House Democrat: We should be let into ICE facilities
Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) condemned new policies Friday requiring prescreening for lawmakers' visits to immigration detention facilities after a series of incidents where members of Congress seeking to conduct oversight were denied entry.
'This administration has continuously tried to go around Congress and block Congress from doing its constitutionally responsible duties,' Meeks said during a Friday appearance on MSNBC.
'We are and have oversight and should be let into these facilities without notice,' he added.
Meeks said Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials can misrepresent conditions when provided advanced notice of oversight visits.
His comments come after the DHS issued new guidance requesting 72-hour notice before members of Congress visit facilities.
Several lawmakers in New Jersey, California, Illinois and New York have been barred from entering facilities to conduct legal oversight. Meeks said the DHS's new policy is 'problematic.'
'The way that you find out what actually is taking place, and we've done this under several administrations, Democrat and Republican previously, you're able to walk in and make an assessment of what is and what is not taking place,' Meeks told MSNBC.
'When you are prevented from doing your job and prevented from, you know, doing what the Constitution says you should be doing, then it makes you feel that there is something going on that should not be going on.'
Multiple detainees have complained of overcrowding and a lack of due process amid national protests regarding the Trump administration's new immigration policies.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) also said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is seeking to block lawmakers from visiting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field offices, even during advance visits.
'No matter how much she and Trump want to force us to live under their authoritarian rule, ICE is not above oversight and the Department must follow the law. This unlawful policy is a smokescreen to deny Member visits to ICE offices across the country, which are holding migrants – and sometimes even U.S. citizens – for days at a time,' Thompson, ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said in a statement.
'They are therefore detention facilities and are subject to oversight and inspection at any time. DHS pretending otherwise is simply their latest lie. There is no valid or legal reason for denying Member access to ICE facilities and DHS's ever-changing justifications prove this,' he added.
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to The Hill, 'As ICE law enforcement have seen a surge in assaults, disruptions and obstructions to enforcement, including by politicians themselves, any requests to tour processing centers and field offices must be approved by the Secretary of Homeland Security. These requests must be part of legitimate congressional oversight activities.'As for visits to detention facilities, requests should be made with sufficient time to prevent interference with the President's Article II authority to oversee executive department functions—a week is sufficient to ensure no intrusion on the President's constitutional authority. To protect the President's Article II authority, any request to shorten that time must be approved by the Secretary.'
Updated at 6:36 p.m. EDT.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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At the Department of Justice, the civil-rights attorney Leo Terrell is leading a Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism; at the end of February, he announced visits to 10 campuses, and on March 7, the administration announced that Columbia would lose at least $400 million in federal grants 'due to the school's continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.' According to The New York Times, the Justice Department also recently demanded that the University of Virginia push out its president to 'help resolve a Justice Department investigation into the school's diversity, equity and inclusion efforts'; the president resigned on Friday. As a critic of DEI and anti-Semitism, I understand the impulse to crack down on both, much as I understood the impulse to crack down on sexual violence. But the administration's approach guarantees the same bureaucratic bloat and illiberal excesses that characterized Title IX enforcement. Two of the administration's primary targets have already been subjected to treatment that wildly exceeds reasonable and lawful oversight. In a March 25 letter to Columbia, the Trump administration demanded not only that the university 'complete disciplinary proceedings' related to campus encampments, but that it impose a minimum penalty of expulsion or multiyear suspensions. But what if, in a given case, a one-year suspension is most just? The administration told Columbia to 'centralize all disciplinary processes under the Office of the President.' What statute empowers it to dictate how administrators and faculty divide power? It demanded that the institution 'formalize, adopt, and promulgate' a definition of anti-Semitism, as if institutional neutrality about that topic of debate is somehow at odds with Title VI. Most strikingly, it ordered Columbia to begin 'placing the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department under academic receivership' for five years, a flagrant intrusion on faculty governance and academic freedom. In an April 11 letter to Harvard, the Trump administration made at least one legitimate demand––that the university comply with the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling that its admissions office cannot discriminate on the basis of race. But the administration also made demands that ought to be beyond the state's purview. Harvard was ordered to reduce 'the power held by students and untenured faculty' in its governance. It was told to pay for an external anti-Semitism audit that would list faculty members who discriminate against Jews so that they can be punished. Yet the next paragraph of the letter demanded that Harvard shut down all DEI initiatives. The letter even seeks to micromanage student groups; funding decisions 'must be made exclusively by a body of University faculty,' it states. Harvard has rejected these demands in court filings, and it is suing the administration to stop it from enforcing the letter's terms. Still, the overall effect of the administration's enforcement is aptly summed up by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. In an amicus brief supporting Harvard's lawsuit, the organization declared that the state's 'coercion of Harvard violates longstanding First Amendment principles and will destroy universities nationwide if left unchecked.' An aggressive regime of civil-rights enforcement is easy to defend in theory. Without bureaucrats focused on the obligations that colleges have under Title IX and Title VI, institutions can neglect the statutory rights of students. Federally dictated policies and procedures can enhance consistency and impartiality. Investment in the Office of Civil Rights and campus-compliance structures can reduce sexual assaults and bigoted harassment. And penalties can be meted out justly to particularly bad actors. But that isn't how the civil-rights regime that arose in 2011 has worked in practice. Listen: Why Trump wants to control universities The new Title IX bureaucracy cost colleges hundreds of millions of dollars to implement, from 2011 to 2016. And for all the bureaucracy's illiberal excesses, colleges ultimately reported an overall increase in forcible sex offenses during the same period. Meanwhile, policy making through the bureaucracy rather than Congress sowed dysfunction, with appointees of different presidents imposing wildly different, sometimes contradictory, accounts of what the law required, such that satisfying one administration got you in trouble with the next. Similarly dismal results are likely as the Trump administration applies the Title IX playbook to Title VI. There is no reason to assume that Jewish students will be better off if colleges comply with every Trump-administration dictate. As Republican administrations used to understand, intense bureaucratic attention to a problem doesn't automatically improve it. And often, state coercion can invite state abuses, yield unintended consequences (see the Israeli students who will have to leave Harvard if Trump succeeds in banning foreign students), and crowd out better solutions. Returning to pre-2011 norms would be better than the status quo. But at this point, an act of Congress might be the only way to stop what one attorney has called the 'regulation by intimidation' that threatens higher education. Congress could clarify what Title IX and Title VI require of colleges, in particular establishing that colleges can never be punished by the administrative state for allowing speech protected by the First Amendment or extending due-process rights to accused students that they would enjoy in a court of law. It could raise the bar for launching an investigation. It could afford colleges more due process before penalties are imposed. And it could silo penalties, so that violations in one part of a university, such as the law school, do not threaten another part, such as a cancer-research center. Many kinds of reform are possible. It is, in any case, unsustainable for colleges to be micromanaged by rival factions of coercive ideologues. Yet many Trump critics are still focusing on his administration's glaring procedural violations, rather than the enforcement model that underlies them. Even if Trump's team were as procedurally diligent as its predecessors (a low bar), the overly aggressive approach to civil-rights enforcement that began in 2011 and persists today would serve academia ill. Civil-rights enforcement on campuses has mutated into something with costs that outweigh its benefits.
