Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and White House Deputy Chief of StaffStephen Miller were met with a hostile welcome at Washington, D.C.’s Union Station on Wednesday.
Their visit came as the National Guard had been camped out around the iconic station as part of President Donald Trump’s crime crackdown in the nation’s capital.
Bystanders looked on as the trio was met with hecklers in the station’s marble lobby as they came confidently strolling through with their entourage.
“You’re an embarrassment to Ohio,” one woman could be heard shouting as Vance kept a smile plastered on his face.
“F***ing nazi,” another man wearing a backpack shouted while taking video on his phone as the group marched through.
“Get the f*** out of my city,” shouted a third man.
Others could be heard chanting “free DC” as video showed the group casually walking into Union Station’s Shake Shack restaurant.
Other protesters shouted about the war in Gaza and to “free Palestine.”
In another video taken of their entrance, a man could be heard shouting at Vance, “Oh look, it’s couch f—er. You going to f— a couch, buddy?” in a reference to the joke that plagued the vice president on the campaign trail.
Upon entering the restaurant, Vance mingled with some service members, many of whom said they were from South Carolina. He took a few pictures while thanking them for their service and joked that the visit was “a hell of a lot more fun” than what he did most days.
“We ought to be able to enjoy great American cities. That’s what we’re trying to do in the Trump administration,” Vance told reporters from inside the Shake Shack as protesters could still be heard in the background.
As they spoke, a box of burgers sat in front of them, and National Guard members surrounded them. Chants of “Free DC” could still be heard in the background.
“We’re committed to this mission just like the one at the southern border and in Los Angeles,” Hegseth said. “Our law enforcement officers deserve to be able to do their jobs safely.”
The defense secretary gestured to the box of cheeseburgers in front of him and declared he “always liked a good cheeseburger” when he was in uniform, so he was hopeful he could deliver a few of them.
The Trump administration announced earlier this month that it was deploying hundreds of National Guard troops to the nation’s capital to combat crime. Multiple Republican-led states, including West Virginia, South Carolina, Ohio, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee, have all rushed to send additional troops to D.C.
However, critics have observed that the service members have largely been stationed along the National Mall and at Union Station, two largely low-crime destinations visited by millions of tourists every year.
In an unhinged rant, Miller then said they were going to “add thousands more resources to this city to get the criminals and the gang members out of here.”
He argued they were going to ignore the “stupid white hippies” protesting, who he claimed should go home and “take a nap because they’re all over 90 years old,” despite the hecklers at Union Station appearing to be all different ages.
“It’s kind of bizarre that we have a bunch of old, primarily white people, who are out there protesting the policies that keep people safe when they never felt danger in their entire lives,” Vance angrily added.
Recapping his field trip on Fox News later that night, the vice president deflected on host Laura Ingraham’s description of the appearance as “eventful,” claiming instead he had heard from “a couple of friends” who said the area now “feels safer.”
“Living with lawlessness and disorder,” he added, “is fundamentally a question of political will.”
“If you’ve got the political will to enforce the law, you can make even cities like D.C. safe again, and that’s what we are demonstrating. And I hope that the American people take an important lesson from this because, obviously, D.C. is a federal city. New York, L.A., these places are not,” he said.
“I hope the American people just recognize that you don’t have to live with lawlessness. You don’t have to live with third-world murder rates. If you just take control of these cities, you can make them save places to live again.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/vance-hegseth-and-miller-branded-nazis-in-botched-pr-stunt
Vermont’s Republican Gov. Phil Scott has declined to send the state’s National Guard to Washington, D.C., noting that he didn’t believe it to be a proper use of these troops.
“In the absence of an immediate emergency or disaster that local and regional first responders are unable to handle, the governor just does not support utilizing the guard for this purpose, and does not view the enforcement of domestic law as a proper use of the National Guard,” Scott’s chief of staff Jason Gibbs told Vermont Public on Friday.
Scott is the rare Republican leader who’s refused to bow to the Trump administration’s requests as the president has deployed National Guard and federal law enforcement to address what he’s described as a spiraling crime crisis in the capital. In reality, data shows that violent crime rates in the district have declined in 2024 and 2025, and Trump’s efforts have been criticized by Democrats as a “stunt” designed to distract from other controversies his administration is grappling with, like the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Scott’s decision followed a Pentagon request for a “few dozen” of the state’s troops, according to Gibbs, and comes as six Republican-led states, including West Virginia, South Carolina, Ohio, Mississippi, Tennessee and Louisiana, have authorized the deployment of their National Guard to D.C. in the last week.
