Trump Is Dismantling Civil Rights Oversight of ICE
When the Department of Homeland Security was first created, Congress established a civil-rights watchdog office for DHS and its various arms, including ICE. Amid mounting concerns about DHS’s rights violations, Trump has been erasing the oversight office.
The civil-rights watchdog office charged with inspecting ICE detention facilities and investigating officers’ use of force has been all but eliminated under the Trump administration. (Sean Bascom / Anadolu via Getty Images)
In the early days of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), long before the brutal raids and mass detentions, advocates warned of what the agency might become.
In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as Congress debated the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), civil rights advocates argued that immigration enforcement would be distorted — and weaponized — by its merger with the national security state. As civil rights lawyer Katherine Culliton-González told Congress at an April 2003 hearing, the move threatened to label “all immigrants, including millions of legal immigrants, as suspected terrorists.”
In response to such concerns, Congress created an unusually far-reaching internal watchdog office for DHS and its various arms, including ICE: the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
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