NEW OIG Report: El Paso Sector Border Patrol Struggled with Prolonged Detention and Consistent Compliance with TEDS Standards

This week, the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security released a new report: El Paso Sector Border Patrol Struggled with Prolonged Detention and Consistent Compliance with TEDS Standards. A full copy of the report is available here.

The OIG conducted unannounced inspections in October 2021 of seven U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facilities in the El Paso area of West Texas and New Mexico. The report raises a number of serious concerns with the operation of these facilities and serious violations of migrants’ rights.

According to the report, they “found that U.S. Border Patrol held 493 migrants in custody longer than specified in the applicable standards, which generally limit detention in these facilities to 72 hours. Despite prolonged detention times, none of the facilities we inspected was overcrowded. We also observed Border Patrol using an Office of Field Operations (OFO) port of entry to process migrants, a practice that created operational efficiencies but was not sufficiently documented. We found that Border Patrol held some migrants placed for expulsion under Title 42 authorities for longer than 14 days, which is inconsistent with Border Patrol policy. In addition, when Border Patrol expelled migrants under
Title 42, agents recorded them in the tracking system as “Not in Custody” despite migrants being placed in custody temporarily prior to being expelled. CBP did not meet two other TEDS standards we evaluated. Specifically, we found inconsistent implementation of standards related to segregating juveniles from unrelated adults or legal guardians and providing interpretation to detained individuals.”

The report makes a number of recommendations for addressing these serious problems.

IE