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On March 21, 2025, Allison Posner received a “Reduction in Force” notice informing her that her position as chief of external relations at the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman was being abolished. Her termination was the result of the “dissolution” of the watchdog office, which handled complaints about conditions and treatment in detention facilities. She was among some 110 full-time OIDO staff who were put on a 60-day administrative leave. “You will be separated from DHS at the close of business on May 23, 2025,” the letter stated.
Posner, a one-time immigration attorney, had joined DHS during the Obama years to work in the ombudsman’s office for US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency in charge of visas, work authorizations, and other immigration benefits. Then, in 2019, Congress established another office to carry out independent and neutral oversight of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facilities and investigate potential misconduct and detainees’ rights violations. Posner was tasked with helping set up this new detention watchdog.
OIDO was supposed to be separate from ICE and CBP while still answering directly to the Homeland Security secretary. It was also designed to complement the oversight work of other department bodies, such as the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) and the Office of Inspector General. Crucially, the office placed on-site inspectors and case managers inside detention centers where they could hear complaints directly from detainees and more immediately address their grievances.
“We went into facilities, talked to people, and solved their individual problems,” Posner said. “For the first time, it wasn’t that people in detention would file a complaint by mailing off a form to Washington. They would simply look for someone from our team who was visiting their facility every week or every other week and just talk to a person in real life.”
“We were getting to a place where we were doing it well, but now there’s no one doing it at all, and that’s the part that’s particularly heartbreaking.”
But after President Donald Trump returned to the White House, Posner witnessed his administration gut the detention ombudsman’s office she had played a role in getting off the ground. It all culminated in this month’s announcement, first reported by the HuffPost, that OIDO was being shut down. The dismantling of the watchdog office creates a void in independent detention oversight at a moment when it’s needed the most, former employees and advocates say. “We were getting to a place where we were doing it well,” Posner said, “but now there’s no one doing it at all, and that’s the part that’s particularly heartbreaking.”
The stated mission of the ombudsman office was to ensure that the conditions for detained immigrants were humane. To that end, case managers stationed across the country conducted announced and unannounced visits to more than 100 detention centers, including those run by private companies and owned by state and local governments. The office also published inspection reports with recommendations to improve detention conditions in specific facilities and flagged broader systemic trends like medical understaffing at the border.
Lately, Posner said, DHS hadn’t allowed them to publish their most recent annual report on the website. “We didn’t publish anything else,” she said. “I think we had a couple of other inspection reports that we ended up just sitting on.” The last available report posted on the website is from 2024, and OIDO’s webpage advising relatives of detainees and advocates on how to request assistance has been archived.
The detention ombudsman wasn’t the only DHS oversight office affected by the March 2025 reduction in force. Most of the 150 full-time employees with CRCL and the 44 who worked at the USCIS ombudsman’s arm were also put on administrative leave, according to an April 2025 complaint filed by the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center and other advocacy groups challenging the closure of the oversight offices as “arbitrary and capricious.” The complaint claims their elimination violated the statutes mandating their existence and funding. (CRCL and the USCIS ombudsman were established by the Homeland Security Act of 2002.)
The number of complaints the detention ombudsman office received plummeted in the months after March 2025, which a government official attributed to the absence of case managers in the detention centers, according to a Washington Office on Latin America report about the dismantling of DHS’s internal oversight. Detainees also reported that information on how to file complaints with the watchdog offices had been removed from their facilities.
Tricia McLaughlin, then a DHS spokesperson, said at the time that the watchdog offices “obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles” and “often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.” OIDO, she added, “misused taxpayer funds by facilitating complaints that encourage illegal immigration.” In an April 2025 letter to ex-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, dozens of members of Congress expressed outrage at the closure of the watchdog offices, saying it placed “vulnerable populations at even greater risk of abuse.”
In May 2025, a federal judge in Washington, DC, ordered the government to post public notices stating that the offices remained operational. But by early 2026, OIDO had been stripped down to just a handful of employees, according to a court declaration by the acting deputy immigration detention ombudsman, who framed the downsizing not as a fatal blow to the office but as a “realignment.” In 2025, OIDO had a $28-million budget—a small fraction of DHS’s ballooning resources boosted by an injection of $170 billion from the Big Beautiful Bill. The department’s budget request for the 2026 fiscal year accounted for no additional funding for the watchdog office, stating that “OIDO has been eliminated in its entirety.”
“The office of the ombudsman was already decimated in early 2025 when the Trump administration fired almost all of the staff,” Michelle Brané, who served as the ombudsman in 2024, said. “But it is particularly concerning that there is now no pretense at all, and there is no mechanism for people to have very serious concerns about conditions of custody addressed.”
It wasn’t easy for people who had been detained by the federal government, and their families and supporters, to trust that an office within that same government would address their problems. But over time, the complaints coming in started to mount. Some were about relatively small problems, like a broken soda vending machine. Others had to do with medical neglect or abuse. In the fiscal year 2024, OIDO received 11,384 complaints, according to an unpublished annual report to Congress. The number of complaints that reached the office over five years added up to 26,846. The most common issues were related to inadequate medical care, contact and communication, and facility environment.
News of OIDO’s shutdown broke on the same day as the Washington Post published an investigation based on internal ICE records that revealed 780 use-of-force incidents in detention facilities during the first year of the second Trump term. It also comes at a time when immigrant deaths in ICE custody have reached a record high; 49 people have died in detention since January 2025. As many as 29 just in this fiscal year. In January, the detained population peaked at 73,000, but it has since diminished to about 60,000, according to the most recent data from ICE.
Former employees I talked to wondered if some of these deaths could have been prevented if the office hadn’t been decimated. “Any death in immigration detention custody is a death too many,” Brané said. “I would like to believe that our attention to a lot of these medical issues kept that number lower than it might have been otherwise.” OIDO’s system wasn’t perfect, she noted, and could have used more independence and enforcement authority. Nonetheless, the now-defunct office played a critical role in providing immediate responses to complaints ranging from insufficient food to a detainee’s inability to secure a medical appointment.
David Gersten, who worked at DHS for almost 20 years and recently served as acting immigration detention ombudsman, praised on LinkedIn the watchdog’s case management embedded model as a “new approach” to federal oversight. “I visited around a hundred ICE and CBP facilities over four years and know OIDO helped ICE and CBP reduce costs and improve efficiency while ensuring safe and secure conditions for detainees,” he wrote in a post. In 2023, then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas recognized the office with an innovation award.
Last week, DHS blamed the end of the detention watchdog on Congress, saying in a statement to NPR that it had shut down because of a funding lapse. But the legislation to fund the department and end the government shutdown didn’t mandate the closure of the office. “There’s plenty of money lying around for DHS to accomplish its statutory functions,” said Anthony Enriquez, an attorney with the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center leading the case against the government. “They’re using the fact that Congress didn’t give even more money as a pretext to accomplish the goal they always had from the beginning, shut these offices down without congressional approval.”
Posner agreed. “It feels like it’s all very intentional to make people absolutely miserable while they’re detained,” she said, calling it “an utter disregard for safety and just humane treatment.”
