When Donald Trump’s ICE forces are not wasting resources creating fake universities in order to entrap immigrants looking to better themselves by way of an education, they are … well, that’s basically all they are doing. In a published set of findings from Jan. 31, 2019, the Office of the Inspector General reports that the terror Homeland Security agency definitely does not police or punish the detainee housing contractors that are funded by American taxpayers. According to the Inspector General’s report, between “October 1, 2015, and June 30, 2018, ICE imposed financial penalties on only two occasions, despite documenting thousands of instances of the facilities’ failures to comply with detention standards.”
This new report comes six months after the OIG released a report that excoriated the oversight being performed—or not performed—at detention facilities housing undocumented immigrants. TechDirt reported on the OIG findings months ago, which showed that inspections at the 211 ICE detention facilities were “either done badly and infrequently or effectively and infrequently.” January’s report finds that regardless of these inspections, ICE is almost entirely interested in locking people up, regardless of the human costs.
And to be clear, the thousands of facility failures that ICE has done nothing about include “significant understaffing, failure to provide sufficient mental health observation, and inadequate monitoring of detainees with serious criminal histories.” Let that sink in: People’s basic, humane needs are not being met. To be entirely cynical, Donald Trump, his attorney general, his secretary of Homeland Security, and by extension ICE have shown they have little interest in people’s humanity. However, they aren’t even securely monitoring the people they claim they are most worried about, namely undocumented immigrants with “serious criminal histories.” They don’t even do the shitty thing they want to do well!
As with most Republican-led departments in our government, the Department of Homeland Security is a mess, says the OIG. There is no consistency in the standards set for inspection, and private contractors have no clear contractual obligation to a consistent set of standards or punitive action for not following those standards. Most importantly, “no office within ICE could provide any data on how many Discrepancy Reports are issued to facilities and for what reasons." Like with everything the Republican Party and this administration doesn’t want to have to answer to, no meaningful data is collected by the agency with which they could actually track anything or improve anything, or God forbid learn something.
According to the OIG report, ICE “concurred” with the office’s findings and promised to be better about it.