Victoria López, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU National Prison Project & Madhuri Grewal, Federal Immigration Policy Counsel, ACLU National Political Advocacy Department

In response to its own nightmarish family separation and zero-tolerance policies, the Trump administration is claiming that in order to keep families together, it must jail them. This isn’t only untrue — it’s expanding a system that puts the health and welfare of immigrants at risk, according to an independent oversight agency.

A new report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General confirms that Immigration and Customs Enforcement jails are profoundly dangerous places with few safeguards to protect the rights of those detained, much less children and families. The inspector general’s report details how ICE inspections and monitoring of immigrant detention facilities fail on multiple levels.

Rather than address these abject failures, the Trump administration is damningly taking the opposite tack. It now wants to detain tens of thousands of immigrant children and families in ad hoc family jails, including on military bases or in newly constructed facilities under Department of Homeland Security control.

Over the last week alone, DHS asked the Department of Defense to jail 12,000 immigrant children and parents on military bases and issued a request for information to detain an additional 15,000 people in family jails.  

The Trump administration thinks it can get away with swiftly expanding detention by building family jails and contracting with the Bureau of Prisons because the existing patchwork of over 200 immigration detention facilities — including private prisons and county jails — operates with impunity. Oversight and accountability of these failed operations, reports the inspector general, is predictably scant.

Inspections of ICE jails are conducted by a private company, Nakamoto Group, as well as ICE’s own Office of Detention Oversight (ODO). Notably, neither entity will investigate all 211 ICE facilities in any given year. Nakamoto inspects an average of 100 facilities each year, and ODO has inspected an average of 28 facilities each year in the last three fiscal years. Finally, there is supposed to be a “continuous” monitoring program, which also does not occur at every facility. The bottom line is that the inspector general found that none of these inspections ensure compliance with detention standards.

The agency’s watchdog also highlights that inspections do not occur with enough frequency, do not meaningfully address facility conditions, and are limited to review of a narrow set of standards. Even worse, according to the report, when there are clear violations, ICE fails to “systematically hold facilities accountable” and “some deficiencies remain unaddressed for years.”

Some of the documented violations that were ignored for years are shocking, including strip searches with no reasonable suspicion and repeated failures by the facilities to notify ICE about sexual assaults, both in violation of detention standards and legal obligations. Furthermore, the report notes inspections are so incomplete that they are ineffective at providing the necessary level of oversight. One ICE official even suggested to the inspector general that the Nakamoto inspections are “useless.”

In one case, Nakamoto inspectors were required to conduct private and confidential interviews with detained immigrants. They failed to do so. Instead, they simply conducted brief group conversations, in English, with no translators present, and asked only very basic questions about food and recreation. In another case, two immigrants were held in “administrative segregation” or solitary confinement simply because there was no other space in which to detain them. The Nakamoto inspector didn’t even bother looking into whether policies on isolation were followed.

Even more troubling, some inspectors actually lied.

In one instance, Nakamoto reported that immigrants in detention “understood how to obtain assistance from ICE officers... [and had] positive comments regarding access to library services.” Yet the inspector general’s investigators did not witness a single Nakamoto inspector asking about the law library, and they even heard immigrants telling inspectors they didn’t know the identity of ICE officers, let alone how to contact them.

These inspections are a pantomime of federal responsibility at best. ICE has no real oversight and certainly no accountability. And now, ICE wants to expand its massive network to jail even more people, including thousands of children and families.

Our nation now boasts, shamefully, the largest immigration detention system in the world. The number of people impacted by the immigration detention system has dramatically increased over the past few decades despite the fact that there are clear alternatives to jailing immigrants.

Today there are on average over 40,000 people locked up every day by immigration authorities, costing taxpayers over $2 billion per year. The treatment of immigrants in detention is nothing less than a human rights crisis, and one that needs immediate action.

The OIG’s report is damning, but it is not the first of its kind. It is the latest condemnation after years of reporting that has made it clear that the system of monitoring and inspections is woefully inadequate and fails to address even the most serious issues, including deaths.     

In the whirlwind of announcements about the administration’s zero tolerance and family separation policies, CBP’s statement clarified the Trump administration’s intentions: “We’re suspending prosecutions of adults who are members of family units until ICE can accelerate resource capability to allow us to maintain custody.”

If the Trump administration succeeds in expanding the failing detention system it will accomplish two things: hurt immigrant families and line the pockets of private prison companies, like CoreCivic (formerly CCA) and GEO Group. Already, the nation’s two largest family jails, located in Dilley and Karnes City, Texas, are operated by these prison profiteers.

