In 2014, a 19-year-old Honduran woman named E.D. fleeing family abuse came to the United States with her 3-year-old son. After crossing the southern border, they were detained at a family immigration detention center in Berks County, Pennsylvania. Within a few months, a detention officer began sexually abusing E.D. Although other workers in the facility were aware of the abuse against E.D. and others, no steps were taken to respond to the violence or prevent further sexual assaults. E.D. eventually brought suit. Her case, E.D. v Sharkey, helped draw public attention to the longstanding and systemic nature of sexual abuse in US immigration detention facilities.
E.D.’s case is hardly unique. Indeed, reports of sexual assault and abuse are rampant in immigration detention facilities. Between 2010 and 2017, migrant women filed more than 1,224 complaints of sexual assault by ICE officials with the Department of Homeland Security, with allegations of abuse in nearly all states that have immigration detention facilities. The Department of Justice’s National Prison Rape Elimination Commission found that immigrant women in detention are especially vulnerable to sexual abuse.
Unaccompanied Children, or children who cross the border into the US without a parent, also experience sexual assault and abuse while in US government custody. A 2024 case brought by the Department of Justice against the government contractor Southwest Key Programs cited over 100 cases of documented sexual assault across its 29 facilities, involving children as young as five. Southwest Key received more than $3 billion dollars in federal funding to house more than 6,350 minors across Texas, Arizona, and California. The Trump administration has moved to dismiss the case against Southwest Key in court.
Sexual assaults are not the only human rights abuses migrants experience in immigration custody. Women have reported being held in conditions so extreme they feared for their lives, including being chained for hours on prison buses without access to food or water, told to urinate on the floor, and packed into tiny cells with more than 25 people with nothing to sleep on but a concrete floor. The administration has also restarted family detention, which subjects entire families, including young children, to detention. Tom Homan, President Trump’s border czar, has sought to lower the legal requirements for detention even further to encourage more sheriffs to detain migrants in local jails.
When migrants experience sexual assault or other abuses during immigration enforcement, their primary and sometimes only option is to file a complaint with one of the Department of Homeland Security’s oversight agencies, which include the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) and the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman (OIDO). CRCL and OIDO are tasked with preventing and responding to abuse committed against migrants by immigration officials and their contractors. They receive complaints from migrants, investigate instances of individual and systemic abuse, and implement policies that prevent further abuses from taking place. They are also responsible for ensuring that core civil rights laws, like the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), are enforced in immigrant detention facilities.
In recent years, the mission of CRCL has expanded to include policies that protect migrants’ human rights during immigration enforcement more broadly, such as “case management” programs and other alternative procedures that allow migrant families to comply with immigration enforcement proceedings, like attending hearings, without being detained. CRCL also oversees the government’s compliance with some aspects of laws like the Violence Against Women Act, which protect vulnerable immigrants outside of detention. This includes overseeing the government’s compliance with the confidentiality requirements that prevent abusers from being able to locate and report their immigrant victims to ICE.
Until now.
On Friday, March 21, the Trump administration announced that it was effectively closing CRCL, OIDO, and the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) Ombudsman’s office, which ensures the government’s compliance with its own policies on legal immigration. A statement by the DHS spokesperson cited the investigative and oversight activities of these offices as an unacceptable impediment to immigration enforcement. “These offices have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS’ mission,” she stated. “Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.”
Human rights, civil rights, and due process are not “bureaucratic hurdles,” they are fundamental to justice, fairness, and the rule of law. These oversight bodies ensure that immigration enforcement officials cannot act with impunity. Without these offices, migrants in detention and their lawyers are left with few avenues to report even the most grave or systemic instances of sexual assault or other forms of violence. Absent their oversight, there is no government department responsible for ensuring that civil rights laws and the Department of Homeland Security’s own detention standards are enforced.
The decision to effectively eliminate the Department of Homeland Security’s internal oversight apparatus comes precisely as the administration has accelerated its attempts to arrest, detain, and deport migrants (some of whom have had legal status up to and including US citizenship) to foreign prisons and detention sites with seemingly no internal government oversight, safeguards, or controls. Some of these migrants have faced and will continue to face torture in foreign prisons. Others will be forced to return to countries where they may face persecution and death. The administration has already conceded that some of these migrants were removed in error, or that its stated justification for their removal (that they were gang members) was incorrect. Already we have seen the horrific human cost to migrant and US citizen families of life-threatening enforcement actions that move too swiftly for law or human rights.
The Women’s Refugee Commission is gravely concerned about the administration’s decision to terminate vital oversight over human rights standards in detention, precisely as it seeks to dramatically increase its enforcement efforts. WRC has documented systemic abuses in immigration enforcement and advocated for stronger standards that protect women in detention from human rights abuses.
We call on Congress to restore meaningful oversight to immigration enforcement, including legal protections for CRCL, OIDO, and the USCIS Ombudsman. We also call on Congress to immediately conduct oversight of the administration’s actions, especially those that ignore the laws and procedures intended to ensure that the rule of law is upheld in migration enforcement proceedings. We further urge Congress to pass the Stop Shackling and Detaining Pregnant Women Act and other legislation that codifies fundamental human rights protections for detained migrants.
CRCL was created in the wake of 9/11 to help ensure that the new Department of Homeland Security complied with the Constitution and the laws that protect us all. Ignoring the civil and human rights of immigrants is a slippery slope that has already resulted in the violation of the rights of citizens and jeopardizes our most fundamental rights and freedoms.