A group of rights organizations are suing the Department of Homeland Security over the dismantling of internal offices focused on investigating human rights abuses.
DHS started cutting jobs and shuttering its oversight bodies earlier this year — including its civil rights and ombudsman offices.
According to analysis from the Project on Government Oversight, more than 100 records were also purged from the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties website.
Lilian Serrano is the director of the Southern Border Communities Coalition, one of the groups filing suit.
“For us, the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, while at times challenging to work with, has served as that path to initiate conversations,” she said.
Serrano says the office is one of the few spaces where organizations and community members can file complaints about alleged rights abuses by agencies like the Border Patrol. Back in 2023, her group asked the office to investigate outdoor detention facilities along the California-Mexico border.
“It was through that work with that office that actually they deployed the investigation team who was looking into the conditions of the migrants and also the allegations by Border Patrol that migrants were not in their custody,” she said.
Serrano’s group has been in conversations with the office about use-of-force issues, like those they took to the United Nations last year. The office has also investigated allegations of medical care issues, excessive lockdowns and unsanitary living conditions at Arizona’s Eloy Detention Center.
“CRCL is actually able to look more at the broader pattern of multiple agents doing the same action, and if they stem from the policy,” Serrano said. “They're looking more at … whether there is a systematic issue that needs to be addressed.”
Serrano says now, that avenue and thousands of active complaints within the oversight bodies have been taken away.
Their lawsuit asks for DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman Office, and Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman — the three oversight bodies eliminated in March — to resume operations.
It argues the offices were created by Congress, and only Congress can dismantle them.
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