ICE Shuts Down Watchdog Office Amid Soaring Abuse in Detention Centers

Donald Trump’s return to the White House has brought an alarming escalation in violence and neglect inside Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers — and now the administration has shuttered the very office tasked with investigating these abuses.

The Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, an independent watchdog agency outside the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has been closed entirely after years of being gutted. Once responsible for reviewing complaints about civil rights violations, excessive force, and misconduct by ICE and Customs and Border Protection officers, the office now no longer exists as a functioning entity.

Internal emails obtained by HuffPost blame the closure on a lack of funding in the Homeland Security appropriations bills that ended the partial government shutdown. Yet the legislation does not explicitly mandate the office’s shutdown, and the office is legally required to operate. DHS spokespeople have deflected responsibility, claiming Congress’s appropriations decisions forced the closure.

The watchdog’s public website, which guided families and attorneys on how to file complaints, has gone offline. Only an archived version remains, containing outdated information.

This shutdown comes amid a staggering rise in violence inside ICE detention facilities. Since Trump’s return, there have been over 780 documented instances of ICE officers using physical or chemical force against detainees — a 37 percent increase from the previous year. The number of detainees subjected to force has jumped 54 percent, reaching 1,330 people, according to a Washington Post analysis.

The Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement strategy has pushed ICE detention populations to historic highs, hovering around 70,000 detainees at any given time and peaking at 73,000 earlier this year. This surge coincides with a deadly spike in deaths in custody — more than 30 people died in ICE detention in 2025, the deadliest year in over two decades. This year has already seen at least 18 deaths.

Last year, hundreds of DHS watchdog employees, including those at the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, were abruptly informed their jobs were being cut to the “absolutely irreducible minimum.” By December, the ombudsman’s office was staffed by only five people — a 96 percent reduction from previous years.

Adam Isaacson of the Washington Office on Latin America interprets the closure as part of a calculated strategy to make detention conditions so miserable that immigrants give up on their cases and asylum claims. “If you’re trying to make detention as miserable as possible — because you believe that’s a deterrent — you’re going to get rid of the ombudsman’s office, because it would have been a source of friction,” he told HuffPost.

Lawsuits across the country have exposed brutal, jail-like conditions inside ICE detention centers, including unsanitary cells, lack of access to legal counsel, medical neglect, and outbreaks of disease. Despite these revelations, Homeland Security officials defend the care provided and promote detention as a “choice,” urging immigrants to “self-deport.”

The administration boasts of 2.2 million “self-deportations” and over 675,000 deportations since January 2025. ICE plans to expand detention capacity to nearly 100,000 beds to meet its goal of arresting and removing 1 million people annually, a move DHS says is critical to avoiding “bottlenecks” in deportations.

Closing the only independent watchdog office investigating abuse inside ICE detention centers amid this surge in force and deaths is a brutal, transparent effort to erase accountability and deepen the misery of detained immigrants. It is yet another dark chapter in the Trump administration’s war on immigrants and the rule of law.