The End of Accountability
“People die in ICE custody. People die in county jails. People die in state prisons.”
That is how Border Czar Tom Homan responded to the death of Isidro Pérez in ICE custody in Miami. Pérez, a 75-year-old father ostensibly detained because of two drug convictions from the 1980s, is the fifth person to die in ICE custody in Florida this year.
The state boasts nearly half of the country’s thirteen deaths in what is already shaping up to be one of the deadliest years for immigration detention in recent history. But for Homan, the record-shattering deaths are not a problem to fix. Earlier this week, Florida opened a new (and already flooding) detention camp in an Everglades swamp surrounded by alligators, with promises of building many more in the state.
Florida is a microcosm for the Trump administration’s simultaneous expansion of the police state contraction of oversight and transparency. The spending bill now winding through Congress would make this exponentially worse. The bill pours unprecedented resources into agencies that Trump has actively worked to shield from scrutiny and accountability–over $100 billion for ICE and border enforcement, law enforcement, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Without question, the White House has emboldened states to defund, declaw, and defer oversight of law enforcement and correctional systems. But as we have emphasized, states have also been leading the way on rejecting good-faith efforts to ensure the safety of their systems of power. Now, their willingness to do so is getting worse.
In this newsletter, we explore the many ways that states and the federal government are trying to keep systems of law enforcement and incarceration in the shadows, accelerating our move away from democracy and transparency and towards authoritarianism.
Federal Attacks on Accountability and Transparency
- Shrouding Detention Conditions in Secrecy. DHS’s new rules limiting congressional visits to immigration detention facilities come on the heels of the agency’s decision to also stop publicizing detention statistics and gut the offices that handle detention complaints. Nonetheless, reports of overcrowding and inhumane conditions in the facilities mount.
- Nameless and Faceless, in Unmarked Cars. Last week in Los Angeles, family members watched Andrea Velez, a U.S. citizen, get kidnapped by masked men wearing no badges or uniforms and driving unmarked cars. It turns out they were ICE agents. She is one of many victims of the GOP’s insidious plan to keep ICE agents unaccountable.
- Abandoning Efforts to Curb Police Misconduct. Hours into his second term, Trump revoked Biden’s executive order to “advance effective, accountable policing,” later supplanting it with an order to “unleash” law enforcement. He also canceled police reform settlements, retracted DOJ findings into police departments accused of civil rights violations, and is now reviewing nearly a dozen federal consent decrees.
States Reject Correctional Oversight
- While advocates believed that deteriorating conditions in prisons and jails across the U.S. would spur legislative interest in greater correctional oversight, those hopes have been dashed as legislative sessions now wind down.
- In Ohio, legislators have stripped the state’s Correctional Institution Inspection Committee of its independence by moving it to the Attorney General’s Office. The committee has operated for decades as a watchdog over juvenile and adult prisons across the state.
- In Washington, a bill to establish oversight of local jails died in the legislature, even after a rash of deaths over the last few years highlighted the need for independent oversight. Similarly, in Wisconsin, Governor Evers’s recommendation for the creation of a prison ombudsman office was rejected by the legislature.
- Even when legislators are able to pass oversight reforms, governors have been loath to sign them into law. Governor Hochul still sits on a package of bills that would expand New York’s oversight commission after correctional officers fatally beat two people in a state prisons.
- Of course, jail oversight authority is not a panacea. The sheriff in Tarrant County (Fort Worth), Texas, for example, oversees a jail with dozens of deaths that have not been properly investigated under state jail oversight law since 2021. And in California, when an ombudswoman reported that a juvenile facility was the worst she had seen in “over 20 years of experience visiting every level of carceral facility in California,” she was fired and replaced by a Newsom ally who had no experience in the juvenile justice system.
Police Oversight Is Also Under Attack
- Ohio has followed Arizona’s lead and recently passed a law that allows police departments to now charge as much as $750 for access to body camera footage, which will undoubtedly create a steep barrier for civil rights advocates and families hoping for police transparency and accountability.
- Since Derrick Chauvin murdered George Floyd for all the world to see, legislators in cities and counties, spurred on by advocates, pushed for civilian police oversight. Now, state legislators are ending these attempts at oversight and moderation. An Iowa law passed this year, for example, bans civilian oversight of the police, mirroring a 2024 Florida law that in effect shuttered the state’s fifteen civilian oversight boards.
- Last month, Alabama passed a law that makes it harder to hold police officers accountable for abuse and misconduct.
- And many states are simply stepping in to block local pushes for police accountability. Missouri is now poised to take over St. Louis’s police department in a bid to stymie reforms; Tennessee just passed a law that outright forbids local government from passing police reforms; and in the years following George Floyd’s murder, states like Florida, Georgia, and Texas passed laws that banned local governments from reducing police budgets.
Profiles in Courage
- In May, Philadelphians overwhelmingly voted to support a local law that would create an oversight office and a civilian oversight board for the city’s troubled jail.
- California state Senator Sasha Renée Pérez has introduced a bill that would require law enforcement officers to display identification and allow law enforcement officers to request identification of one another.
- Children and people with disabilities braved arrest to protest and lobby at the Capitol against the devastating Medicaid cuts that are to come.