The Trump administration has said immigration enforcement will “remain unchanged” through the government shutdown. Officers continue to arrest migrants, detention centers remain fully operational, and the government issued new contracts for additional migrant holding facilities just last week.
But at least one team at Immigration and Customs Enforcement isn’t going into work: the Office of Detention Oversight, which inspects detention centers to ensure they meet federal standards for the safe and humane treatment of immigrants.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, confirmed in an email Monday that the entire Office of Detention Oversight has been furloughed, saying, “We hope Democrats will open up the government swiftly so that this office can resume its work.”
While many federal agencies have kept only a small number of essential staff on duty, DHS is in a unique position because Congress in July allocated $170 billion for border security and immigration enforcement. Agencies that received funds from that spending bill can use them to operate through the shutdown, White House budget Director Russell Vought said in a memo last month.
DHS expected to furlough just 8% of its staff, or 22,862 people, according to a Sept. 29 shutdown planning document the agency posted to its website. The majority, or 59% of DHS staff, would remain at work because their jobs are “necessary to protect life and property,” the planning document said. The remaining 33% of the workforce should stay on the job for other reasons, it states, including the fact that those employees are needed to perform activities “expressly authorized” or “necessarily implied” by law.
By contrast, the Environmental Protection Agency has sent home about 89% of its staff, and the Education Department furloughed 87%. Only two departments, Veterans Affairs and Treasury, furloughed a smaller share of their staffs.
Several divisions of ICE appear to be affected, according to out-of-office messages sent by department leaders in response to emails from The Washington Post late last week. Officials overseeing ICE’s civil rights division, its congressional relations team and its privacy unit all sent automated messages saying they would “return to duty upon conclusion of the funding hiatus.”
McLaughlin said some of her colleagues on the communications team had also been furloughed.
But the furloughs at the detention oversight group stand out, at a time when President Donald Trump is dramatically increasing ICE arrests and working to double the nation’s capacity for detaining immigrants to more than 100,000 beds.
The Office of Detention Oversight was formed in 2009 as then-President Barack Obama’s administration aimed to improve conditions in immigrant detention. Since 2019, Congress has required the group to inspect every immigrant detention center at least once a year, including the privately run ones where nearly 90% of ICE detainees are held.
Those facilities are mostly run by contract company employees, not government workers. The firms agree to follow national standards for living conditions, and the government performs inspections and issues penalties when its requirements are not met.
In its shutdown plan, DHS said government workers who perform “inspection, accounting, administration, payment processing” and other oversight of contractors “would generally not continue.” However, the contractors could continue to operate so long as they are fully funded and government oversight “is not critical to the contractor’s continued performance.”
The document did not detail which divisions of ICE would be furloughed.
Steve Owen, the spokesman for CoreCivic, one of the two largest detention contractors, said in an email that there are “no changes we are aware of” relating to the shutdown. Geo Group, the other of the two largest contractors, did not respond to requests for comment.
Since Trump took office this year, the Office of Detention Oversight has performed more than 80 detention center inspections, at a pace of about two per week, according to reports posted on ICE’s website. It’s the only oversight group that has continued to routinely inspect these facilities since March, when DHS hobbled two other watchdog units that previously performed inspections and investigated complaints.
At the time, DHS’ McLaughlin said those groups added “bureaucratic hurdles” and said the agency would “streamline” its oversight of facilities.
Other federal groups sometimes inspect detention centers, including the DHS inspector general, the Government Accountability Office and ICE’s own contract officers. Those inspections have generally been less frequent, narrower in scope or done in response to specific concerns.
This year, the need for detention oversight has grown, with ICE’s detained population soaring to a record 61,000 in August and dozens of new facilities accepting detainees. Lawyers for immigrants and nonprofit advocacy groups say that deteriorating conditions at some locations are festering unchecked, and lawsuits have claimed that detainees are being held in overcrowded conditions, sometimes without beds, showers, adequate medical support or quality food.
The temporary absence of detention oversight could mean that conditions threatening the health and safety of immigrants at detention centers will go ignored, said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former ICE assistant director who served during the Biden and Obama administrations.
“What little is left of oversight is on hold,” Trickler-McNulty said. “Everybody was already stretched, and now you’re reducing the number of people who are looking at conditions in facilities.”
Meanwhile, the government’s rapid rollout of new detention centers continues. On Wednesday, the first day of the shutdown, CoreCivic announced a new contract with ICE to hold up to 2,160 immigrants at a former prison in Oklahoma.
The facility will cost U.S. taxpayers about $100 million a year — roughly the same cost as employing 760 workers at ICE.
Information for this article was contributed by Jacob Bogage and Aaron Schaffer of The Washington Post.