All told, Trump has already deployed 800 National Guard troops to the city, and the states’ contributions could put that number upwards of 1,700.
It’s not evident why more troops have been requested from different states and what function they will serve upon their arrival in D.C.
A spokesperson for Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee told the Associated Press that the state’s National Guard would “assist with monument security, community safety patrols, protecting federal facilities, and traffic control.” Some troops “may be armed,” a Guard representative said Sunday.
“In this case, because it is being hyperpoliticized, the governor doesn’t feel like — and I believe the vast majority of Vermonters don’t feel like — it would be an acceptable and appropriate use of the National Guard,” Gibbs added in his comments to Vermont Public.
A Scott spokesperson and a White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A Pentagon spokesperson declined to provide additional comment.
Gibbs noted that Scott would have viewed the situation differently if D.C. leaders had called for federal aid, which was not the case this time around. On Friday, the D.C. attorney general sued the Trump administration for its federal takeover of the leadership of the district’s police force.
“This doesn’t make sense. The numbers on the ground and the district don’t support 1,000 people from other states coming to Washington, D.C.,” Mayor Muriel Bowser said on Monday.
This also isn’t the first time that Scott has pushed back on the Trump administration’s attempts to use the state’s National Guard. Previously, Scott rejected a Defense Department request to utilize Vermont’s National Guard to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at detention facilities.
The Trump administration is evaluating plans that would establish a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” composed of hundreds of National Guard troops tasked with rapidly deploying into American cities facing protests or other unrest, according to internal Pentagon documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
The plan calls for 600 troops to be on standby at all times so they can deploy in as little as one hour, the documents say. They would be split into two groups of 300 and stationed at military bases in Alabama and Arizona, with purview of regions east and west of the Mississippi River, respectively.
Cost projections outlined in the documents indicate that such a mission, if the proposal is adopted, could stretch into the hundreds of millions of dollars should military aircraft and aircrews also be required to be ready around-the-clock. Troop transport via commercial airlines would be less expensive, the documents say.
The proposal, which has not been previously reported, represents another potential expansion of President Donald Trump’s willingness to employ the armed forces on American soil. It relies on a section of the U.S. Code that allows the commander in chief to circumvent limitations on the military’s use within the United States.
The documents, marked “predecisional,” are comprehensive and contain extensive discussion about the potential societal implications of establishing such a program. They were compiled by National Guard officials and bear time stamps as recent as late July and early August. Fiscal 2027 is the earliest this program could be created and funded through the Pentagon’s traditional budgetary process, the documents say, leaving unclear whether the initiative could begin sooner through an alternative funding source.
It is also unclear whether the proposal has been shared with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
“The Department of Defense is a planning organization and routinely reviews how the department would respond to a variety of contingencies across the globe,” Kingsley Wilson, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said in a statement. “We will not discuss these plans through leaked documents, pre-decisional or otherwise.”
The National Guard Bureau did not respond to a request for comment.
While most National Guard commands have fast-response teams for use within their home states, the proposal under evaluation by the Trump administration would entail moving troops from one state to another.
The National Guard tested the concept ahead of the 2020 election, putting 600 troops on alert in Arizona and Alabama as the country braced for possible political violence. The test followed months of unrest in cities across the country, prompted by the police murder of George Floyd, that spurred National Guard deployments in numerous locations. Trump, then nearing the end of his first term, sought to employ active-duty combat troops while Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and other Pentagon officials urged him to rely instead on the Guard, which is trained to address civil disturbances.
Trump has summoned the military for domestic purposes like few of his predecessors have. He did so most recently Monday, authorizing the mobilization of 800 D.C. National Guard troops to bolster enhanced law enforcement activity in Washington that he said is necessary to address violent crime. Data maintained by the D.C. police shows such incidents are in decline; the city’s mayor called the move “unsettling and unprecedented.”
