Shuttering of the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, and the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman.
On Friday, March 21, 2025, the administration fired the majority of the staff in the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL), the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, and Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, all but eliminating critical oversight offices within the Department of Homeland Security. Among other vital responsibilities, these offices were tasked with ensuring appropriate application of and compliance with immigration policies including 8 U.S.C. 1367 privacy protections for immigrant survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking which kept survivor information safe and confidential and ensuring that enforcement actions against immigrant survivors could not be taken based solely on information reported by their abuser.
The Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman was specifically tasked with overseeing immigration detention, including receiving and elevating reports of rights violations such as sexual assault and harassment within immigration detention. Without these offices — the heads of which are mandated by statute as are their annual reports — there is no internal oversight of the immigration detention system and no administrative office with which to raise concerns or lodge complaints about immigrant survivor safety, access to justice, or 8 U.S.C. 1367 privacy protection compliance. While the administration has said these offices impeded the operations of the federal government and the immigration system specifically, on the contrary, they were intended to ensure those systems operated within the law.
As an example, throughout 2024 and beyond, Tahirih was aware of situations at the border where asylum seekers were having their prescribed medications confiscated by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the medicine was not returned after release. Some of these accounts involved sexual violence survivors who had been prescribed medications for post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by doctors while on the Mexico side of the border who then had their medications taken away by CBP and never returned. Abruptly losing access to such medication can be devastating for survivors physically, emotionally, and psychologically. Symptoms of PTSD and abrupt withdrawal from medication can impact a survivor’s memory and their ability to fully and effectively participate in her asylum legal case and her ability to secure employment, among other cascading negative impacts.
Tahirih elevated these concerns with CRCL and requested that they advocate with CBP from their position as experts on violence against women. As a result of this advocacy, in August 2024, CBP released a personal property directive which includes the following instructions:
This is just one example of the ways in which these offices served an effective oversight role in our immigration system. While much remains unclear, advocates are deeply concerned about the eroding rights of immigrants lawfully seeking status in the U.S. and those who have been detained.
Impact on Survivors
Without these offices, the U.S. immigration system has lost almost all internal mechanisms of oversight and accountability. Advocates are now unclear what channels exist for raising concerns related to DHS and USCIS now that these offices have been gutted. Immigrant survivors suffering abuse within detention will have no mechanism to report it, those whose applications are rejected based on administrative errors will have no clear way to get such errors addressed, and survivors who experience needless traumatization during their interviews — in contradiction of USCIS policies and procedures — will have no recourse.
Advocates have also lost access to the critical data these offices would typically compile and the annual reports they were statutorily required to publish, making advocacy based on trends, patterns, and practice much more challenging.
