The Department of Homeland Security says three oversight offices are online and performing their duties.
The three bodies — DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman Office, and Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman — monitor everything from detention standards to TSA practices. They were closed in March and staff was put on leave when the administration said they no longer fit into the agency’s mission.
Anthony Enriquez, vice president of U.S. advocacy and litigation, is with the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights.
“So each of these oversight offices were created by statutes that Congress wrote, they were created to exercise specific oversight functions,” he said.
Enriquez’s group is one of a coalition of rights organizations that sued DHS to re-open the offices. By the end of last week, a banner on each of the office’s websites said they continue to exist and perform statutorily required functions.
“As it stands today there are almost no employees in these offices, there are heads of each of the offices that have been appointed, there are contracts that exist with private contractors to carry out some of the statutory functions,” Enriquez said.
Enriquez said attorneys will continue to monitor how the offices are being run and litigation could continue.
A federal judge has ordered DHS to report back on how it’s re-staffing the offices to meet its legal obligations, but declined to force the agency to stop layoffs already planned for this month.
Ricky Garza is border policy counsel with the Southern Border Communities Coalition, another group part of the suit. He says advocates are unsure how the new, slimmed-down offices will function.
“They had people responding to tens of thousands of complaints every year across the government — everything from immigration detention to airports, impacts of AI and privacy issues — that are now going to be staffed by almost no one until they can get their new hiring together,” he said. “We’re extremely skeptical, because we know that these offices were already extremely slim operations that were not able to keep up.”
DHS did not respond to questions about the re-openings or how the offices would be staffed,
