Immigration & Border · The Record
DHS oversight offices Congress created by statute now run on 2 and 5 staff, WOLA count shows
GAO found no impoundment violation in the March 2025 reductions in force and expressly declined to rule on their legality. The statute still requires unannounced inspections of detention facilities.
On March 21, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security sent reduction in force notices to most of the staff of three offices it houses to watch itself. The Government Accountability Office's decision B-337366, issued July 31, 2025, fixes the date and the scope: the notices went to the majority of the workforce in the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman and the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman.
The department's explanation came the same day, in a statement from DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin carried by the Associated Press and reproduced in a March 2026 analysis by the Washington Office on Latin America. The three offices, she said, "have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS's mission." The AP account of the department's position put the operational argument more bluntly still: the offices, in the department's telling, "function as internal adversaries that slow down operations." The case being made was not that the offices duplicated work done elsewhere. It was that they impeded an enforcement mission the department had been funded to expand.
Those offices are not administrative inventions the department is free to size as it likes. GAO's decision opens its analysis by noting that Congress has statutorily established several offices and positions in DHS relevant to the question it was answering. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 created the Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, whose duties, as GAO sets them out, include reviewing and assessing information about abuses of civil rights and civil liberties committed by employees or officials of the department, and reporting annually to Congress on those allegations. The same act created the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, charged with helping individuals and employers resolve problems with the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services.
The detention ombudsman's charter is more specific again. Under 6 U.S.C. § 205, as published by the Cornell Legal Information Institute, "The Ombudsman shall be independent of Department agencies and officers and shall report directly to the Secretary." Among the duties the section assigns is to "Conduct unannounced inspections of detention facilities holding individuals in federal immigration custody," alongside establishing an accessible and standardized process for complaints against any officer or employee. GAO's summary of the same statute adds the investigation of cases where DHS officers are found to have engaged in misconduct or violated the rights of people in immigration detention.
What GAO was asked was narrow, and its answer is narrow to match. The question was whether the reductions in force amounted to an impoundment of appropriated funds under the Impoundment Control Act. The decision resolves it in a line: "we find that DHS did not violate the ICA." The reasoning runs through the money rather than the staffing. DHS confirmed that it continues to obligate and expend its FY 2025 lump-sum OSEM operations and support appropriation, and the decision restates the general duty of executive branch officials to obligate appropriations prudently during their period of availability unless Congress legislates otherwise.
The decision is equally explicit about what it declines to reach. "We do not take a position on the legality of the RIFs; that is an issue under current litigation," GAO writes, adding that it takes no position on the policy goals of the directives and programs at issue. Read as analysis rather than as a finding, the shape of the outcome is this: an appropriation written as a lump sum can be spent in full while the offices it nominally supports are emptied, and the published decision points to no staffing floor Congress attached to that money. The statutory duties survive the notices; the capacity to discharge them is a different question, and B-337366 does not answer it.
Capacity is what WOLA counted. Before March 21, 2025, its March 2026 analysis records, the civil rights office had 144 employees and a $46 million annual budget. By the time of the count it had 2 full-time employees and about 25 to 30 full-time-equivalent contractor personnel. WOLA's own percentage figure, an 80 percent reduction, is calculated against a slightly different pre-notice baseline of 147; both numbers appear in the same document. The detention ombudsman's office fell from 118 to 3 full-time employees, 2 detailees and no contractors, a total of 5 people, which the analysis describes as a 96 percent reduction. The pending work did not shrink with the staff: on the day the notices went out, the civil rights office had "778 complaints either under investigation or pending review," roughly 550 of them open and under investigation.
View the data
| Value (people) | |
|---|---|
| CRCL before: 144 employees | 144 people |
| CRCL after: 2 full-time, plus 25 to 30 contractor FTE | 2 people |
| OIDO before: 118 | 118 people |
| OIDO after: 3 full-time, plus 2 detailees | 3 people |
Source: WOLA, March 2026; CRCL baseline of 144 employees, the lower of the two pre-notice figures WOLA states · Daily Pol graphic
Set two of those numbers beside each other and the ratio does the arguing: 778 complaints pending, 2 full-time employees left in the office Congress directed to review and assess them. That is arithmetic drawn from a single document rather than a characterization, and it is the most direct available measure of what March 21, 2025 did to the complaint function the Homeland Security Act assigns.
The period that followed is the one Human Rights Watch counts as the worst on record. In a report published June 25, 2026, the organization documents 39 deaths in ICE custody during the first year of the second Trump administration, January 20, 2025 to January 19, 2026, "the highest number of annual deaths in ICE detention since ICE was established in 2003." The same report carries a larger figure, 52 people who died in ICE custody in the United States, without stating in that passage the span it covers, so the 39 is the count with a date range attached to it. The mortality rate, the report finds, is the highest in over a decade and has more than doubled since the start of the current term, while the detained population reached "a record high of over 71,000 people in January 2026." The report also states that oversight mechanisms at DHS were dismantled or rendered ineffective, and describes those mechanisms as flawed but important to preventing and investigating deaths in custody.
Congress's own oversight of the agency ran thin across the same stretch. An analysis published by The Conversation under the title Congress has exercised minimal oversight over ICE, but that might change, written by Claire Leavitt of Smith College, counts the hearings: since ICE's funding increase, "the Senate has held just one public hearing on ICE," and while the House has held a few routine oversight hearings of DHS, none focused on ICE or Customs and Border Protection. The analysis notes that Congress holds long-established constitutional authority to oversee and investigate the executive branch, and cites the political-science finding that "committees are less likely to investigate the executive branch when the president is from their own party."
Put the two tracks in the same frame and something appears that no one source states: the internal oversight Congress mandated by statute and the external oversight Congress conducts itself both thinned inside the same window, and that window is the one Human Rights Watch counts as carrying the highest number of annual deaths in ICE detention since ICE was established in 2003. Neither statutory duty was repealed in the interval. Section 205 still directs unannounced inspections of detention facilities. The civil rights officer still owes Congress an annual report on allegations of abuse. What changed, on WOLA's count, is the number of people available to do either.
Three things are checkable against a date rather than an argument. The civil rights officer's report to Congress is a statutory product, so whether one appears covering the period after March 2025, and what staffing it describes, is a document a reader can go and ask for. The litigation GAO pointed to is live, and GAO said it would not get ahead of it. On that last point, a prediction: as of December 31, 2026, GAO will not have issued a decision taking a position on the legality of the March 2025 reductions in force, because B-337366 expressly left that question to the courts. If it does, this prediction is wrong and the docket will show it. The department's position of record, meanwhile, remains the statement it gave on the day the notices went out.