DHS Removed 100+ Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Records

According to CRCL’s fiscal year 2023 annual report, issued in November 2024, the office “provides proactive policy advice to the Secretary and other leaders across the Department to integrate civil rights and civil liberties protections into all DHS activities.” The office’s staff, which the annual report put at “more than 150 people in a Department with more than 260,000 employees,” also ran DHS’s diversity and equal employment opportunity programs; received and investigated complaints; and participated “in policy creation, oversight, and outreach to individuals and communities impacted by DHS policies, programs, and activities.”

The records that DHS has largely removed from its website, and which POGO has posted below, pertain to CRCL’s investigative role.

Most of the records in this archive are recommendation memos from CRCL, or summaries of recommendation memos; they are sometimes called “close memo,” “close summary,” and “determination memo.” CRCL produced these memos following some CRCL investigations of complaints the office receives from the public, attorneys, advocates, or people directly impacted by DHS operations. Only 25% of complaints in fiscal year 2023 led to CRCL investigations, and a majority of CRCL investigations led to no recommendations, according to the office’s latest annual report. These investigations could be sparked by one or multiple complaints. A single CRCL investigation can encompass numerous complaints, as in CRCL’s review of over 200 complaints involving detention centers overseen by the ICE New Orleans office as detailed above, which led to nine formal recommendations and the one-page summary memo posted online.   

A smaller set of these records are “retention memos” that put a part of DHS on notice that CRCL is investigating a complaint.

(There is often significant interest in what CRCL investigations reveal, even beyond the memos, which are often only a single page. Last August, several advocacy groups called for the public release of “the complete results of the CRCL systemic review” of the ICE detention centers under the responsibility of the New Orleans, Louisiana, ICE field office.) 

CRCL did not make these individual memos publicly available proactively until several years ago, although it has produced annual reports that typically offer less information. One former high-ranking CRCL official recommended more transparency in 2019. The office’s annual reports have noted the office’s progress in making more records available, but there has been a push for even more access from the outside.  

From 2018 to 2023, POGO fought an ultimately successful nearly five-year Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against DHS to get access to reports produced by subject matter experts contracted by CRCL to investigate complaints. National Public Radio (NPR) pursued a similar legal battle. In summer 2023, both POGO and NPR published lengthy investigative stories based on those reports. POGO’s story cited experts and advocates to note that “this institutional secrecy has limited CRCL’s impact and allowed problems, many of which are systemic in nature, to fester, enabling abuse and putting lives at risk.” 

Before POGO and NPR won their legal battles, CRCL launched its dedicated online repository of memos, which included summaries of the findings and recommendations from contracted subject matter experts (the reports POGO and NPR obtained are far more detailed than the summaries). That repository grew significantly after POGO and NPR published their stories — until it was stripped nearly bare in February 2025.

After the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government embarked on the biggest federal reorganization in decades: It created the Department of Homeland Security. But there were concerns across the political spectrum that the new department could put civil rights and civil liberties at risk. For instance, a letter organized by Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich and signed by the leaders of over two dozen conservative groups urged Congress to exercise “restraint, caution and deeper scrutiny before hastily granting unnecessary powers to a homeland security bureaucracy.” On the Democratic side of the aisle, the late Senator Robert Byrd (WV) said, “the war on terrorism must not be used by the executive branch as an excuse to ignore constitutional liberties behind closed doors and to destroy the delicate checks and balances that have made this Nation a great beacon for freedom to the world.”

In the 2002 law that authorized the Department of Homeland Security, Congress required DHS’s secretary to appoint an officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. The House Select Committee on Homeland Security wrote in a report on the legislation that it “believes that protecting the privacy rights of United States citizens requires additional protection and oversight to encourage the Department of Homeland Security to maintain and practice the highest standards in protecting Constitutional liberties.” 

The legal basis for CRCL was further reinforced in 2004 when Congress passed a law tasking the new office with ensuring “that the civil rights and civil liberties of persons are not diminished by efforts, activities, and programs aimed at securing the homeland.” At least as recently as fall 2020, there had been bipartisan congressional support for improving CRCL. While the original Homeland Security Act of 2002 only referred to an officer for civil rights and civil liberties, the current law that authorizes DHS, which has been amended by Congress over the years, also refers to the “Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.” 

Commenting on termination notices sent to CRCL staffers in March, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told reporters that CRCL and two other offices “have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS’s mission.” McLaughlin also stated that “rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.” 

The conservative Heritage Foundation had argued in its Project 2025 plan for an incoming administration that CRCL should have a truncated role compared to what it had done previously. CRCL would no longer investigate complaints in DHS components such as ICE and CBP, according to the Heritage proposal. 

In a letter, Senators Gary Peters (MI) and Dick Durbin (IL), the top Democrats on the Senate homeland security and judiciary committees, wrote that “a decision to eliminate the CRCL office or make significant reductions in CRCL staff will jeopardize DHS’s ability to comply with statutory requirements and to protect the civil rights and civil liberties of the American people.” Peters and Durbin also cited a law requiring that civil liberties officers at various agencies, including DHS, have the staff they need to do their jobs.