FEDERAL COURT, June 23 – Inner City
Press has filed a letter with the United States District
Court for the Eastern District of California opposing The
GEO Group, Inc.'s request to seal the audit and inspection
records of the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center and other
summary judgment exhibits in L.V.Q. v. The GEO Group,
Inc., No. 1:24-cv-00656-KES-CDB (E.D. Cal., Judge Kirk E.
Sherriff). T
he filing adds a sixth federal court to
Inner City Press's active unsealing project, which now
spans from Massachusetts to Maryland to Colorado to
Connecticut to Washington and California. GEO Group — one
of the largest private immigration detention companies in
the United States, operating the Mesa Verde ICE Processing
Center in Bakersfield under contract with ICE — filed a
request to seal on June 16 and a corrected request on June
22, 2026, seeking to file its entire summary judgment
record under seal.
The stated grounds: that exhibits contain
the plaintiff's personally identifying information, that
emails contain the names and email addresses of ICE and
DHS personnel, and that Mesa Verde audit and inspection
records were produced as confidential under the parties'
protective order. Inner City Press does not challenge the
redaction of the plaintiff's personal information — the
plaintiff, an immigration detainee, is proceeding in this
civil rights case under a pseudonym, and that protection
is legitimate.
What Inner City Press challenges is
GEO's attempt to use those legitimate narrow concerns as a
lever to seal the entire factual record underlying its
summary judgment motion, including the substantive content
of audit and inspection records of a government-contracted
detention facility. GEO's own attorney acknowledged in her
declaration (ECF 86) that she had "searched the internet
and found some of the audit and inspection records for
Mesa Verde on the internet in a redacted form."
The records are already partly public. The
Ninth Circuit's standard from Kamakana v. City &
County of Honolulu, 447 F.3d 1172 (9th Cir. 2006),
requires "compelling reasons" to seal documents filed in
connection with dispositive motions — compelling reasons
that the existence of publicly available redacted versions
definitively undercuts. Targeted redaction of specific
details is the appropriate remedy, not wholesale sealing
of what GEO claims to be the undisputed facts in a case
about immigration detention conditions.
The EDCA filing is part of an expanding
unsealing project that Inner City Press has pursued across
federal districts in 2026. In the District of
Massachusetts, Inner City Press's letter in UMG Recordings
v. Suno was docketed as ECF No. 233, and Suno ultimately
conceded that only a narrow numerical figure required
protection. In the District of Maryland, Judge Matthew J.
Maddox docketed Inner City Press's opposition to wholesale
sealing of a sentencing memorandum in United States v.
Rappaport the day it was received.
In the District of Colorado,
Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter has set a hearing
on Inner City Press's oppositions to restriction motions
(ECF Nos. 73 and 76) in Jones v. United Airlines, No.
1:24-cv-03013-NYW-NRN, a race discrimination case
involving a noose in a breakroom at Denver International
Airport. And in the District of Connecticut, Inner City
Press's motion to unseal sentencing exhibits in United
States v. Sakal arrived at the Bridgeport Clerk's Office
by mail — after the sentencing had already taken place. It
has now been docketed.
The Second Circuit recognized Inner City
Press's First Amendment newsgathering and its standing to
be heard on sealing motions in Lee v. Greenwood, 145 F.4th
248 (2d Cir. 2025). Inner City Press is carrying that
principle — and the Ninth Circuit's Kamakana standard —
into the Eastern District of California, where a private
prison company wants to keep its government contract
compliance records out of the public eye.
A summary judgment hearing in the GEO case
is set for August 3, 2026. Inner City Press will not rest
on this. Watch this site.
