These findings are all part of a trove of more than 1,600 pages of previously secret inspection reports written by experts hired by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. In examining more than two dozen facilities across 16 states from 2017 to 2019, these expert inspectors found “negligent” medical care (including mental health care), “unsafe and filthy” conditions, racist abuse of detainees, inappropriate pepper-spraying of mentally ill detainees and other problems that, in some cases, contributed to detainee deaths.
These reports almost never become public.
For more than three years, the federal government — under both the Trump and Biden administrations — fought NPR’s efforts to obtain those records. That opposition continued despite a Biden campaign promise to “demand transparency in and independent oversight over ICE.”
The records were obtained in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by NPR. After two years, a federal judge found that the government had violated the nation’s public records law and ordered the release of the documents.
The reports provide an unprecedented look at the ICE detention system through the eyes of experts hired to investigate complaints of civil rights abuses, who provide an often unvarnished perspective. These experts have specific expertise in subjects such as medicine, mental health, use of force and environmental health. Sources familiar with these inspections tell NPR that they often uncover problems that other government inspectors miss.
“These reports are chilling. They are damning,” said Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project and an expert on ICE detention, when NPR shared the reports’ findings. “They really show how the government’s own inspectors can see the abuses and the level of abuses that are happening in ICE detention.”