On October 10, 2025, RBGG, along with co-counsel, filed a motion for preliminary injunction on behalf of class members incarcerated at the San Diego County Jail facilities. The motion seeks to prohibit the placement of class members with serious mental illness in the Jail’s Administrative Separation units absent exigent circumstances.
Plaintiffs’ mental health expert, Dr. Pablo Stewart, filed a declaration in support of the motion stating that “conditions in the San Diego County Jail’s Administrative Separation units are among the harshest and most restrictive forms of solitary confinement I have seen in over 35 years of practice.” The declaration also states that “[p]lacing people with serious mental illness in solitary confinement can and likely will worsen their mental health symptoms, including but not limited to increased feelings of depression or anxiety, worsening psychosis, such as increasing hallucinations or paranoia, and/or catatonia.” In addition to Dr. Stewart, fourteen class members filed declarations about their experiences in the Jail’s Administrative Separation units, along with the sister of Corey Dean, who died in an Administrative Separation unit at Vista Detention Facility on July 13, 2025.
RBGG’s Gay Grunfeld, lead counsel for Plaintiffs, commented: “For too long, San Diego County has been an outlier on many fronts, but particularly on this one, where it practices an extreme and harsh form of solitary confinement that has already led to the deaths of many incarcerated people. We are asking the Court to stop San Diego County’s unlawful and deadly practice of housing people with serious mental illness in solitary confinement conditions and to bring San Diego County into compliance with constitutional law, which will save lives and improve the health and safety of all people who live and work at San Diego County Jail facilities. Our hearts go out to the families of Corey Dean and Karim Talib, both of whom suffered a terrible loss of a loved one in July, and all other families who have lost loved ones due to this practice.”
An article in the San Diego Union Tribune on October 20, 2025 includes this quote about conditions for those in solitary confinement in the San Diego County Jails: “’There are rats, birds, ants, flies and roaches inside the unit and feces all over the place in the module and the yard,’ wrote Ismael Betancourt, who’s been held continuously in administrative separation — the sheriff’s term for solitary confinement — for more than four years at three different San Diego jails. The showers are ‘disgusting and full of mold,’ he wrote. ‘Whenever I am out of my cell, I wear waist chains and my legs are shackled. Even when my wife and kids visit me in person, they chain me up on the wall right in front of my family.'”
KPBS in San Diego broadcast a lengthy report on October 21, 2025 on its All Things Considered program, interviewing two investigative reporters who have been covering the case, Disturbing accounts of solitary confinement in San Diego jails.
The motion for preliminary injunction was filed as part of Dunsmore et al. v. San Diego County Sheriff’s Department et al., No. 3:20-cv-00406-AJB-DDL, a broader class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California over unconstitutional and unlawful conditions at the San Diego County Jail facilities. The hearing date for the motion is set for Thursday, November 20, 2025 at 2pm.
Key court documents:
Memorandum of Points and Authorities, 09-10-2025