Trump Prevents Congressmen from Performing Their Oversight Function by Denying them Access to ICE Detention Centers

Jun 10, 2025

Under Trump’s direction, ICE is increasingly acting as a law unto itself, particularly with the recent arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka who accompanied members of Congress on an oversight visit to an ICE detention facility. Now ICE is illegally denying members of Congress the right to inspect those facilities.

The Guardian reports:

Democratic members of Congress from California and New York say that they were blocked from entering federal detention facilities over the weekend while seeking to inspect conditions and check on individuals detained during immigration raids and related protests.
In Los Angeles, the US House members Maxine Waters, Jimmy Gomez and Norma Torres each said that they were denied entry to the Metropolitan federal detention center, outside of which there had been anti-immigration customs enforcement (ICE) protests. …
In a video posted outside the building after they were turned away, Gomez said that their positions in Congress gave them the right to conduct oversight of the detention conditions and the welfare of the people detained.

See here for the specific wording of the law that mandates congressional access. More broadly, the right of legislators to observe the operation of the executive is crucial to the ability of Congress to exercise oversight and ensure that the executive is staying with the limits of the law.

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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