In early May 2026, the Department of Homeland Security closed the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, an office within DHS that Congress set up to be independent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. It reviews complaints about civil rights abuses, excessive force and other alleged misconduct in immigration detention. HuffPost reported the closure on May 4, citing an internal email to DHS employees. The closure comes as use of force inside ICE detention is documented at unprecedented levels.
The office was authorized by law in 2019 and launched in 2021. Its public-facing complaint website is offline; an archived version notes it contains 'outdated information.' The internal email attributes the closure to a lack of funding in the Homeland Security appropriations bill that ended the partial government shutdown, though the text of that bill does not require the office to close, HuffPost reported. A DHS spokesperson said, “DHS did not shutdown the Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman — Congress did.” DHS did not answer ABC News's questions about why the office is not being funded or whether it will be reinstated. Anthony Enriquez of the Robert and Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center: “The law that exists on the books right now is that this office must exist.”
The scale of the abuse the office was created to track has surged. Per a Washington Post analysis cited by The Independent: 780+ instances of ICE officers and detention staff using physical force or chemical agents against immigrant detainees since Trump returned to the White House, a 37% surge from the previous year. The number of detainees subjected to force rose to 1,330, a 54% increase from the previous year under President Biden. More than 30 people died in ICE detention in 2025, the deadliest year for ICE detainees in more than two decades. At least 18 people have died in ICE custody so far in 2026.
The closure follows a deliberate hollowing-out. Last year, the administration alerted hundreds of DHS watchdog employees they were being stripped of their jobs; DHS had argued such offices were “internal adversaries that slow down operations,” NPR reported. The Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman were all to be shrunk to their 'absolutely irreducible minimum.' By December 2025, the Detention Ombudsman office had only three full-time employees, two detailees, and no contractors, a 96% staff reduction, according to the Washington Office on Latin America.
WOLA's Adam Isaacson told HuffPost the closure “fits in with a larger strategy here, of trying to get people to give up on their immigration cases — and give up on their asylum cases — by holding out the threat of detention and making sure that that detention will be in the most miserable conditions possible.” He continued: “If you're trying to make detention as miserable as possible — because you believe, in some twisted way, that that's a deterrent — then you're going to do what you can to get rid of the ombudsman's office, because that would have been a source of friction for you.”
The scale of the system the closed watchdog was supposed to oversee: the administration is detaining nearly 70,000 people in ICE detention centers at any given time, with a record 73,000 reached earlier this year. ICE recently told Congress it plans to hold at least 99,000 people on any given day in fiscal years 2026 and 2027, and DHS told lawmakers that expanding detention to nearly 100,000 people a day is 'critical' to meeting ICE's goal of arresting and removing 1 million people a year.
Correction (October 2, 2026): This entry described the ombudsman's office as an independent agency separate from DHS, repeating The Independent; ABC News and NPR report it is an office within DHS that Congress set up to be independent of ICE and CBP, and the title and summary now say DHS, not ICE, closed it. The entry also said the closure happened on May 5; HuffPost reported it on May 4, and the summary now says early May. A statement that the Senate's $72 billion spending package allocated $38.2 billion for ICE was removed because the entry's sources do not support it.