Earlier this year, over the objections of California’s governor and other Democrats, Trump dispatched more than 5,000 National Guard members and active-duty Marines to the Los Angeles area under a rarely used authority permitting the military’s use for quelling insurrection. Administration officials said the mission was necessary to protect federal personnel and property amid protests denouncing Trump’s immigration policies. His critics called the deployment unnecessary and a gross overreach. Before long, many of the troops involved were doing unrelated support work, including a raid on a marijuana farm more than 100 miles away.
The Trump administration also has dispatched thousands of troops to the southern border in a dramatic show of force meant to discourage illegal migration.
National Guard troops can be mobilized for federal missions inside the United States under two main authorities. The first, Title 10, puts troops under the president’s direction, where they can support law enforcement activity but not perform arrests or investigations.
The other, Title 32, is a federal-state status where troops are controlled by their state governor but federally funded. It allows more latitude to participate in law enforcement missions. National Guard troops from other states arrived in D.C. under such circumstances during racial justice protests in 2020.
The proposal being evaluated now would allow the president to mobilize troops and put them on Title 32 orders in a state experiencing unrest. The documents detailing the plan acknowledge the potential for political friction should that state’s governor refuse to work with the Pentagon.
Some legal scholars expressed apprehension about the proposal.
The Trump administration is relying on a shaky legal theory that the president can act broadly to protect federal property and functions, said Joseph Nunn, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice who specializes in legal issues germane to the U.S. military’s domestic activities.
“You don’t want to normalize routine military participation in law enforcement,” he said. “You don’t want to normalize routine domestic deployment.”
The strategy is further complicated by the fact that National Guard members from one state cannot operate in another state without permission, Nunn said. He also warned that any quick-reaction force established for civil-unrest missions risks lowering the threshold for deploying National Guard troops into American cities.
“When you have this tool waiting at your fingertips, you’re going to want to use it,” Nunn said. “It actually makes it more likely that you’re going to see domestic deployments — because why else have a task force?”
The proposal represents a major departure in how the National Guard traditionally has been used, said Lindsay P. Cohn, an associate professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. While it is not unusual for National Guard units to be deployed for domestic emergencies within their states, including for civil disturbances, this “is really strange because essentially nothing is happening,” she said.
“Crime is going down. We don’t have major protests or civil disturbances. There is no significant resistance from states” to federal immigration policies, she said. “There is very little evidence anything big is likely to happen soon,” said Cohn, who stressed she was speaking in her personal capacity and not reflecting her employer’s views.
Moreover, Cohn said, the proposal risks diverting National Guard resources that may be needed to respond to natural disasters or other emergencies.
The proposal envisions a rotation of service members from Army and Air Force National Guard units based in multiple states. Those include Alabama, Arizona, California, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Tennessee, the documents say.
Carter Elliott, a spokesperson for Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D), said governors and National Guard leaders are best suited to decide how to support law enforcement during emergencies. “There is a well-established procedure that exists to request additional assistance during times of need,” Elliott said, “and the Trump administration is blatantly and dangerously ignoring that precedent.”
One action memo contained in the documents, dated July 22, recommends that Army military police and Air Force security forces receive additional training for the mission. The document indicates it was prepared for Hegseth by Elbridge Colby, the Defense Department’s undersecretary for policy.
The 300 troops in each of the two headquarters locations would be outfitted with weapons and riot gear, the documents say. The first 100 would be ready to move within an hour, with the second and third waves ready within two and 12 hours’ notice, the documents note, or all immediately deployed when placed on high alert.
The quick-reaction teams would be on task for 90 days, the documents said, “to limit burnout.”
The documents also show robust internal discussions that, with unusual candor, detail the possible negative repercussions if the plan were enacted. For instance, such short-notice missions could “significantly impact volunteerism,” the documents say, which would adversely affect the military’s ability to retain personnel. Guard members, families and civilian employers “feel the significant impacts of short notice activations,” the documents said.
The documents highlight several other concerns, including:
• Reduced Availability for Other Missions: State-Level Readiness: States may have fewer Guard members available for local emergencies (e.g., wildfires, hurricanes).
• Strain on Personnel and Equipment: Frequent domestic deployments can lead to personnel fatigue (stress, burnout, employer conflicts) and accelerated wear and tear on equipment, particularly systems not designed for prolonged civil support missions.
