An Open Letter to the New Majority: Start With the Detention Centers

The majority in both chambers of Congress changed hands this week, and with it changed who holds a subpoena. I am an immigration attorney, and this is the one request I am asking the incoming Democratic majority not to lose at the bottom of a very long list.

This post is opinion and general information rather than legal advice. The election figures described below were preliminary and still being certified when it was written.

The mandate on this is not ambiguous

People voted on the cost of living. That was the leading concern in survey after survey, and anyone who tells you this election turned on a single issue is selling something. But immigration enforcement was not a footnote, and the numbers showing it are not subtle. Preliminary exit polling put Latino voters behind Democratic House candidates by roughly 62 percent to 35 percent, a swing of more than twenty points from 2024, when the Democratic presidential ticket carried that group by about five. Among Latino men, the group that moved hardest toward this administration two years ago, support for Democratic candidates rose from about 44 percent to about 55 percent in a single cycle. People do not move that far that fast over an abstraction. They move when enforcement arrives on their street.

The warning was in the polling for most of a year, and almost no one acted on it. In late January, an NPR, PBS News and Marist survey of 1,462 adults found that 65 percent of Americans believed ICE had gone too far in enforcing immigration law, up from 54 percent seven months earlier, against 12 percent who said it had not gone far enough. Sixty percent disapproved of the agency's performance outright. Sixty-two percent said ICE was making Americans less safe rather than safer. Among independents, 71 percent said the agency had overreached and 66 percent disapproved of it. Even among Republicans, the share saying ICE had gone too far climbed to 27 percent. An Ipsos poll the following week put the figure at 62 percent, and a Fox News poll of registered voters in September still had it at 53 percent, with independents at 60 percent.

That is not a partisan split. That is a country that watched an agency sold to it as a border security operation become something else entirely, a federal force running armed operations in residential neighborhoods, outside schools, in courthouse hallways, and in the parking lots of hardware stores and processing plants in towns that never thought of themselves as border communities. The political consequence of that arrived this week. The human consequence is still sitting inside the buildings.

What is behind the walls

On January 27, Senator Jon Ossoff's office released the third phase of an ongoing investigation into conditions in immigration detention. Between January 20, 2025 and January 12, 2026, his staff documented 1,037 credible reports of human rights abuse. The categories are worth reading slowly rather than skimming, because each entry is a person: 206 reports of medical neglect, 181 of overcrowding and unsanitary conditions, 139 of denial of adequate food or water, 102 of imposed sleep deprivation, 88 of physical and sexual abuse, 50 of exposure to extreme temperatures, 44 of family separation, 40 of mistreatment of children, and 26 of mistreatment of pregnant women. The Department of Homeland Security called the report false and said its facilities meet standards higher than most American prisons.

Those findings do not stand alone, and that is the point. A federal judge in Chicago, reviewing conditions at the Broadview facility, called them unnecessarily cruel and ordered changes after hearing from the people held there, in a case alleging denial of adequate food, water, hygiene and medical care at a site built for short-term holding and used instead to warehouse people for days. A federal court entered a permanent injunction over conditions at 26 Federal Plaza in New York, where the government maintained that detainees received three meals a day and the detainees testified that they received one, or none at all. At Delaney Hall in Newark, hundreds of people went on hunger strike, which is what it looks like when the only leverage a person has left is their own body, and handwritten letters out of that facility described expired food, maggots and cells without air conditioning. Human Rights Watch documented people sleeping on concrete floors in freezing holding cells at three Florida facilities. These are not competing anecdotes. This is the same account, given independently, by people who do not know one another, in different states, under oath wherever anyone bothered to take testimony.

Medical care is where neglect turns lethal, and the record there has become partly an accounting problem rather than a clinical one. Reporting this year found that ICE had stopped paying outside medical providers for detainee care while the detained population surged, and that some providers consequently refused to treat detained patients. Attorneys have documented people denied insulin, cardiac medication, wound care and cancer treatment. ICE's own public death reporting lists 36 deaths in custody in fiscal year 2026, more than in any year on a page that goes back to fiscal 2018, and outlets reviewing the same underlying data put the figure at 37 and call it the worst year on record. The agency's explanation is that the population grew, and the population did grow, from under 40,000 people in January 2025 to a peak of roughly 73,000 this past January, across a network that expanded from 134 facilities to 272. A larger denominator is not an answer to a dead person. It is a description of how you came to have more of them.

This is being done to people who are not, by the government's own data, who the public has been told they are. As of July, an analysis of ICE's own detention records found that 46,436 of the 65,765 people in custody, just under 71 percent, had no criminal conviction of any kind, and that many of those who did had convictions for minor offenses including traffic violations.

Why this is not abstract in Maryland

We wrote in March about the hold rooms inside the ICE field office at 31 Hopkins Plaza in Baltimore, five cells that ICE's own guidance says a person should pass through in twelve hours or less. By early this year people were being held there for days. The population reached 123 people in a space rated for 56, which works out to roughly ten square feet per person, about the footprint of a bath towel. Sworn declarations in that litigation described people denied treatment for leukemia, HIV, diabetes and high blood pressure, and sleeping on floors and benches without blankets. It took a federal judge, in March of 2026, to order a cap that did nothing more than restore the facility's own rated capacity.

That building is a short drive from this office. The people in those cells were somebody's father on the way home from a shift. If you represent Maryland, Virginia or the District, this is not a national abstraction you are being asked to take an interest in. It is a federal building in your own backyard.

