dissolution of – The Department of Homeland Security moved to dissolve the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, ending a model that stationed case managers inside detention centers to hear complaints. The shutdown comes amid a record number of deaths in ICE custody,
When Allison Posner received a “Reduction in Force” notice on March 21. 2025. it came with a blunt deadline: her job as chief of external relations at the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman was being abolished. and she would be “separated from DHS at the close of business on May 23. 2025.”
Posner’s exit was tied to the “dissolution” of the watchdog office that had been designed to handle complaints about conditions and treatment inside immigration detention facilities. She was among roughly 110 full-time OIDO staff placed on 60-day administrative leave as the office wound down.
The timing landed with particular force for people who had seen the ombudsman function as more than another layer of bureaucracy.. Posner. who had helped set up the detention watchdog after Congress established it in 2019. said the office’s presence inside facilities changed how grievances were raised.. “We went into facilities, talked to people, and solved their individual problems,” she said.. “For the first time. it wasn’t that people in detention would file a complaint by mailing off a form to Washington.. They would simply look for someone from our team who was visiting their facility every week or every other week and just talk to a person in real life.”
“We were getting to a place where we were doing it well, but now there’s no one doing it at all, and that’s the part that’s particularly heartbreaking,” she added.
OIDO’s stated mission was to ensure conditions for detained immigrants were humane.. To carry out that job. case managers stationed across the country conducted both announced and unannounced visits to more than 100 detention centers. including those run by private companies and those owned by state and local governments.. The office also published inspection reports with recommendations for specific facilities and flagged broader systemic trends such as medical understaffing at the border.
In recent months, Posner said DHS had blocked the publication of the office’s most recent annual report.. “We didn’t publish anything else. ” she said. adding that “a couple of other inspection reports” were “just sitting on.” The most recent report posted on the website dated to 2024. and the webpage that had advised relatives of detainees and advocates on how to request assistance was archived.
The move is part of a wider reduction in DHS oversight roles connected to detention and immigration benefits.. A reduction in force in March 2025 also placed on administrative leave most of the staff at other watchdog offices: roughly 150 full-time employees with the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. and 44 working at the USCIS ombudsman’s arm. according to an April 2025 complaint filed by the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center and other advocacy groups challenging the closures as “arbitrary and capricious.” The complaint argues the eliminations violated statutes that mandate their existence and funding. referencing that CRCL and the USCIS ombudsman were created by the Homeland Security Act of 2002.
A government official also pointed to the decline in complaints the detention ombudsman office received in the months after March 2025. attributing it to the absence of case managers in detention centers.. Detainees also reported that instructions for filing complaints had been removed from facilities.
DHS’s position has been that these offices slowed enforcement and encouraged improper immigration-related outcomes.. Tricia McLaughlin. then a DHS spokesperson. said the watchdog offices “obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles” and “often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.” She also said OIDO “misused taxpayer funds by facilitating complaints that encourage illegal immigration.”
Dozens of members of Congress responded with outrage in an April 2025 letter to ex-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, arguing the closures put “vulnerable populations at even greater risk of abuse.”
The conflict between an insistence that the offices are being dismantled and a court order requiring public acknowledgement did not end the shutdown.. In May 2025, a federal judge in Washington, DC, ordered the government to post public notices stating the offices remained operational.. Yet by early 2026. OIDO had been reduced to “just a handful of employees. ” according to a court declaration by the acting deputy immigration detention ombudsman.. The declaration framed the downsizing not as a fatal blow but as a “realignment.”
Money and messaging became another point of contention.. In 2025. OIDO had a $28-million budget. and DHS funding levels were boosted by an injection of $170 billion from the Big Beautiful Bill.. For fiscal year 2026. DHS’s budget request accounted for no additional funding for the watchdog office and stated that “OIDO has been eliminated in its entirety.”
Former ombudsman Michelle Brané. who served in 2024. said the office was already “decimated in early 2025 when the Trump administration fired almost all of the staff. ” and called it especially concerning that “there is now no pretense at all. and there is no mechanism for people to have very serious concerns about conditions of custody addressed.”
That vulnerability is sharpened by the scale of complaints the office once handled.. In fiscal year 2024, OIDO received 11,384 complaints, according to an unpublished annual report to Congress.. Over five years, complaints reaching the office totaled 26,846.. The most common issues involved inadequate medical care, contact and communication, and facility environment.
The closure news arrived alongside two other developments that intensified scrutiny.. It broke the same day a Washington Post investigation published an account based on internal ICE records revealing 780 use-of-force incidents in detention facilities during the first year of the second Trump term.. It also came as immigrant deaths in ICE custody have reached a record high: 49 people have died in detention since January 2025. including as many as 29 deaths in the current fiscal year.. In January, the detained population peaked at 73,000, and later fell to about 60,000, according to the most recent ICE data.
Posner had witnessed what she described as the watchdog’s slow disappearance from the places where detainees could reach it. In her account, the office shifted from being a weekly or biweekly point of contact to becoming an empty promise in facilities where complaints were no longer easy to file.
Some former employees and advocates suggested those changes mattered for survival.. Brané said. “Any death in immigration detention custody is a death too many. ” and she added: “I would like to believe that our attention to a lot of these medical issues kept that number lower than it might have been otherwise.” She also acknowledged the ombudsman’s system wasn’t perfect. saying it could have used more independence and enforcement authority. but still described its role in immediate responses to grievances ranging from insufficient food to a detainee’s inability to secure a medical appointment.
The picture was contested from the start.. David Gersten. who worked at DHS for almost 20 years and recently served as acting immigration detention ombudsman. praised OIDO’s “embedded” case management model in a LinkedIn post.. “I visited around a hundred ICE and CBP facilities over four years and know OIDO helped ICE and CBP reduce costs and improve efficiency while ensuring safe and secure conditions for detainees. ” he wrote.. He also pointed to recognition of the office in 2023, when then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas gave it an innovation award.
The dispute over why the office ended has also turned into a fight over responsibility. Last week, DHS blamed Congress for the shutdown, saying it had shut down due to a funding lapse. But the legislation to fund the department and end the government shutdown did not mandate closing the office.
Anthony Enriquez. an attorney with the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center leading the case challenging the closures. said: “There’s plenty of money lying around for DHS to accomplish its statutory functions.” He argued that DHS was using Congress’s lack of additional funding “as a pretext to accomplish the goal they always had from the beginning. shut these offices down without congressional approval.”
Posner, too, rejected the funding-lapse explanation, saying, “It feels like it’s all very intentional to make people absolutely miserable while they’re detained,” and calling it “an utter disregard for safety and just humane treatment.”
A government official said the number of complaints fell after March 2025 because case managers were absent from detention centers. while detainees reported instructions for filing complaints had been removed; at the same time. DHS said the watchdog offices obstructed enforcement and misused taxpayer funds. and the office’s website stopped publishing new reports beyond a 2024 posting.. The result is a narrowing gap between what the office was built to do and what detainees could access when it mattered most.
DHS ICE CBP immigration detention Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman OIDO oversight case managers complaints CRCL USCIS ombudsman Kristi Noem Allison Posner Michelle Brané David Gersten use-of-force incidents government shutdown funding lapse