• Training Disruptions: Erosion of Core Capabilities: Extensive domestic deployments can disrupt scheduled training, hinder skill maintenance and divert units from their primary military mission sets, ultimately impacting overall combat readiness.
• Budgetary and Logistical Strains: Sustained operations can stretch budgets, requiring emergency funding or impacting other planned activities.
• Public and Political Impact: National Guard support for DHS raises potential political sensitivities, questions regarding the appropriate civil-military balance and legal considerations related to their role as a nonpartisan force.
National Guard planning documents reviewed by The Post
Officials also have expressed some worry that deploying troops too quickly could make for a haphazard situation as state and local governments scramble to coordinate their arrival, the documents show.
One individual cited in the documents rejected the notion that military aviation should be the primary mode of transportation, emphasizing the significant burden of daily aircraft inspections and placing aircrews on constant standby. The solution, this official proposed, was to contract with Southwest Airlines or American Airlines through their Phoenix and Atlanta operations, the documents say.
“The support (hotels, meals, etc.) required will fall onto the general economy in large and thriving cities of the United States,” this official argued. Moreover, bypassing military aircraft would allow for deploying personnel to travel “in a more subdued status” that might avoid adding to tensions in their “destination city.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/08/12/national-guard-civil-unrest
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has halted the Trump administration’s effort to shutter the Job Corps training program — the nation’s largest residential career training program for thousands of low-income youth — becoming the second to do so within the span of a month.
U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich — an appointee of President Donald Trump during his first term — on Friday granted the request for a preliminary injunction blocking the closing of 99 Job Corps centers throughout the nation, reasoning that the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) unilateral closing of the program, which was created and authorized by Congress, violated federal law.
The case stems from the Labor Department notifying the 99 private Job Corps centers across the nation on May 29, 2025, that they would “cease operations” by June 30.
The lawsuit was filed last month by a group of seven student-enrollees in the Job Corps program hailing from Georgia, Mississippi, Oregon, North Dakota, and Michigan on behalf of themselves as well as the putative class of students enrolled at all 99 centers affected by the program’s shuttering.
The complaint alleged that the Labor Department was legally required provide advance notice and an opportunity for public comment before closing any Job Corps center, as required by federal law. By failing to do so, the administration’s actions allegedly violated the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) and the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) of 2014.
The administration asserted that the shuttering of all Job Corps centers was a “statutorily authorized pause — as opposed to a closure,” a claim that Friedrich said did not stand up to scrutiny.
“This argument fails because DOL’s across-the-board shutdown extended far beyond any ‘pause’ contemplated by the statute,” the judge wrote. “The agency suspended operations at all 99 privately operated Job Corps centers without any expectation of future reopenings. And it effected the mass shutdown without complying with any of the statutory requirements that must precede a ‘pause’ in operations. DOL failed to conduct an individualized assessment or develop a performance improvement plan for any of the 99 centers. It instead suspended all operations based on the perceived failures of the Job Corps program as a whole.”
Friedrich said the nationwide shutdown was “not only unprecedented,” but also” inconsistent with its historic standard of practice.” While earlier “pauses” allowed for the realistic possibility that Job Corps centers would be reopened, here, the administration informed students that they should harbor “no expectation of transfer to another center or return to their current center.”
The court said there was no need to engage in any analysis regarding the difference between a “pause” and a “closure” because “the record unequivocally demonstrates that DOL unlawfully ‘closed’ all 99 privately operated Job Corps centers, in violation of the WIOA.”
“At bottom, DOL’s position is entirely circular: So long as the agency uses the term ‘pause’ and never makes a final decision to ‘formally close’ a center, it is authorized to shutter any Job Corps center indefinitely,” Friedrich wrote. “In DOL’s view, the WIOA’s procedural mandates hinge on the terminology the agency chooses to use, allowing it to sidestep its statutory obligations entirely. That cannot be correct. Because DOL unlawfully ‘closed’ all 99 privately operated Job Corps centers, in violation of the WIOA, the Court finds that the plaintiffs have established a likelihood of success on the merits of their APA claims.”
The plaintiffs are being represented in the case by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Public Citizen. Adam Pulver, an attorney with Public Citizen Litigation Group and lead counsel for the plaintiffs, lauded the ruling.
