Los Angeles youth detainees win right to hug their parents

Youth held at Los Padrinos juvenile hall have won the right to hug their parents during visits, after a campaign run from inside the Los Angeles County facility. Mercedes Maradiaga, who visited her 19-year-old son every weekend of his detention, spent years sitting across a table without being allowed to touch him.

The no-contact rule made no exceptions for birthdays or holidays. One mother who embraced her son on his birthday had the visit terminated and future visits suspended for two weeks, according to Ilana Parach of Hoops 4 Justice, who ran a basketball and mentorship program inside the hall. A boy held for three years watched his mother cry across the visiting table. When Parach asked the detained youth to list the programs they wanted — resources for their families, reentry support — they added a final line: 'We want to hug our moms.'

The rule was enforced by an institution with a documented record of the opposite problem. Los Padrinos was closed in 2019 after conditions there — rat infestations, flooded toilets, abuse by staff — violated state standards, and six officers were criminally charged with assault and child abuse for pepper-spraying teenage girls. The hall reopened in 2023 when Central Juvenile Hall, which had absorbed its detainees, was itself closed for similar violations. Abuses resumed within months, and in 2025 the California attorney general charged 30 officers with child endangerment and abuse, conspiracy and battery over 'gladiator fights' the staff encouraged between detained youth.

Maradiaga's own son was beaten by officers days before her September 2024 visit. It happened in a part of the jail with no cameras; guards jumped on him and kicked him, and he needed surgery for a torn ACL. 'I couldn't even let him know I'm here just with the little hug,' Maradiaga said. 'It would have meant everything to him. It was sad, and I did that for four years.'

Olivia Shields, a justice transformation policy coordinator at the Urban Peace Institute, describes a county that avoids compliance failures by moving bodies rather than reducing them. 'Rather than decarcerate these populations of young people and find community-based alternatives or step-downs for as many of them as possible, they basically shift the youth around from facility to facility to avoid noncompliance,' she said. Los Padrinos carried its reputation in Los Angeles long before 2019; Maradiaga grew up hearing disturbing stories about the hall and now says it should be shut down. 'I don't think locking them away from their family is the answer.'

The hugs will now be permitted inside a facility where officers staged fights between the same boys. The last item on the youths' wish list took a campaign to obtain; the fights took 30 criminal charges to stop.