ICE Illegally Refuses to Allow Congressional Oversight of its Detention Centers

Using its power of the purse, Congress passed a bipartisan law last year that makes funding for immigration enforcement conditional on allowing lawmakers to visit ICE detainment facilities unannounced. The administration has been blatantly defying that law, both in practice and now in formal policy.

The New York Times reports:

Under federal law, members of Congress can make unannounced oversight visits to immigration facilities that “detain or otherwise house aliens.” Lawmakers are not required to provide “prior notice of the intent to enter a facility” to conduct oversight. …

But in guidance released this month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement asks members of Congress to give at least 72 hours notice for a visit to its facilities. Asked about the policy, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, went even further, suggesting that federal officials would not be allowed entry unless they provided a week’s notice. …

The new policy, updated since February, also denies that ICE field offices are subject to the provision in federal law about congressional oversight visits. Detained immigrants have been held in some of those offices for days waiting for officials to process their cases.

Democratic lawmakers in California, Illinois and New York have been turned away from ICE field offices and processing centers in recent days, sometimes after trying in vain for hours to gain access to buildings that they say they are authorized to visit.

ICE is determined to make itself fully into America’s secret police, preventing even members of Congress from knowing who it has grabbed off the streets or the conditions in which they are being held, and detaching themselves completely from the knowledge or control of the people’s representatives.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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