At a hearing led by Senator Dick Durbin on July 29, 2026, NIJC’s Associate Director of Adult Detention Project, Jennifer Babaie, testified about the abuse, cruelty, and lack of due process people face in immigration detention.
Jennifer Babaie provided the following remarks at the Senate Judiciary Spotlight on ICE Detention:
Thank you, Senator Durbin, and to all the Senators in the room for the opportunity to share first-hand experiences of the destructive impact of ICE enforcement and detention operations.
My name is Jennifer Babaie. I currently serve as the associate director for the National Immigrant Justice Center’s adult detention project.
At NIJC, thanks to an incredible team of legal advocates, we represent people detained in 18 states, from Texas to Michigan, Colorado to Kentucky.
We are 18 months into this administration, and daily, my team and I are forced to witness the abuse of power and rights violations endemic to ICE’s mass detention and deportation. Over the past year, we have represented more than 500 people trapped in ICE detention.
Each and every one of these people has a story to tell. I will share just a few today, starting with Anabell.
Anabell is an asylum seeker who followed the rules and attended a routine ICE check-in. That didn’t stop ICE from arresting her after the end of her appointment, putting her in Campbell County Detention Center in Kentucky, where she learned she was pregnant. At Campbell, Anabell was forced to perform labor and denied adequate medical care, resulting in a devastating miscarriage.
There are no confidential calls in Campbell County, even when calling an attorney. Arbitrarily, calls capped at 15 min. Despite these intentional barriers designed to deter detained people from seeking help, Anabell was brave enough to share her story and retain NIJC to represent her.
This is still just the beginning of her plight – Anabell, along with 60% of the detained population – is subject to mandatory detention, meaning she is not permitted access to a bond hearing to make a case for release and cannot otherwise seek release on parole. The cause of her entrapment is rooted in Trump policies implemented in 2025.
Like the majority of those in detention, a writ of habeas corpus filed in a federal district court is the only means of Anabell having even an opportunity to seek release.
Even for those granted bond hearings, immigration judges are denying release en masse on pretenses of flight risk – take, for example, another NIJC client denied bond and designated a flight risk when the very reason he was in detention in the first place was that he attended his ICE check-in, on time, as he had done before.
Several others we have worked with were not even the target of the ICE arrest, but rather collateral damage at the time of the enforcement. Despite recognizing their error, ICE refuses to release them.
What these cases exemplify is ICE’s intention that the person will find the conditions of their confinement so intolerable they will give up their claims, and in doing so give up years or decades of their lives in the U.S.
Believe it or not, in some respects, Anabell is in a better situation than some of her peers. She has a qualified lawyer. Most importantly, she is armed with an unwavering belief that what is happening to her and other women like her, must be stopped—even if that means she may face retaliation and solitary confinement, which she has.
Faced with similar situation, at least two other women accepted removal orders hoping to avoid miscarriages of their own.
At the same time, despite her intent to fight for her rights, Anabell is still at risk of prolonged detention and deportation. Location of detention, immigration judge assignment, district judge assignment, all of these factors lead to disparate and inequitable decisions among similarly situated cases.
This is one reason why advocates decry the constant use of transfers – by moving individuals to remote areas, away from loved ones and communities, ICE further isolates you, making it more likely you will give up their case.
This state of affairs is not the result of routine negligence, lack of funding, or lack of leadership.
For those of us working in this field across multiple administrations, we know that the system was designed to present a myriad of hurdles before any one person could make the case of their right to remain in the U.S.
However, the goal of this administration is overt and explicit – (1) create lawyer-free courtrooms and eradicate legal protections such that the only option left is to accept deportation. (2) intentionally use prisons to meet the political goal of deporting as quickly as possible as many people as possible, ripping apart immigrant communities in the process.
At a time where there is little to no oversight of day-to-day ICE operations, people trapped in ICE detention are risking their lives in their attempt to fight their case.
Take Omar, who was forced to wait a week while a bacterial infection spread in his body just to be seen by a provider, and then several more weeks just to receive a diagnosis. His condition became so bad that with pressure from ICE on his wife and children, the family agreed to a deal that would allow all of them to be deported at the same time back to Colombia. Their flight is scheduled for today.
Or another client who not only was assaulted while in custody, but also witnessed the death of another man inside.
I implore you not to forget about these people just because they are hard to find. What I can only hope for is that you see what is obvious to any attorney representing people in ICE detention – this system cannot be saved and needs to end.
I thank you for holding this hearing and look forward to answering your questions.