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The federal watchdog system at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that oversees complaints about civil rights violations, including in immigration detention, has been gutted so thoroughly that it could be laying the groundwork for the Trump administration to “abuse people with impunity”, experts warn.
Former federal oversight officials have sounded the alarm at the rapid dismantling of guardrails against human rights failures – at the same time as the government pushes aggressive immigration enforcement operations.
A group of fired watchdogs has filed a whistleblower complaint to Congress through the Government Accountability Project (GAP), and a coalition of human rights organizations sued the administration, demanding the employees be reinstated. There is deepening concern that a system of oversight that was already weak is now hanging by a thread, even as criticism surges over treatment of detainees in the ballooning immigration jail network.
“They want to be able to abuse people with impunity,” said Anthony Enriquez, vice-president of US advocacy and litigation at the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights advocacy group based in Washington, which is representing the group suing the government.
He added: “They want to be able to operate a system that doesn’t have any rules and that can be used to maximize brutality against people, in order to accomplish a mass deportation agenda.”
The DHS has repeatedly, through assistant secretary for public affairs Tricia McLaughlin, insisted when asked about reports and complaints of abuses that there are “no sub-prime” conditions in immigration custody in the US.
But Dana Gold, a senior director of the GAP, which is working with those behind the whistleblower complaint, echoed Enriquez’s warning.
Without a robust oversight system “there’s just a blank check for impunity”, she said.
The second Trump administration early on fired hundreds of officials in federal oversight offices, typically known as watchdogs.
This included at the DHS. The main watchdog team there overseeing civil rights, the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) – one of three DHS oversight offices – has been cut from a staff of 150 to just nine. This despite there being about 550 investigations that were active and alleging serious civil rights violations by DHS officials and contractors, including inside immigration detention centers.
Cases that were active when Trump returned to office include civil rights officials then in post investigating allegations of civil and human rights abuses, according to CRCL documents that were previously public, original complaint records submitted to the CRCL and the whistleblower disclosure, reviewed by the Guardian. Among the cases, were the following allegations:
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Border Patrol agents in Arizona forcibly removed a detained man from a cell, handcuffed him and then injected him with ketamine to sedate him in 2023, according to a CRCL document confirming the watchdog’s investigation into the allegation. A Guardian reporter had saved that document just weeks before it was scrubbed from the DHS’s website.
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Guards at a privately owned Louisiana detention center systematically mistreated detained immigrants, according to a CRCL document. This included an investigation into a 2024 incident during which correctional staff pepper sprayed around 200 detained immigrants who were staging a hunger strike in protest of detention conditions. Guards then allegedly locked the men in the unit and cut the power and water for hours. A majority of the men were allegedly denied medical care, the original complaint, submitted to the CRCL by RFK Human Rights, said.
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In a Florida jail, a 33-year-old immigrant woman with mental health problems was forcibly stripped naked, strapped to a restraint chair and mocked by male guards, according to a CRCL complaint submitted by the ACLU of Florida and RFK Human Rights. The woman was allegedly left with “contusions and marks on her body” after hours in the restraint chair. The whistleblower declaration said the CRCL had launched an investigation into the case.
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Agents violated due process during the arrest and detention of Palestinian student and Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil, according to the whistleblower complaint.
This last one, into Khalil, who was arrested by ICE agents for his pro-Palestinian activism, was one of the final investigations launched before the mass firing of civil rights watchdog officials in March.
The status of these investigations, and hundreds more, is unknown. Enquiries by the Guardian to the DHS last week about the above specific cases and the many others previously understood to be active elicited no response.
However, in response to requests for comment by the Guardian, also submitted to DHS last week, McLaughlin issued a statement, saying: “These claims are ridiculous. All of legally required functions of the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) continue to be performed, but in an efficient and cost-effective manner and without hindering the department’s mission of securing the homeland.”
It went on to say: “As it existed in the past, the CRCL obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS’s mission. Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.
“CRCL and OIDO, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, regularly inspect detention facilities, document conditions in accord with facility standards, investigate detainee complaints, and issue recommendations to ICE and CBP [Customs and Border Protection] when appropriate.”
An investigation by the Guardian based on interviews with five recently dismissed DHS civil rights officials, hundreds of pages of documents, and interviews with immigration attorneys, has found that the already limited oversight practiced within the DHS prior to January 2025 now appears almost nonexistent.
Of the nine people now working at the CRCL, one is its acting officer, installed in May, Troup Hemenway, a former adviser to the rightwing Project 2025 blueprint for conservative government.
Congress originally tasked the three offices, including CRCL, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman (OIDO) and the Office of Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman (CIS), with oversight at DHS. The watchdog bodies process complaints, initiate investigations and provide guidance to DHS agencies in various areas of interest.
Now, those operations have seemingly been halted, or at least significantly slowed.
In recent months, the former DHS officials who have filed the whistleblower complaint have watched as the Trump administration has targeted political adversaries, expelled immigrants to a foreign prison, allowed officials to arrest immigrants at court appearances, encouraged officers to wear face coverings during arrests and targeted people who have lived in the US for years and have no criminal record.
Few know much about what is happening behind closed doors inside Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers and at secretive holding facilities.
Former DHS employees the Guardian spoke with, who were dismissed from their positions at CRCL, spoke with the Guardian on condition of anonymity to discuss matters more freely and avoid retaliation.
