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Contact NIJC Communications Director Tara Tidwell Cullen at (312) 833-2967 or by email.

Statement by Mary Meg McCarthy, Executive Director, Heartland Alliance’s National Immigrant Justice Center
 
Heartland Alliance’s National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) welcomes the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) announcement that it has initiated unannounced inspections of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities.
 
Citing concerns raised by immigrant rights groups and complaints to the DHS OIG Hotline regarding detention conditions, the DHS investigatory arm began spot inspections “to monitor DHS compliance with official government health, safety, and detention standards,” and well as conditions for detained immigrant children. These reports will be shared with DHS, Congress, and the general public.
 
The OIG’s announcement is long overdue toward ending DHS’s culture of secrecy. The lack of transparency and drive for profit dominating the immigration detention system puts lives at risk. The system is in desperate need of a more robust inspections process that truly holds DHS and its detention contractors accountable. Congress must provide the OIG with the necessary funding in fiscal year 2017 to conduct these inspections and appropriators should ensure that consecutive failures of OIG inspections results in termination of CBP and ICE detention center contracts. We urge the OIG to make public their findings in a timely manner to improve transparency and accountability in our nation’s immigration detention system.
 
Through the Immigration Detention Transparency and Human Rights Project and in collaboration with several partners, NIJC wrote and distributed a series of reports in recent months exposing DHS’s failure to provide adequate oversight of ICE detention facilities, particularly the lack of meaningful inspections to hold facilities accountable for the humane treatment and well-being of people in its custody. In a November 2015 report, based on thousands of pages of government inspections reports obtained through Freedom of Information Act litigation, NIJC and the Detention Watch Network called for an independent body to conduct unannounced inspections of immigration detention facilities at least annually, and make their findings available publicly. A February 2016 report by NIJC, the Detention Watch Network, and the American Civil Liberties Union showed that in some cases, ICE inspectors’ failures to address violations of the government’s own detention standards contributed to deaths of immigrants in ICE custody. Mass civil rights complaints filed in recent years on behalf of immigrant children in CBP custody and LGBT immigrants in ICE custody also have established a long-term pattern of abuse and lack of accountability in the U.S. immigration system.
 
As these reports revealed, it is imperative that OIG inspections have meaningful consequences.