• The Baltimore hold rooms: what the court just ruled and why it matters
• Know your rights during immigration detention
• Calls, mail and money: how to support someone in ICE detention
• How to use the ICE detainee locator

Access to counsel has become a formality

I need to be plain about this part, because it is my own work and I watch it fail every week. The right to counsel in immigration proceedings exists on paper and is increasingly unavailable in practice. Data drawn from the immigration courts' own records shows that only 23.4 percent of people had an attorney when a removal order was entered against them in September. Three out of four people are losing the right to remain in this country alone, against a trained government lawyer, frequently while detained, often in a language they do not speak well, and sometimes within days of arrest. We have written before about the fact that there is no appointed counsel in immigration court. What has changed is that even retained counsel is now being kept out.

The obstruction is not always passive. A federal judge in Minnesota found this year that ICE had blocked detained people's access to lawyers during an enforcement surge, and ordered the agency to restore confidential attorney visits and private calls and to stop transferring people out of state in a way that severed them from their counsel. Attorneys reported being turned away at a federal building by agents who told them the facility simply did not do attorney visitation. The ACLU has made similar demands in Louisiana. A policy change in September removed people with final orders of removal from the public detainee locator, which means the government's own tool for answering the question of where a client is being held stopped answering it. Virtual visitation exists at some facilities and is not a substitute for sitting in a room with a person and earning enough of their trust that they will tell you what actually happened to them.

I have spent hours this year on nothing more sophisticated than establishing which building a human being is in. That is not advocacy. That is a search, and the people on whose behalf it is being conducted are the lucky ones, because they have a lawyer at all.

The oversight that was supposed to catch this is gone

This is why a congressional investigation is not redundant with the ordinary machinery of government. The ordinary machinery has been taken apart. The Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, which had more than 120 employees, visited over 100 facilities a month and processed more than 11,000 complaints in 2023 alone, was shut down this past May, after the department's internal civil rights watchdog was gutted the year before. In June, the department ended the requirement that it investigate and report deaths occurring within thirty days after a person is released from custody, a rule whose only function was to stop an agency from discharging a dying person and then declining to count them. A review of the grievance process that remains found that 71 percent of the 485 complaints examined were rejected or deemed unfounded. And in May, ICE issued a memo restricting congressional visits to its facilities, requiring that members name in advance the detainees they intend to see and produce signed consent forms, a rule designed by someone who understood exactly what an unannounced visit would show.

When the inspector general has been hollowed out, the ombudsman is closed, the grievance process rejects seven of every ten complaints and the legislators are kept at the door, there is no remaining mechanism except the one that changed hands this week.

Why this investigation can produce consequences, and most cannot

There will be a long queue, and I am not pretending detention is the only thing that needs examining. My claim is narrower. Of everything on that list, this is one of the few areas where a congressional investigation is not merely expressive, because it generates things that courts and prosecutors can actually use.

Sworn testimony and compelled documents convert allegations into an evidentiary record. A credible report in a senator's memo is a fact an agency can call garbage. The same account, given under oath, sitting beside the facility's own incident logs, sick call requests, grievance files, use of force reports, contract monitoring findings and medical invoices, is something else entirely. That record has specific legal uses. Civil detainees may not be punished at all, which is the holding of Bell v. Wolfish, so conditions evidence supports Fifth Amendment due process claims on a standard considerably more favorable to plaintiffs than the one convicted prisoners face. Documented medical neglect and wrongful death support Federal Tort Claims Act litigation that often founders on proving what the government knew, and an agency that received 1,037 credible reports and a congressional record of them cannot plausibly claim it did not know. Willful deprivation of rights by a federal officer acting under color of law is a federal crime under 18 U.S.C. 242, and criminal referrals require evidence rather than outrage. Most of these facilities are run under contract by private operators bound to published detention standards, so documented noncompliance is both a ground for terminating the contract and potential False Claims Act exposure for having certified a compliance that did not exist.

There is also a reason to move early rather than thoroughly later. Subpoenas preserve evidence. Video is overwritten, logs are purged on retention schedules, staff leave, and an agency that has just rescinded its own post-release death reporting requirement has already told you what it would prefer not to have written down.

What I am asking for

• Open oversight hearings on conditions in immigration detention in the first months of the session, with subpoenas for facility records and compelled testimony from facility operators and medical contractors, not only from political appointees who will decline to know things.
• Issue document preservation demands immediately, before the hearings are even scheduled, covering medical records, grievances, use of force and incident reports, surveillance video and provider payment records.
• Restore the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman by statute and fund it, reinstate the thirty-day post-release death reporting requirement, and condition detention appropriations on unannounced access for inspectors and for members of Congress.
• Treat access to counsel as a condition of confinement, because that is what it has become. Require confidential in-person attorney visitation at every facility, restore full detainee locator data, and bar the transfer practices that courts have already found sever people from their lawyers.

One more thing

The people whose conditions I have described did not vote. Many have lived here for a decade or more, have American children, pay taxes under an ITIN, and had, by the government's own numbers, no criminal conviction when they were taken. They could not reward anyone at the ballot box on Tuesday and they cannot punish anyone now. They are the only constituency in this country with a complete stake in the outcome and no leverage over it at all, which is precisely how conditions got this bad, and precisely why someone holding a subpoena has to decide to care without being made to.

You were sent to Washington in part by people who were frightened. Some of them were frightened for a cousin, a father, a wife, a coworker who did not come home from a shift. The ones they were frightened for are still inside. Please do not make them wait for the end of the list.

If you have a family member in detention right now, do not wait for any of this. Speak with an immigration attorney before the next hearing date, because the options available to a detained person are almost always time limited.

Slatton & Hass Immigration Advocates is a Maryland-based immigration firm serving clients nationwide. This post is general information rather than legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship. It describes a developing situation and reflects what was publicly reported as of November 4, 2026.