POGO Investigates and the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University compiled and analyzed data from ODO’s inspection reports website to identify recent trends in how ICE rates its facilities. Judging from detention inspection data from the beginning of fiscal year 2022 through July 23, 2026, ICE facility conditions appear to have undergone a dramatic improvement.
ICE is identifying fewer problems in facilities across the board. Called “deficiencies,” these violations to detention standards are used to determine what grade a facility gets and whether it stays open. The number of these violations dropped by nearly 70% between fiscal years 2022 and 2025.
Meanwhile, the proportion of ICE detention facilities receiving a “Superior” rating nearly tripled since fiscal year 2024 as of July 23, after declining by 61% between fiscal years 2022 and 2024. The recent spike in “Superior” grades coincides with increasingly weakened detention standards and a drop in the overall number of inspections being conducted.
ICE also doesn’t give itself a failing grade on detention inspections. During the period analyzed, ICE never failed a “dedicated” ICE facility — one that solely incarcerates people in ICE custody. Of the few facilities that did receive a failing grade, all were “non-dedicated” facilities, typically county and municipal jails holding a mixture of imprisoned U.S. citizens and people detained by ICE.
Inadequate oversight has clear ties to unsafe and even deadly conditions in detention, according to Scott Shuchart, a former senior advisor for the Department of Homeland Security Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
“The amount of oversight has been scaled back irresponsibly,” he said. The outcome, according to Shuchart, is that “ICE detention seems to be more dangerous and working worse than ever before.”
Related story from 2023, “Government’s own experts found ‘barbaric’ and ‘negligent’ conditions in ICE detention” (arc)
In Michigan, a man in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was sent into a jail’s general population unit with an open wound from surgery, no bandages and no follow-up medical appointment scheduled, even though he still had surgical drains in place.
A federal inspector found: “The detainee never received even the most basic care for his wound.”
In Georgia, a nurse ignored an ICE detainee who urgently asked for an inhaler to treat his asthma. Even though he was never examined by the medical staff, the nurse put a note in the medical record that “he was seen in sick call.”
“The documentation by the nurse bordered on falsification and the failure to see a patient urgently requesting medical attention regarding treatment with an inhaler was negligent.”
And in Pennsylvania, a group of correctional officers strapped a mentally ill male ICE detainee into a restraint chair and gave the lone female officer a pair of scissors to cut off his clothes for a strip search.
“There is no justifiable correctional reason that required the detainee who had a mental health condition to have his clothes cut off by a female officer while he was compliant in a restraint chair. This is a barbaric practice and clearly violates … basic principles of humanity.”
These findings are all part of a trove of more than 1,600 pages of previously secret inspection reports written by experts hired by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. In examining more than two dozen facilities across 16 states from 2017 to 2019, these expert inspectors found “negligent” medical care (including mental health care), “unsafe and filthy” conditions, racist abuse of detainees, inappropriate pepper-spraying of mentally ill detainees and other problems that, in some cases, contributed to detainee deaths.
These reports almost never become public.
For more than three years, the federal government — under both the Trump and Biden administrations — fought NPR’s efforts to obtain those records. That opposition continued despite a Biden campaign promise to "demand transparency in and independent oversight over ICE.
The records were obtained in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by NPR. After two years, a federal judge found that the government had violated the nation’s public records law and ordered the release of the documents.
(Italics in original, bolding added)