As President Trump presses ahead with his conversion of warehouses across the country into huge immigrant concentration camps, advocates and lawmakers are warning that there is virtually zero oversight of the conditions inside any Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) prison.

The administration has gutted the agency’s inspector general and civil rights divisions, they said, and it has closed the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, a position created in 2019 to investigate deaths, medical care, and guard misconduct inside ICE prisons.

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The last check on the prisons is surprise visits by lawmakers, during which they can speak to immigrants and ask what life is like inside, they said. But in a May 11 memo, ICE’s acting director at the time, Todd Lyons, said those conversations are disruptive and unfair to workers. Now ICE will only facilitate meetings with detainees during congressional visits if lawmakers request them by name, along with “valid proof of the alien’s consent to the meeting” at least two days in advance.

Lawmakers and advocates said they doubted the new acting director, former private prison company official David Venturella, would respect their authority any more than his predecessor did. Venturella worked for more than a decade at GEO Group, one of the two biggest for-profit private-sector companies that run ICE prisons, most recently as senior vice president of client relations. He’s also a major Trump donor via GEO Group’s PAC.

“Congress is now the only oversight mechanism, and they’re trying to make that as difficult as possible,” Rep. Mike Levin (D-CA) said in an interview. He found out about the new policy when he and Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-CA) visited the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego unannounced on May 11, the same day the memo is dated. They were allowed in, but a staff member handed them the memo when they tried to speak with prisoners, which is a crucial part of surprise visits if they’re to get a clear read on a facility’s conditions and prisoners’ experiences.

“Congress is now the only oversight mechanism, and they’re trying to make that as difficult as possible.”

Rep. Mike Levin (D-CA)

“The only thing I can conclude, based on the pattern of behavior and this letter, is that they do not want bad stories about how detainees are being mistreated,” Levin said. “They are trying to cover up and only provide a narrative that is consistent with Stephen Miller’s desire to broaden this mass deportation machine.”

THE TRUMP REGIME CONTENDS that conditions of ICE prisons are “superior.” The Prospect’s analysis of 36 ICE reports on facility inspections conducted during the 2026 fiscal year found that the majority list no deficiencies and say that all interviewed prisoners were satisfied with facility services and made no allegation of discrimination, mistreatment, or abuse. Yet a record number of people have died in ICE prisons—18 so far this year, by the Prospect’s tally, almost certainly an undercount. Advocates, attorneys, elected officials, journalists, researchers, and prisoners themselves have repeatedly outlined the endemic abuses taking place there.

In a potent recent example, almost 300 prisoners inside the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, New Jersey, signed an open letter saying they are “tortured physically and psychologically” by the prison’s living conditions, and that guards are denying them adequate food, medical attention, and legal representation. Released by the immigrant rights coalition Eyes on ICE, the letter says children “are suffering a very strong psychological impact,” that COVID-19 is rampant, and that “flu is constant among detainees, which could lead to outbreaks of illnesses or epidemics.”

It is the second time prisoners inside Delaney Hall have organized an open letter. As in the first letter, written by prisoner Leonardo Villalba and co-signed by 24 other prisoners, the new one notes that Delaney prisoners had been following required immigration rules before they were “kidnapped—detained without justification” and that staff are now stopping them from leaving the country. During immigration court hearings, judges “inform the detainee that they can purchase a plane ticket to return to their country of origin, but the ICE officer denies that possibility,” the letter said, adding that those who have agreed to depart voluntarily must wait up to three months before they are allowed to do so.

Across the country in California, immigrant prisons fail to meet even ICE’s own standards, state Attorney General Rob Bonta wrote in his fifth report on conditions of those in his state, released last Friday. Worsening conditions are harming immigrant prisoners’ health and constitutional rights, his office found in their research, which included a tour of seven facilities, a review and analysis of logs, policies, detainees, and other documents, and interviews with prison staff and 194 prisoners. The California Department of Justice has the right to conduct such reviews under state Assembly Bill 103, enacted under the first Trump administration.

Bonta’s team “found evidence of inadequate medical care and heard countless reports of disturbing, unsafe, and unsanitary conditions and a lack of basic necessities,” he said in a press statement. “This is cruel, inhuman, and unacceptable—and it is past time for the Trump Administration to do something about it.”

Among other failures, staff at California’s detention centers are serving prisoners undercooked food, providing insufficient drinking water, and attacking prisoners with unwarranted violence, including “concerning uses of pepper spray.” Toilets and showers are dirty, rooms are overcrowded, and staff prevent prisoners from talking to their attorneys.

“Detainees, especially older detainees, reported suffering and detainees wept when describing these conditions,” the report says.

Lawmakers are demanding that Trump respect their right to inspect ICE prisons. During the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs meeting on Tuesday, Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) introduced amendments to the reconciliation bill, including one that would continue the authority of members of Congress to conduct unannounced oversight visits of ICE facilities and meet with prisoners, and another that would require the DHS inspector general to conduct a formal review of Delaney Hall. Kim referenced the prisoners’ recent open letter, saying it substantiates what he has also witnessed; he noted that ICE camps are public facilities paid for by taxpayers, who deserve to know what’s happening inside.

Lawmakers are demanding that President Trump respect their right to inspect ICE prisons.

Congress must be able to conduct oversight to hold the Trump administration accountable and “be a voice for the local communities who are resoundingly against these detention centers,” he told the Prospect via email.

“This administration knows our visits expose their cruelty and are more concerned about protecting their private partners’ profits than people’s dignity,” he wrote in the email.

TRUMP IS CLOSING THE CURTAINS on what is happening in his concentration camp network as he seeks to expand it with giant warehouses across the country, a project that for-profit prison company executives discussed in recent first-quarter calls.

CoreCivic CEO Patrick Swindle said the plan is to consolidate immigrant prisoners into fewer, larger facilities; he noted that the regime has so far purchased 11 of the 24 warehouses it wants to buy.

“The broader vision appears to be to develop a nationwide network that consolidates populations in relatively larger facilities but allows them to service the needs of the entire country,” he said on the call. “As they map that, they will have to make decisions between purchasing facilities outright, continuing to contract with the private sector, and considering alternatives like warehouses. Ultimately, they will settle on a strategy that makes sense for them.”

His competitor, GEO Group CEO George Zoley said on that company’s earnings call that the warehouse plan “has been paused,” which subsequent reporting found was untrue, though the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general is reportedly investigating the purchases. Meanwhile, the government is paying up to more than $1 billion to renovate just two of them.

The Department of Homeland Security paid KVG LLC $113.1 million on March 6 to renovate an “ICE-owned permanent structure” in Hagerstown, Maryland, “to serve as a processing and detention facility and provide all necessary wraparound services for operation of the facility,” the federal database of spending shows. The spending disclosure says the payment may be increased to $641.8 million.

The DHS also paid GardaWorld Federal Services $313.4 million to do the same with a building in Surprise, Arizona. That contract has the potential to increase to $704.1 million.

A spokesperson for KVG referred questions about when the warehouse would open back to the federal government. GardaWorld did not respond to an email asking the same question.

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Whitney Curry Wimbish is a staff writer at The American Prospect. She previously worked in the Financial Times newsletters division, The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and the Herald News in New Jersey. Her work has been published in multiple outlets, including The New York Times, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, Music & Literature, North American Review, Sentient, Semafor, and elsewhere. She is a coauthor of The Majority Report’s daily newsletter and publishes short fiction in a range of literary magazines. She can be reached on Signal at wwimbish.07.