ICE shuts down office that investigates abuse in detention centers as use of force explodes

Donald Trump’s administration is closing down a watchdog office that investigates allegations of abuse inside immigration detention centers even as officers’ use of force against detainees reaches unprecedented levels.

The Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, an independent agency outside of the Department of Homeland Security, reviews complaints about civil rights abuses, excessive force and other allegations of misconduct involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.

An internal email seen by HuffPost attributes the closure to a lack of funding in the Homeland Security appropriations bills that ended the partial government shutdown — even though the bill’s text does not require the office to close. The office is required by law.

“DHS did not shutdown the Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman — Congress did,” a DHS spokesperson told The Independent. “The House passed the DHS appropriations bill without objection, and it was signed into law last week.”

The office’s public-facing website, which instructs families and attorneys how to file complaints, is offline. A website describing the office is online only in an archived capacity that contains “outdated information that may not reflect current policy or programs.”

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The closure follows more than 780 instances of ICE officers and detention staff using physical force or chemical agents against immigrant detainees since Trump returned to the White House — a 37 percent surge from the previous year.

The number of detainees subjected to force spiked to 1,330 people, marking a 54 percent increase from the previous year under President Joe Biden, according to the analysis from The Washington Post.

Those allegations follow a seismic shift in immigration enforcement under Trump, whose administration is detaining nearly 70,000 people in ICE detention centers at any given time.

Those detention figures hit a record 73,000 people earlier this year as the president uses the full force of federal law enforcement to support his mass deportation efforts.

More than 30 people died in ICE detention in 2025, the deadliest year for ICE detainees in more than two decades.

At least 18 people have died in ICE custody so far this year.

Last year, the Trump administration abruptly alerted hundreds of watchdog employees overseeing DHS that they were being stripped of their jobs.

The Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman as well as the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman were to be shrunk to their “absolutely irreducible minimum.”

By December, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman had only three full-time employees, two detailees, and no contractors — a total of five people, marking a reduction of 96 percent of its staff, according to a recent analysis from the Washington Office on Latin America, a D.C.-based research and advocacy group.

The office’s closure “fits in with a larger strategy here, of trying to get people to give up on their immigration cases — and give up on their asylum cases — by holding out the threat of detention and making sure that that detention will be in the most miserable conditions possible,” the group’s Adam Isaacson told HuffPost.

“If you’re trying to make detention as miserable as possible — because you believe, in some twisted way, that that’s a deterrent — then you’re going to do what you can to get rid of the ombudsman’s office, because that would have been a source of friction for you,” he told the outlet.

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Lawsuits across the country allege brutal conditions inside ICE detention centers, which the agency says are designed to be “non-punitive” facilities. Yet many of those facilities rely on the same tools and tactics inside prisons and jails holding people with criminal records.

Lawsuits also alleged unsanitary cells and inhumane treatment, a lack of access to legal counsel, outbreaks of measles in at least two facilities, and the hospitalizations and alleged medical mistreatment of children inside a sprawling camp that is holding a growing number of immigrant families.

Homeland Security officials have repeatedly defended the level of care provided to detained immigrants while also claiming that “detention is a choice” as officials urge immigrants to “self-deport.”

In a statement recognizing Trump’s first year back in office, Homeland Security claimed 2.2 million “self-deportations” and “more than 675,000 deportations” since January 20, 2025.

ICE recently told Congress that the agency plans to hold at least 99,000 people on any given day in ICE detention centers in the 2026 and 2027 fiscal years.

Expanding detention space to be able to hold nearly 100,000 people on any given day is “critical” to meeting ICE’s goal of arresting and removing 1 million people a year, DHS told lawmakers.

That increase will prevent “bottlenecks in the removal lifecycle,” the agency wrote.

“Further increases in allocations for ICE detention bedspace will drive average daily population figures higher, though this increase may be gradual as the acquisition and construction of new facilities, and expansion and retrofitting of existing facilities takes time,” according to the agency.

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