ICE Plans to Start Destroying Records Detailing Immigrant Sexual Abuse and Deaths in Its Custody

‘The openly anti-immigrant agenda of the Trump administration has led to a drastic increase in deportations of undocumented immigrants, and a looming threat of removal for Dreamers who have spent most of their lives in the U.S. Those policies promise only to further tax the country’s immigration detention centers, where watchdog groups and detainees frequently report unsafe conditions. The dangers these detainees face are often revealed through careful reviews of records that document violations of immigrants’ human and civil rights. Now the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, better known as ICE, wants permission to destroy those records, which detail immigrant abuses ranging from sexual assaults to wrongful deaths.
A press release from the ACLU indicates that ICE has submitted the new request on recordkeeping to the National Archives and Record Administration, which oversees the handling of federal records. Under the new terms, ICE would be allowed to destroy 11 types of records, “including those related to sexual assaults, solitary confinement and even deaths of people in its custody,” as well as “regular detention monitoring reports, logs about the people detained in ICE facilities and communications from the public reporting detention abuses.”’
Read more: ICE Plans to Start Destroying Records Detailing Immigrant Sexual Abuse and Deaths in Its Custody