The jailing of immigrants is a cruel and harmful practice. We cannot allow this administration to lock up more immigrants in a system that is already so broken. We must demand Congress reduce the number of detention beds, cut funding for Trump’s massive deportation force, and reject all funding and proposals for any new plans to jail immigrants and families.

It’s up to us to demand how our taxpayer dollars are being spent, and we must collectively say: Not one more cent.

The ACLU of Nevada filed suit today to obtain vital public records regarding the upcoming execution of Scott Dozier.

Death row inmate Scott Dozier is scheduled to be executed on July 11, 2018— just eight days from today— but the Nevada Department of Corrections has failed to inform the public about almost any details of this most consequential action. It has not issued a press release acknowledging it will execute Mr. Dozier nor has it publicly stated the drugs or protocol it intends to use to kill Mr. Dozier.

Worse, the only information provided by the Department of Corrections has been contradictory and misleading statements to the media. In a single day, different news organizations were told first that the Department would use the previous protocol due to unexpired drugs and then later told that the lethal injection protocol was “still evolving.” The Department of Corrections lack of transparency is especially egregious as Mr. Dozier’s execution will be Nevada’s first in over a decade and will take place in a newly built and never used execution chamber.

The ACLU of Nevada submitted a public records request on June 15th asking for various records relating to lethal injection drugs and the Department of Corrections’ execution protocol, but the Department has refused to release any information prior to this execution.

The suit seeks to force NDOC to release these records.

ACLU of Nevada Legal Director Amy Rose said:

“The Nevada Department of Corrections has abandoned even basic principles of transparency and opted for misinformation, stonewalling, and extreme secrecy instead. It’s dangerous for our state to undertake its first execution in 12 years under these conditions. Without transparency and accountability, we are very concerned about the legality of the protocol and the possibility of a botched execution.”

In a win for government transparency about its lethal actions overseas, a federal judge has told the CIA that it can’t refuse to “confirm or deny” whether it knows anything about a military operation when the agency’s director was present at the White House dinner where the action was approved.

The judge rejected the Trump administration’s extreme secrecy claim in a ruling Wednesday in our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking records on the January 2017 raid in Yemen that killed as many as 25 Yemeni civilians and one Navy SEAL.

Days after President Trump took office, he approved the dead-of-night raid in al Ghayil, Yemen. Although he called the raid “successful,” the strike had actually gone awry. Soon after, the ACLU filed a FOIA request demanding to know who in the government planned and approved the raid, what the legal basis for it was, and who the U.S. government killed.

The Departments of Defense, Justice, and State produced most of their records with heavy redactions, some of which we are challenging in court. But the CIA refused to respond at all, falsely claiming that if it confirmed or denied whether it had records, it would reveal whether the CIA had an “intelligence interest” in the raid.

This refusal to answer a FOIA request — known as a “Glomar” response — has become par for the course for the CIA. The agency has often relied on such overbroad secrecy tactics, claiming that if its intelligence interests are revealed, it could harm national security — even if the CIA’s interest is already obvious. We thought that approach might change after courts in our previous cases rejected similar claims, but in this case, the CIA’s Glomar attempt was even more brazen.

That’s because the Trump White House had already directly and publicly acknowledged the CIA’s intelligence interest in the raid. And it wasn’t a casual, off-hand statement: In the face of mounting criticism of the operation and its human costs, then-Press Secretary Sean Spicer defended the “intelligence gathering” operation, saying that several of Trump’s top advisors were at a dinner meeting where the raid was approved — including then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo.

We told the court that the CIA couldn’t continue to hide something that isn’t even remotely a secret. Nor can it selectively disclose information to defend its actions while hiding behind “official” secrecy in court. Outrageously, the CIA continued to argue that just because Pompeo was at the meeting, it didn’t mean that he had participated in the meeting, or that he was part of the decision-making process at all.

In its opinion this week, the court rejected the CIA’s preposterous contentions. The judge said that the government had already “clearly disclosed” what the CIA was trying to hide — its intelligence interest in the raid — and it was implausible the CIA wouldn’t have records. He wrote:

The Court is unprepared to accept that the CIA Director attended the meeting with the President in which that Raid was discussed and appears to have been approved, but that neither he nor his staff ever generated or received any documentation whatsoever (even in the form of a calendar entry or preparatory paperwork) related to that meeting or the Raid before, during, or after these occurred.

By rejecting the CIA’s blanket secrecy arguments, the court is sending a clear signal: The CIA is not outside the law, and it cannot continue to hide its actions without good reason. It’s a warning the CIA needs to hear.

This matters for the families of the people who were killed or injured in this tragic raid. It matters because under President Trump, this country’s record of unjustified secrecy about lethal strikes in overseas conflicts that it helps cause — like the ongoing one in Yemen — is becoming even worse. And it matters because the American people need to know what the government is doing in our name.