” he said.
Adelanto has long been one of the most scrutinized facilities in the country. Located in California’s high desert, it is operated by the GEO Group, a private prison contractor. It has been the subject federal investigations, civil rights lawsuits, and repeated complaints from detainee advocates. But those complaints of inadequate medical care, unsanitary conditions, and abuse have been historically disputed by the facility and GEO Group.
The hunger strike reported this week suggests conditions inside have not improved.
The accounts are alone stark, but together form an ominous pattern of what appears to be state-sanctioned abuse. A stroke concealed from a family. A hunger strike inside a detention center. Allegations of sexual abuse by staff, each emerging at a moment when under the Trump administration ICE detention populations have swelled.
Oversight has not kept pace.
For Betancourt, the damage may already be done.
When he came directly onto NVN’s live show for his first public appearance after his release, he spoke carefully, deliberately. His daughter Ari had noticed changes in her father’s speech after the December incident but received no explanation from the facility and nothing from her father , who stayed silent to spare the fear of his daughter.
Now she knows.
Today, Ari is working to obtain her father’s medical records from the period of his detention. What those records may disclose could reveal what for more and more is becoming the reality of these for-profit private prisons. Cruelty is the point.
