The Department of Homeland Security is closing an office responsible for investigating misconduct and abuse in the immigration detention system, according to an internal email to DHS employees obtained by HuffPost.

The Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman is in the process of removing all its public signage and ending its inspections, according to the email.

The office’s public-facing website, which advised the families and attorneys of detainees on how to file complaints, was down as of Monday afternoon. Even basic informational webpages explaining the office’s responsibilities appeared to have been taken offline.

The email attributed the closure to a lack of funding in the Homeland Security appropriations bill that ended the recent shutdown, though the text of that bill does not require the closure of the ombudsman’s office.

“DHS did not shutdown the Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman — Congress did,” an agency spokesperson told HuffPost in an email. “The House passed the DHS appropriations bill without objection, and it was signed into law last week.”

The closure of the ombudsman’s office adds to the lack of oversight of immigration jails nationwide, despite the Trump administration’s efforts to surge detention capacity.

Earlier this year, a record 73,000 people were being held in immigration detention facilities, CBS News reported, though that number has recently decreased slightly to around 60,000.

“If you’re trying to make detention as miserable as possible ... then you’re going to do what you can to get rid of the ombudsman’s office.”

Over 30 people died in ICE custody last year — making it the deadliest year for ICE detainees since 2004. So far this year, ICE has reported 18 deaths in custody, marking an even deadlier pace so far.

The closure of OIDO “fits in with a larger strategy here, of trying to get people to give up on their immigration cases — and give up on their asylum cases — by holding out the threat of detention and making sure that that detention will be in the most miserable conditions possible,” Adam Isaacson of the Washington Office on Latin America, co-author of a recent report on the “dismantling” of DHS oversight bodies, told HuffPost Monday.

“If you’re trying to make detention as miserable as possible — because you believe, in some twisted way, that that’s a deterrent — then you’re going to do what you can to get rid of the ombudsman’s office, because that would have been a source of friction for you,” Isaacson said.

“It’s death by a thousand cuts, and this is just one more way that they’re trying to get people out of the immigration system.”

Isaacson said he believed the closure of OIDO was illegal because it had been established in law by Congress. The office was authorized in 2019 and launched in 2021.

“It’s right there in the law: Congress created this office, so only Congress can take it away,” he said. He added that the office likely had plenty of funding from previous appropriations bills to continue to function.

The Trump administration had already kneecapped OIDO’s capabilities, as well as those of other oversight bodies.

In March, a court filing revealed the office employed only five people, down from over a hundred at the start of last year, the Guardian reported — even though the number of immigration detention facilities more than doubled in Trump’s second term.

Homeland Security officials have plainly said at times that the brutal conditions in detention are meant to incentivize people to “self-deport,” or abandon their legal immigration cases and return to their home countries as a way of leaving detention.

As one DHS spokesperson put it to HuffPost in March: “Being in detention is a choice.”

This story has been updated with comment from DHS.

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