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Families are having an even harder time than usual talking to loved ones in immigration detention or finding out where they're located during the current Department of Homeland Security shutdown, a Texas Democrat says.
The plight of families adds to the patchwork of complaints from Democratic lawmakers and attorneys about oversight and other issues while the agency enters a sixth week without government funding.
"I have had numerous constituents reach out to my office who have been unable to locate family members or secure medical treatments for those held in detention, all while Members of Congress continue to receive inconsistent responses from this administration regarding the scope of their oversight authority and the role of the agency during a lapse in funding," Rep. Julie Johnson, D-Texas, said in a statement provided to NPR.
The White House and Republicans have spent the last month blaming Democrats for the shutdown, which has slowed some operations across the agency.
During a recent confirmation hearing for Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., to be the new head of the department, Republicans criticized the shutdown and argued that it was blocking necessary programs while allowing immigration enforcement to continue.
Democrats have sought changes to immigration enforcement before funding the agency. But Johnson says politics shouldn't stop oversight.
"Regardless of whether a federal agency or department is open, constituents have a fundamental right to information about loved ones in custody or detention. Members of Congress also have a constitutional obligation to conduct oversight," Johnson said. "If [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] can continue its operations even during a shutdown … then Congress must retain the ability to communicate with the agency and secure critical information for constituents about their family members."
Johnson this week planned an unannounced visit to the Dallas ICE field office, which holds detainees, to see conditions there. While she was allowed in, her staff members were not.
Johnson said she visited the center because that is where Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal was detained. He was an Afghan asylum seeker who aided U.S. Special Forces, and died less than a day after being taken into immigration custody.
Johnson last month also introduced a bill that would require DHS to continue communicating with congressional offices even during a lapse in funding.
Uneven, hard to measure impacts from shutdown
Beyond detention, the shutdown has had inconsistent impacts on DHS oversight more broadly, lawmakers and immigration lawyers said in interviews.
"While this shutdown appears less visibly disruptive than the last, I would not characterize oversight as fully intact. The impacts are more uneven and harder to measure, particularly at the individual case level," said Marium Uddin, an immigration attorney in Texas.
Uddin referred to the fact that this isn't the first shutdown to hit the agency: it was part of the record-long shutdown for all government agencies in the fall, which lasted more than six weeks. During that shutdown, DHS confirmed the Office of Detention Oversight was not working.
Now, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem says some 100,000 of the agency's employees are furloughed during the current shutodown — but it's unclear in what areas.
DHS has not answered questions about whether the department's internal oversight offices are working, including the already slimmed-down Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman and the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties office.
DHS's immigration enforcement appears to be continuing uninterrupted, since the agency also received billions of dollars for its deportation and detention goals as part of Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill Act last summer.
The shutdown also does not affect other parts of the deportation process, such as immigration courts inside the Department of Justice.
Like Johnson, New York Democrat Dan Goldman was able to make unannounced visits to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn and the detention space at 26 Federal Plaza. That's in contrast to the prior shutdown, when members of Congress were barred from making visits to immigration-related facilities. (Lawmakers have since successfully challenged that policy in court; the administration is appealing.)
DHS did not respond to questions about their current guidelines for congressional visits during lapses in government funding.
But beyond members of Congress, lawyers said both shutdowns have made it harder for them to reach or track their clients, or getting response from the agency to requests like for a temporary release.
"The biggest issues are not necessarily outright denials of access, but delays, lack of clarity," Uddin said. "Even small disruptions in those communication channels can have serious consequences for individuals in detention."
Oversight at DHS already in question
Problems with DHS oversight during the shutdowns have only exacerbated lawmakers' concerns about a lack of accountability at the agency.
Former employees of the DHS office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in a statement to Congress this month accused the department of providing lawmakers with a misleading report of civil rights complaints there.
The employees said DHS was underreporting the number, scope and outcome of complaints and investigations in its latest annual report, which is mandated by law and covers fiscal year 2024, which ended in September 2024. They also pointed out that the report was only 17 pages — in contrast to 129 pages for the prior year.
Former CRCL employees — who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation — say DHS omitted information including investigations and recommendations on the ICE detainee locator, disaster relief program management and use of the Migrant Operations Center at Guantanamo Bay. They said this data and information was collected for the report as far back as the end of the 2023 fiscal year, to be published soon after.
"There's a wide array of topics and in civil rights and civil liberties issues that would have been referenced," to get a better sense of internal controls and problems, one former employee told NPR. "Numbers alone don't really tell you what the story is."
DHS refuted these claims.
"DHS remains committed to civil rights protections and is streamlining oversight. In the past, these offices had obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS's mission by going beyond their statutory missions," according to a statement from an unnamed DHS spokesperson. "Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often functioned as internal adversaries as opposed to neutral oversight bodies."
The spokesperson added that "CRCL officials in the Trump Administration inherited many data integrity issues, inflated statistics, and a case management system that violates industry best practices for such systems."
"New CRCL leadership has been hard at work correcting these failures and sent a report to Congress that accurately and honestly reflects the true CRCL workload," the spokesperson said.
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