Members of Congress, including Rep. Dan Goldman, have been vindicated by a D.C. federal judge in upholding their right to access facilities where ICE is holding detainees. This came after Goldman and others had been unceremoniously turned away for months, notably 26 Federal Plaza in Downtown Manhattan, as federal agents ignored a law granting Congress the right to conduct unannounced visits.
A dozen representatives, including Goldman and Adriano Espaillat, sued the administration, and have now won a preliminary injunction from Judge Jia Cobb, who ruled they were likely to succeed on the merits and the government was required to allow them to visit such facilities.
This is a victory to be sure, but a bittersweet one for the simple reason that it should never have been necessary for a federal judge to rule that the administration must follow the plain letter of the law. This is a case where there are remarkably few ambiguities, because the language is so explicit; the law as passed by Congress gives members the right to inspect ICE detention facilities without notice, and not as a request.
Administration attorneys argued that the law has a provision about congressional staff being required to provide 24 hours advance notice, but as the notes in its very first paragraph, it also states that “[n]othing in this section may be construed to require a Member of Congress to provide prior notice of the intent to enter a facility.” It hardly gets clearer than that.
Homeland Security and the Justice Department also attempted to argue that many of these were not, in fact, centers where it detains people, but merely federal facilities where people were incidentally being detained; this inane dodge is a real argument that they tried to advance in court, and were predictably slapped down.
Cobb quoted the dictionary definition of the word “detain” and noted that “the Court agrees that the plain meaning of ‘detain’ lacks any clear temporal element as to the length of the detention — it focuses on whether the individual is subject to legal confinement or restraint, regardless of the time spent in that condition.”
Put another way, the law plainly allows members of Congress to conduct oversight at facilities where ICE is detaining people, for however long and regardless of what the agency chooses to call them — detention centers, field offices, no-exit rooms, or the fun zone, for that matter. It’s immaterial.
This isn’t a capricious desire by these members of Congress. There has been ample reporting and firsthand accounts pointing to these centers being cesspools of abuse and neglect, overstuffed by Stephen Miller’s mass national crackdown, where the conditions themselves are understood to be a punishment and an incentive for people to give up their cases and agree to deportation. This is precisely why this language about inspections was added to appropriations bills.
Citizens or not, the people held at these facilities are constituents, and it’s crucial that legislators retain the ability to conduct these unannounced inspections given how difficult it is to get information out about these places otherwise. As we’ve said before, there must also be consequences for federal officials flagrantly violating the law; it cannot be that they do whatever they want until a judge steps in every time, and then face no repercussions.