“They don’t care about civil rights concerns,” one former watchdog said about the Trump administration. “That’s why they fired us all. They just don’t care about the civil rights of immigrants. Even when we were there, they didn’t want to hear what we had to say – they didn’t want to let us do our jobs.”
One morning in late March, top DHS officials emailed employees at the three oversight offices, ordering them to stop working. Trump administration officials said the offices undermined DHS’s immigration enforcement operations, calling them “internal adversaries”.
A coalition of immigrant rights organizations sued the administration in Washington, declaring the cuts illegal and demanding all oversight employees be reinstated.According to a declaration filed by a top DHS official, , nearly every single employee from the offices was fired, including 147 employees at the CRCL, 118 at the OIDO and 46 at CIS.
The Trump administration wants “no oversight into what they are doing,” said Enriquez from RFK Human Rights.
Following the lawsuit, the DHS walked back its claims that the offices were being abolished. Instead they told the federal judge they reduced the number of staff in order to “refocus” the offices and “create more efficient processes.” The internal oversight work was continuing, the DHS said, arguing the lawsuit should be tossed.
Throughout litigation, the administration has put out various staffing figures, most recently that only nine people total, including Hemenway, now worked at CRCL. Five of them are “contract” investigators, meaning that as of August, there were only two full-time CRCL investigators. Fifteen additional contractors are also reportedly at CRCL, according to the DHS court declaration, exclusively focusing on internal Equal Employment Opportunity cases for DHS employees.
“When there was a fully-staffed, robust CRCL, there were regular inspections of ICE facilities. There were contracted experts who went on those on-site oversight visits to the facilities, who provided detailed recommendations and corrective action that had to be taken when conditions were poor or when staff was mistreating the detained individuals,” the former official explained in a telephone interview with the Guardian.
“By doing the regular oversight, I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that that really saved lives.”
But now, “ I don’t think they’re happening – it certainly doesn’t seem CRCL has the staff to be doing those inspections”, the former official added.
Gold, at the GAP, said of the whistleblowers she is working with: “The idea that getting rid of basically every employee with institutional knowledge and replacing them with just a few – in the wake of daily multiple examples of the kinds of things that CRCL would have dealt with – is just deeply disturbing to them.”
Oversight at the DHS “is a guardrail that has been deliberately decimated to make sure that sand is not put in the gears of executive branch priorities”, Gold added.
Many CRCL investigations focused on complaints inside ICE detention centers, including allegations of medical neglect, sexual abuse and deaths in custody, the whistleblower complaint said. Now, the Trump administration is further expanding its immigration detention network.
“ I don’t think they care about the conditions of these facilities. I think they’re just trying to round up as many people as they can and get rid of them without any due process and without any regard for conditions,” said the former official, who worked on CRCL investigations into allegations of abuse at several facilities.
A third former official, speaking to the Guardian, warned of dangers for immigrants targeted by ICE.
“If there isn’t oversight that keeps pace, the potential for real danger is great,” that former official said, adding: “You are left to ICE policing itself.”
In 2023, the CRCL’s compliance branch received 3,104 complaints and investigated 25% of them, according to a report to congress.
“I don’t know if they’re actually reading and investigating those complaints or doing anything with the complaints,” said the former CRCL official quoted first in this report.
Sophia Genovese, an immigration attorney and faculty member at Georgetown University Law Center, has submitted over 100 complaints to CRCL.
“Nine people can’t cover a detention center, much less an entire country – especially with so many new detention centers popping up left and right,” she said. “It’s laughable that they think that they can do anything with so few staff.”
As the Trump administration ramps up its enforcement operations, Genovese is seeing an increase of cases of ICE threatening physical violence on immigrants, pressuring them to self-deport – an allegation CRCL would have likely investigated.
“I’m getting referrals every day from people who have family members who are picked up, detained and are being coerced into signing deportation orders,” said Genovese.
Immigrant advocates for years were already frustrated with CRCL’s limited powers. Typically after an investigation, CRCL officials make recommendations to DHS agencies to improve their civil rights practices but can rarely mandate changes.
“Structurally speaking, the way congress set up the agency, there were some real weaknesses,” said Enriquez from RFK. But he argues that any oversight, no matter how limited, is significantly better than no oversight. “A true solution to this problem is going to look like a massive reduction in the use of immigration detention,” he added.
That appears highly unlikely in the current climate.
Gold said of CRCL: “Even with its weaknesses at some level, it did investigations, it could mitigate problems and it provided a really important oversight function – also in terms of just getting information to Congress to do [additional] oversight. And without that, there’s just a blank check for impunity.”
CRCL always used to publish memos about completed investigations and those they were initiating, which, Genovese said, journalists and attorneys found valuable in helping reveal conditions inside ICE detention centers and other problems within the DHS.
But the Trump administration in February removed all of the CRCL’s public records from its website. (The Project on Government Oversight, an independent watchdog, later published the majority of the CRCL public records after they were scrubbed by the DHS).
“It’s a real breakdown in the rule of law. It’s really concerning,” said one former CRCL official. “It’s very upsetting.”
The main avenue of resort now is public protest and legal action, Genovese said.
“We’re seeing really incredible acts of bravery by members of the public,” she said. “That’s been helpful at preventing detention in some ways, but also educating the public about the horrors of detention.”