“The Department of Labor’s decision to abruptly close Job Corps centers across the country, ignoring legal requirements and literally putting vulnerable young people on the street, was callous, and as the Judge today agreed, illegal,” Pulver said in a statement. “The Department’s ludicrous argument to the court, that in shutting down 99 Job Corps centers it was not actually closing those centers, was a naked attempt to evade clear law.”
Parisa Firouzabadi and Pouria Pourhosseinhendabad were drinking tea on a warm Sunday evening in Junewhen they heard a knock at their apartment door in Baton Rouge. According to court documents, two police officers said they were there to discuss a hit-and-run accident that the married couple had reported weeks earlier — might they see the damage on the car?
No criminals here! The Gestapo ICE thugs bust two law-abiding Ph.D. students, exactly the sort of people we want in our country.
The couple, immigrants from Iran studying at Louisiana State University, led the officers to their apartment’s parking lot. Then, without knowing why, their lawyers say, the two were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
After nearly a month in custody and two petitions challenging their detainment, a magistrate judge this week ordered that Firouzabadi, 30, and Pourhosseinhendabad, 29, be released and that all removal proceedings against them be dismissed. Norah Ahmed, one of their attorneys and legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union in Louisiana, said the case illustrates the risks immigrants face in their everyday lives under President Donald Trump’s push to increase deportations.
“There is a broader narrative out there that somehow the mass deportation efforts underway are somehow related to ‘criminals,’ right?” Ahmed said. “The reality is you’re taking two PhD students at LSU. … You’re taking in our friends, family, neighbors and loved ones — these are the people in these immigration jails.”
In certain cases, ICE officers can legally employ ruses, or deceptive tactics, to access private property. Officers could legally pretend to be from another agency and say they are investigating another crime to be allowed inside someone’s home, but they cannot misrepresent themselves as a probation officer or as a member of a health or safety organization. They also cannot coerce people through threats and intimidation, according to internal ICE memos. Neither ICE nor the Department of Homeland Security responded to requests for comment.
Ahmed said ICE’s tactics mean immigrants need to be less trusting of apparent officers showing up at their door.
“And that’s very sad,” she continued, “because it means that, as opposed to people feeling comfortable with law enforcement and state actors and contributing to make their communities better and safer, we are now encouraging people to, in fact, shut down.”
After their arrests, the two were held briefly in Baton Rouge and in Mississippi’s Hancock County before they were separated: Firouzabadi was moved to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center and Pourhosseinhendabad to Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, where they remained for several weeks.
The charges centered on their visa statuses after they were enrolled as students at LSU. The two arrived in the United States in 2023, when Firouzabadi, then 28, was accepted into a graduate program at LSU and granted an international student visa known as an F-1, according to court documents. Pourhosseinhendabad initially came to the U.S. on an F-2 visa, meant for spouses of international students, but was granted an F-1 visa earlier this year after he was accepted into LSU’s PhD program in mechanical engineering, according to court documents.
The U.S. revoked Firouzabadi’s visa in late September 2024, and when she was notified roughly a week later, school officials told her that her studies would remain unaffected, though she could not leave and re-enter the country, according to court documents. Both she and her husband applied for asylum; their application is still pending.
Firouzabadi was not initially given a reason for the revocation of her visa, but a week after she was arrested, her charging document said it was revoked because she had been suspected of espionage or sabotage against the U.S., according to Firouzabadi’s habeas corpus petition, which is a legal process to challenge a person’s detention. ICE then rescinded that allegation 10 days later, the petition says, to reflect that she was just being charged for overstaying her visa. Her husband’s charging document, known as a notice to appear, says he was arrested over losing his F-2 status in late 2023 — even though he had since obtained an F-1 visa, according to his habeas corpus petition.
Her lawyers argued that she was in the U.S. legally as she was still an active student and an employee of LSU on the date of her arrest. They also argued that the couple were unlawfully detained, as the government’s purpose for detention is solely to protect against danger and flight risk.
“Parisa’s detention — which occurred on the heels of the United States’ bombing of Iran and as part of a concerted, public effort by the Executive Branch to round up suspected Iranian terrorists — is unlawful, as it appears based solely on her Iranian nationality,” the petition says.
