WASHINGTON — During the first year and a half of the current Donald Trump presidency, the administration hollowed out a federal office that inspected immigrant detention centers to ensure adequate medical, food, language and safety standards.
The Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman was established by Congress during Trump’s first term. An independent unit within the Department of Homeland Security, the office could arrive unannounced at places like Delaney Hall in Newark, where detainees are staging a hunger and labor strike to protest what they describe as physical and mental torture.
Also conducting surprise oversight visits are members of Congress and their staffs: Federal law allows them entry to immigration facilities that “detain or otherwise house aliens.” At the core of the brewing pushback against Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations are reports by Democratic lawmakers Rob Menendez (D-8th), LaMonica McIver (D-10th) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-10th) and U.S. Sen. Andy Kim. Their party has tried without success to pass ICE reforms into federal law.
Last year Trump moved to restrict visits by federal lawmakers, drawing a lawsuit from sitting House members. And in its latest budget request to Congress, the administration urged lawmakers to cut all funding and staff for the watchdog office. That move would close a rare avenue for people who are detained to get help.
“It is impossible for the agency with a skeletal staff to conduct investigations,” Greg Chen, senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said in an interview. The agency, Chen said, “has been rendered toothless.”
More frequent visits
In budget documents, Homeland Security said the ombudsman’s office is operating on about $11.8 million with 53 full-time equivalent staff, though that figure is almost certainly artificially high. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, who declined to be give NJ Spotlight a name, falsely said Congress shut down the ombudsman’s office when it did not fund the department on time.
“DHS remains committed to civil rights protections but must streamline oversight to remove roadblocks to enforcement,” the spokesperson said.
Adam Isacson, who works on border and migration policy at the Washington Office on Latin America, a research and human-rights group, said the ombudsman’s office had more than 120 employees before the recent wholesale removal of staff. Online help links were removed or archived. “There’s now nothing on the website,” Isacson said in an interview.
Full-time ombudsman staff can be counted in single digits, according to records and deposition transcripts in a court case filed by advocacy groups to block the office’s closing.
The Trump administration also has tried to close two other oversight offices within DHS: the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and the Office of the Citizenship Immigration Ombudsman.
The nonprofit Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center, the lead plaintiff in that case, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., said in court records that because the office shrunk so much, they can no longer “rely on OIDO case managers in facilities to serve as in-person intermediaries with facility staff” and “staff must make more frequent visits to detention facilities themselves to advocate for their clients.”
In February court papers, the plaintiffs said Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman has issued no recommendations since March 2025.
‘Internal adversaries’
Complaints against immigration agents serve as a reminder that their actions are under watch, plaintiffs in the ongoing case said. “These complaints also fulfilled an important deterrent function by reminding personnel in other DHS components, like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), that their actions were subject to independent scrutiny,” the plaintiffs said in court papers.
“These offices have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS’s mission,” the unnamed Homeland Security spokesperson said. “Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.”
Before the Trump administration pulled staff and funding from the office a year ago, the ombudsman’s office received tens of thousands of requests for help from more than 200 detention centers nationwide.
Their option has dried up.
“You really don’t have the ability to call for help right now,” Isacson said. “People are taking these extreme measures because really every other channel has been cut off from them.”
Beyond the hunger strike at Delaney Hall, another is underway at an ICE detention center in Adelanto, Calif.
Inspection reports released to the public provide general categories that need improvement.
A 2022 inspection of the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania, for example, found inadequate physical and mental health care policies, insufficient emergency drills and concerning and poor Spanish translations for detainees. Moshannon is a site that receives deliveries of detainees, shuttled by van across New Jersey to Pennsylvania, according to contracting records.
“I saw good conditions, clean facilities, basic care, and a detention center where ICE and DHS are doing a hard job that keeps our communities safe.” — Rep. Jeff Van Drew
Ombudsman staff also examine the deaths of detainees and “conditions of confinement,” said Raul Pinto, deputy legal director for transparency at the American Immigration Council, an advocacy group. The office has provided some individual details but no “comprehensive” information about conditions inside, Pinto said by email.
“The bigger issue is the Trump administration’s attack on DHS oversight as a whole at a time when ICE detention is ballooning and the number of deaths of people in detention is increasing,” Pinto wrote. “The hamstringing of offices like OIDO must be considered in conjunction with limitations on congressional visits to ICE detention facilities and other measures that block transparency at a critical time.”
Fifty-one ICE detainees have died in custody under the Trump administration, a pace faster than during previous administrations.
After a tour of Delaney Hall on Monday, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-2nd) said the conditions inside were acceptable — a stark contrast to what has been said by elected Democrats, advocacy groups, detainees, their families and their lawyers.
“I saw good conditions, clean facilities, basic care, and a detention center where ICE and DHS are doing a hard job that keeps our communities safe,” Van Drew said in a statement. “I will continue to stand with the men and women who protect the American people.”
Worsening conditions
More than 60,000 people are in ICE detention in the U.S., a sharp uptick from about 40,000 when Joe Biden left office in January 2025. Roughly 70% of them have no criminal convictions, according to TRAC, a nonpartisan research group that analyzes federal records.
“The Trump administration’s claim that they are going after the worst of the worst is simply not accurate,” said Chen, of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
Immigration attorneys report increased difficulty in reaching their clients and worsening food and medical conditions at detention centers, Chen said. “They are having a harder time getting access to their clients.”
The detained population has exploded while DHS oversight agencies have been nearly wiped out, Chen said, underscoring the notion that there are no tools to rein in the administration. ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents, he said, “are committing on the streets are happening with impunity. It just points to the fact that there are no existing guardrails.”
Isacson, of the Washington Office on Latin America, likened ICE detention sites to prisons in repressive regimes in countries that he studies. “It’s a black box,” he said. “It’s the level of ability to get help that a prison in Cuba might have.”
