These findings are all part of a trove of more than 1,600 pages of previously secret inspection reports written by experts hired by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. In examining more than two dozen facilities across 16 states from 2017 to 2019, these expert inspectors found “negligent” medical care (including mental health care), “unsafe and filthy” conditions, racist abuse of detainees, inappropriate pepper-spraying of mentally ill detainees and other problems that, in some cases, contributed to detainee deaths.
These reports almost never become public.
For more than three years, the federal government — under both the Trump and Biden administrations — fought NPR’s efforts to obtain those records. That opposition continued despite a Biden campaign promise to “demand transparency in and independent oversight over ICE.”
I mean, I can see why. They make both administrations look awful.
“These reports are chilling. They are damning,” said Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project and an expert on ICE detention, when NPR shared the reports’ findings. “They really show how the government’s own inspectors can see the abuses and the level of abuses that are happening in ICE detention.”
The government, whether it was under Trump or Biden, knew all about the abuses going on in these camps, and their response wasn’t to arrest and prosecute these guards or to shut down these facilities, they just tried to cover them up. It’s incredibly disappointing to say the least.
“Examples of mistreatment include a Sergeant entering the female unit and greeting the female detainees by yelling, ‘Hello a••holes and bitches,’” an inspector found at the Orange County Jail in Goshen, New York. “Multiple staff make comments such as, if detainees do not like the treatment, they should not have come to our country. A [correctional officer] working in a male unit confronted a group of detainees stating, ‘Who’s the f•••ing p•••• who made the complaint against me?’”
Abolish ICE
