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Last week, ICE released its own inspection report on Camp East Montana, the detention facility in Texas that has become a symbol of the administration’s overfunded, overcrowded, underregulated mass detention project — where prior reporting revealed that staff bet on which detainee might be next to die by suicide. The new findings were not leaked by advocates or surfaced by investigative reporters. They came from the agency itself: 49 failures in medical care, disease control, and oversight; undocumented uses of force; inadequate sexual assault response. The federal government’s own auditors documented the suffering, and the federal government will do nothing about it.
But while Washington absorbs the daily torrent of executive orders, social media provocations, and congressional paralysis, something significant is happening at a different level of American government. States are moving — aggressively, creatively, and increasingly together — to impose accountability on a detention system explicitly designed to avoid it.
