The Immigration Detention Transparency and Human Rights Project 

(October 2015) — This report by the National Immigration Justice Center (NIJC) and Detention Watch Network (DWN), exposes how the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) inspections process for immigration detention centers obscures and perpetuates widespread abuses of detained immigrants. Lives in Peril: How Ineffective Inspections Make ICE Complicit in Detention Center Abuse draws on information from ICE inspections documents for 105 immigration detention facilities and features focused analyses of inspections for detention centers in Arizona, Florida, Alabama, Texas, Georgia and Illinois. NIJC obtained the inspections through a federal court order resulting from three years of litigation under the Freedom of Information Act. NIJC and DWN’s review of the documents reveals fundamental inconsistencies within and between inspection reports for individual detention centers which suggests that the immigration detention inspection process is a sham - designed to perpetuate a broken and abusive system.

For this second in a series of reports, NIJC released hundreds of inspection reports and the deposition of the chief of ICE’s Detention Monitoring Unit, who provided insight into ICE's inspections system.

For an updated list of ICE detention facilities and applicable detention standards, visit the detention data section of NIJC's Transparency Project.