**6. Government Oversight**

Everyone is assured equal protection under the law. ICE's questionable use of detention standards, compounded by its inability to secure the facility operators' compliance with those standards, have been repeatedly scrutinized by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG), both of which are charged with oversight of federal agencies and focus on efficiency and integrity on behalf of the legislative and executive branches, respectively. To date, ICE appears to be neither deterred nor dissuaded.

In 2014, the GAO evaluated the three sets of detention standards that ICE had at that time and concluded employing more than one set of standards impeded ICE's ability to operate a uniformly effective and efficient system (GAO 2014). ICE disregarded its

advice. In 2016, the GAO determined similar practices impeded IHSC's efforts to collect information about on-site and off-site health care services and assess utilization (GAO 2016a). Again, ICE disregarded its advice. Also in 2016, the GAO addressed ICE's inability to utilize the correct version of each set of detention standards—the abbreviated version for under "72-h" facilities or the complete version for "over 72-h" facilities (GAO 2016b). ICE disregarded its advice.

In 2018, the DHS OIG concluded ICE's methods for monitoring facilities' compliance with their respective detention standards had failed and many of the deficiencies that it had identified were longstanding (OIG 2018). In 2019, the OIG probed further and found just 28 of the 106 contracts that it reviewed, approximately half of ICE's 206 contracts for beds at that time, included the Quality Assurance Surveillance Plan (QASP), a provision enabling ICE to impose financial penalties to ensure facilities met performance standards. The OIG determined where there was a QASP in place, ICE had imposed financial penalties on only two occasions despite numerous documented instances of facilities' failures to comply with detention standards. Instead, ICE issued waivers, exempting facilities with deficient conditions from complying with certain standards. The OIG discovered ICE also failed to issue written instruction to govern the waiver process, thereby enabling staff to continue to gran<sup>t</sup> waivers without clear authority to do so (OIG 2019).
