INSIDE COMPLIANCE

Last month, 60,000 people were detained by ICE (United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement) – a new record for the United States. Once individuals are taken into custody during an ICE raid, a new set of high-risk regulatory and constitutional compliance issues emerge. ICE, and cooperating law enforcement agencies, are supposed to adhere to multiple statutory and internal standards that govern how detainees are identified, processed, housed, and given access to legal and medical protections. Compliance failures at this stage are some of the most frequent sources of civil-rights litigation, class actions, and federal court injunctions. The distance between what the standards require, and how detention facilities are actually operating right now, raises an urgent question: what does a regulatory regime mean when the agency tasked with enforcing it is the first to ignore it?