The Senate Must Insist on Reining in ICE and CBP

Immigration agents have now killed two people on the streets of Minneapolis. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed Renee Good in her car; then federal officers shot and killed Alex Pretti while he was on the ground, disarmed and restrained. Administration officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, have attempted to smear each as domestic terrorists, doubled down on accounts of the shootings that videos easily show are lies, and impeded state officials’ efforts to investigate. There is no reason to believe the federal government will provide any modicum of accountability. And beyond these horrifying killings, brutality by immigration agents has become a daily scene, with protestors beaten, children detained, and people grabbed from the streets and their homes regardless of their immigration status.

Meanwhile, Congress is in the midst of considering whether to give billions more dollars to the immigration enforcement machine. The House narrowly passed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) appropriations bill late last week, continuing to shovel money at out-of-control agencies with only the barest fig leaves of accountability measures. In the wake of Pretti’s killing, sentiment in the Senate seems to have turned against passing the bill. The top Democratic appropriator in the Senate, Patty Murray of Washington, renounced her support for the bill, and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer indicated Democrats would not provide enough votes to pass it. That’s a good start — the current bill would do nothing to rein in ICE’s and Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) abuses, and the Senate should reject it.

But it is clear that is not sufficient. If Congress were serious about preventing more deaths, disappearances, and brutality from being unleashed on the American public — immigrants and citizens alike — it would claw back the tens of billions of dollars it lavished on ICE and CBP last summer. That money was dangerous then, and it has become impossible to conclude that it does not put people at increased and immense risk.

While the current DHS appropriations bill is unlikely to be enacted into law, it’s still worth untangling a bit of what was approved by a bipartisan majority of the House of Representatives. The bill would provide ICE another $10 billion in funding. In exchange, it includes provisions that purportedly increase oversight and accountability of agencies that fall under DHS.

Arguing in favor of the House bill, some pointed to a $1.3 billion cut to CBP. But that pales in comparison to the extra $65 billion over four years that CBP got in last summer’s spending bill — and the fact that CBP ended last year with nearly $9 billion in unspent funds. Meanwhile, the House voted to fund ICE at the same level as last year, and its bill actually increases the budget for DHS’s Enforcement and Removal Operations arm by $370 million, while cutting $76 million from its Alternatives to Detention program. And all of this is before taking into account the $75 billion over four years ICE received in the last spending bill.

Insufficient Oversight and Accountability

Given that extraordinary increase in funding, we should review the “strings” the House attached to this newest appropriation bill. These provisions are a bipartisan majority’s answer to the recent rash of public abuses and rights violations by ICE and CBP agents, so they’re worth scrutinizing. A quick review will show that, while these provisions would, for the most part, do no harm, they are far from sufficient.

Detention Inspections

First, the bill that passed the House allocates $20 million specifically for the DHS Office of Inspector General to conduct “inspections and oversight of detention facilities.” As POGO Investigates has documented, oversight of immigration detention facilities has been severely lacking, especially as detention has skyrocketed in the past year. Dedicated funding is a good thing. But aside from our longstanding concerns with DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari and his ability to conduct robust oversight, his office is only one of several responsible for oversight within DHS, and this bill does nothing for any of them.

And despite the $20 million for inspector general inspections of detention facilities, DHS is still dealing with a net loss for oversight, given the decimation of two other key oversight offices that the Trump administration has already gutted. The bill zeroes out the dedicated budget for the DHS Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, a cut of over $28 million dollars from last year’s appropriations bill. And it cuts nearly $33 million from the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. In other words, this would mean an overall cut of around $40 million for oversight.

Body Cameras

The bill also dedicates $20 million for body cameras for ICE and CBP agents. It’s generally better to have body cameras than not, and they have played a useful role in some court challenges to the administration’s crackdowns. But as we’ve long written, having cameras isn’t sufficient — there need to be policies that govern their use and we need safeguards against incorporating technology like face recognition that endangers the public. In fact, given the ways ICE is already abusing technology to identify people off the street, providing more cameras without these safeguards might actually be more dangerous. More fundamentally, the current absence of accountability is not because abuses by agents are happening in secret — scenes of brutality are playing out on neighborhood streets in front of crowds with cameras. Cameras alone cannot fix a culture of impunity and government leadership that cheers on these abuses.

Training

The bill includes provisions directing DHS to ensure that all agents receive de-escalation training and specific instructions on the rights of the public to record agents as long as they do not interfere with operations. Given the well-documented tendency of immigration agents to escalate interactions, including using force against people who are simply recording, it’s possible training will help in some instances. But the agents who killed Good and Pretti were described as veterans in their agencies, undercutting the notion that more would have been meaningful. And training will not make a dent when agency leadership celebrates agents’ abuses and refuses to impose any accountability.

Real Oversight and Accountability Is Still Missing

In the immediate aftermath of Good’s killing, we joined over 500 other organizations demanding a few baseline conditions for further funding of ICE and CBP. They were

• no increases in funding for ICE or Border Patrol;
• restrictions on dragnet arrests and arrests based on profiling;
• restricting Border Patrol deployments in cities; and
• limiting DHS’s ability to take money from other programs to spend on detention.

Days before Alex Pretti was killed, the House passed a bill that failed to meet any of these minimum requirements. Most damningly, the House approved additional funds while including no restrictions on abusive arrests or Border Patrol deployments within cities. This is simply unacceptable.

POGO has also joined calls for Congress to prevent DHS from spending more money on surveillance technology that undermines people’s rights — everything from face recognition to purchasing personal data from private companies and scraping whole neighborhoods’ worth of cell phone data. Perhaps needless to say, Congress has done nothing to rein that in.

The minimal conditions that Congress has placed on DHS funding will not make people — immigrants and citizens alike — any safer in the face of ICE’s and CBP’s militarized, lawless campaign across the country. We deserve better from our elected representatives, and the Senate must step in to demand real safeguards and accountability. And then, Congress must take back the dangerous blank check it handed to ICE and CBP last summer. It has become searingly clear that lives depend on it.