ICE cuts detention inspections, leaving many facilities unchecked for over a year

ICE has shifted most immigration detention inspections from twice a year to once a year or once every two years, and 15 of the 45 facilities holding 500 people or more had gone more than 12 months without an inspection by late June. Five of those large facilities had no inspection on record at all.

That slower pace worries detention-health experts who say oversight only matters if violations are checked often enough to force repairs. “A lot of facilities have deficiencies and it takes frequent reassessments to ensure that those deficiencies are being addressed,” said Dr. Annette Decker, an assistant professor at UCLA’s medical school who studies health outcomes among immigration detainees. She said the longer gaps are “a pretty big time gap between evaluations” for healthcare and other conditions.

After a Department of Homeland Security watchdog found in 2018 that ICE’s Office of Detention Oversight was not inspecting often enough to make sure violations were fixed, Congress increased funding to require inspections twice a year by the end of fiscal 2021. ICE later moved to annual inspections for dedicated facilities and every-other-year checks for non-dedicated sites such as county jails.

ICE detention facilities must comply with national detention standards, and ICE uses a “robust and multilevel oversight and compliance program.” That includes daily on-site compliance reviews by Detention Service Managers and Detention Standards Compliance Officers, plus oversight from the DHS Office of Inspector General, the DHS Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman and the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. ICE began posting third-party inspection reports in May 2018.

The inspection record shows frequent problems. Since 2019, nearly 90% of ICE inspections identified at least one deficiency, including missed suicide checks, food stored at unsafe temperatures and incident reports that were not filed correctly. In a May 21, 2025 report, the Government Accountability Office said DHS and ICE had not set clear performance goals and measures for the inspection programs, making effectiveness hard to judge. The GAO found that the ICE Office of Detention Oversight rated facilities acceptable or above in 238 of 241 inspections from fiscal 2022 through fiscal 2024, while still identifying deficiencies. ICE Health Service Corps found compliance in 46 of 47 staffed-facility inspections, and the DHS Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman found noncompliance in 31 of 33 facilities it inspected.

Deaths in ICE custody were at their highest rate since 2020 last year. In May, allegations of spoiled food and poor medical care helped spark a hunger strike inside Delaney Hall in New Jersey and weeks of protests outside the facility. Last month, a government review found dangerous conditions at Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson defended the change, saying the “frequency of inspections is based on facility type, detention capacity, and operational function.”