‘Life-and-death implications’: Former IG warns ICE’s detention oversight is masking unsafe conditions

As the Trump administration pursues mass deportations, a former inspector general for the Homeland Security Department argued that the current oversight structure for Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities is obfuscating unsafe conditions.  

“This is essentially a Potemkin village of reports that are put up for largely disinformation value to try to explain to the public that there is no problem when in fact there's significant problems in all these facilities that need to get fixed,” said John Roth during a webinar Tuesday put on by the Project on Government Oversight. 

The webinar focused on an August report by the nonprofit’s news reporting division that found the percentage of detention facilities receiving the highest inspection rating by ICE’s Office of Detention Oversight “nearly tripled since fiscal 2024 as of July 23, after declining by 61% between fiscal 2022 and 2024.” René Kladzyk, one of the researchers behind the analysis, provided an update during the event that, by the end of fiscal 2026, about 71.5% of inspected facilities scored a “superior” rating.  

At the same time, the average daily population of noncitizens detained by ICE increased by 71% between January 2025 and July 2026, and 33 people in ICE custody died in 2025, which was a more-than-two-decade high. 

“You don't have to be a former IG or an investigative reporter to understand that it's facially incredible that the number of perfect reports are going up at the same time that we are facing unprecedented detentions in these facilities,” Roth said. 

Roth criticized DHS for weakening internal watchdogs, such as DHS’ Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, through staff cuts and shutting down their operations. 

The former IG recommended that Congress could strengthen oversight of ICE detention facilities by: 

• Enacting a uniform inspection standards for such facilities, as ICE currently develops its own criteria.  
• Shielding internal oversight bodies from influence by the administration.  
• Encouraging external oversight, including from IGs and third-party organizations. 

“You need a combination of both internal oversight, which has meaningful reporting to people who are decision makers and meaningful power, as well as independent oversight, because without that, then you're not going to have the kind of oversight that you need for a high-risk system like this,” Roth said. 

He noted that the DHS IG currently performs unannounced inspections of ICE detention facilities, but the former watchdog argued that that isn’t comprehensive enough. 

“There has to be a deeper dive into the root causes as to why it is that we're where we are,” Roth said. “Is this because we are not holding the contractors responsible? Is this a funding issue? Is this a technical issue? Is this a legal issue? What is the fundamental root problem of why we can't detain people humanely and in accordance with specific standards?” 

ICE did not respond to a request for comment. 

On Monday, the DHS IG reported, based on an unannounced inspection of a since-closed ICE facility in El Paso, Texas, that the agency held detainees in a short-term environment for an average of 36 hours longer than standards provided. The watchdog also found that the facility did not comply with other standards regarding “use of force, personal property, hygiene and food and beverage.” 

The DHS IG also reported in September that an ICE facility in Florida, which was nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz” and has shut down, “did not provide detainees with sufficient living space, creating cramped conditions for detainees who spent most of their time in their housing units, which may harm detainees’ physical and mental health.”

And the Government Accountability Office found in June that an immigration detention facility in Texas experienced “gaps in medical services, the loss of a loaded firearm and unsanitary conditions, among other issues” that “posed serious risks to the safety and security of both detained noncitizens and staff in the facility.”

Kladzyk, the POGO investigator, emphasized that ICE detention oversight has “life-and-death implications.” 

“I think it's important to think about ICE oversight in those terms,” she said. “If some of these problems had been addressed earlier, maybe we would not be seeing the current numbers we're seeing in terms of deaths in custody.”