The two were among several Iranian immigrants arrested or detained in the days after the U.S. launched military strikes against Iran on June 21. Another Iranian woman from Louisiana, a 64-year-old grandmother named Mandonna “Donna” Kashanian who had been in the U.S. for nearly 50 years, was detained the same day Firouzabadi and Pourhosseinhendabad were taken into custody.
The DHS said the arrests reflected its “commitment to keeping known and suspected terrorists out of American communities,” and it issued a news release on June 24 identifying 11 Iranian men it had arrested. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said the department had “been full throttle on identifying and arresting known or suspected terrorists and violent extremists that illegally entered this country.”
Ahmed, the attorney, likened the arrests to the country’s internment camps during World War II, when the federal government rounded up and incarcerated citizens and residents of Japanese descent, justifying it by claiming they posed a security threat while the U.S. was at war with Japan.
“That it could be happening in 2025 is shocking, and it’s beyond deeply troubling,” she said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/07/19/iranian-students-lsu-ice-arrest-ruse
The Trump administration has freed a convicted human smuggler in its desperate bid to convict Kilmar Abrego Garcia of the same charge.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported Abrego Garcia in March—a move the Department of Justice (DOJ) admitted was an error—before a federal judge forced the administration to return him. Abrego Garcia was placed in federal custody on a human smuggling charge as soon as he set foot on U.S. soil again.
Despite President Donald Trump’s pledge to focus mass deportation efforts on criminals—the “worst of the worst”—the DOJ has now released three-time felon Jose Ramon Hernandez Reyes from federal prison and transferred him to a halfway house in exchange for his testimony against Abrego Garcia, an undocumented father from Maryland.
“It’s wild to me,” Lisa Sherman Luna, executive director at the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, told the Washington Post. “It’s just further evidence of how the government is using Kilmar’s case to further their propaganda and prove their political point.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-frees-felon-to-keep-deported-maryland-dad-locked-up
As the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts continue, multiple lawmakers and immigrant rights groups are alleging that conditions at various Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities are “inhumane” and “unsanitary.”
Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., sounded the alarm last week in a video, stating she was deeply disturbed by what she saw during her visit to the Adelanto ICE facility, where many people swept up in recent immigration raids around Los Angeles have been brought.
Chu said the detainees she spoke with at the facility were “not the criminals that [President Donald] Trump says that he’s trying to get out of this country,” noting that some of those detained simply had expired documents.
“They are undergoing conditions that are inhumane, in my opinion. They were not able to change their underwear for 10 days,” Chu said in the video, adding: “They did not get a PIN number for the telephone. As a result, they cannot be in contact with any legal representative nor with their family members. This is not right.”
The US Department of Homeland Security is now requiring lawmakers to provide 72 hours of notice before visiting detention centers, according to new guidance.
The guidance comes after a slew of tense visits from Democratic lawmakers to detention centers amid Donald Trump’s crackdowns in immigrant communities across the country. Many Democratic lawmakers in recent weeks have either been turned away, arrested or manhandled by law enforcement officers at the facilities, leading to public condemnation towards Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (Ice) handling of such visits.
Lawmakers are allowed to access DHS facilities “used to detain or otherwise house aliens” for inspections and are not required “to provide prior notice of the intent to enter a facility”, according to the 2024 Federal Appropriations Act.
Previous language surrounding lawmaker visits to such facilities said that “Ice will comply with the law and accommodate members seeking to visit/tour an Ice detention facility for the purpose of conducting oversight,” CNN reported.
…
In response to the updated guidance, Mississippi’s Democratic representative and the ranking member of the House committee on homeland security, Bennie Thompson, condemned what he called the attempt by the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, to “block oversight on Ice”.
“Kristi Noem’s new policy to block congressional oversight of Ice facilities is not only unprecedented, it is an affront to the constitution and federal law. Noem is now not only attempting to restrict when members can visit, but completely blocking access to Ice field offices – even if members schedule visits in advance,” Thompson said.
“This unlawful policy is a smokescreen to deny member visits to Ice offices across the country, which are holding migrants – and sometimes even US citizens – for days at a time. They are therefore detention facilities and are subject to oversight and inspection at any time. DHS pretending otherwise is simply their latest lie.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/19/dhs-immigration-detention-center-visits-new-guidance
