Women’s Refugee Commission calls on Congress to restore meaningful oversight to immigration enforcement

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.

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.

“Sexual assaults are not the only human rights abuses migrants experience in immigration custody,” said Zain Lakhani, director of the Women’s Refugee Commission’s Migrant Rights and Justice program. “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.”

When migrants experience sexual assault or other abuses during immigration enforcement, their primary option has been 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.

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.

“Human rights, civil rights, and due process are not ‘bureaucratic hurdles,’ they are fundamental to justice, fairness, and the rule of law,” said Lakhani. “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 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.”

The Women’s Refugee Commission is calling on Congress to restore meaningful oversight to immigration enforcement, including legal protections for CRCL, OIDO, and the USCIS Ombudsman, and 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.

To learn more about the catastrophic cost of eliminating government oversight over immigration enforcement, please: read our blog.

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