On Feb. 10, more than a dozen Department of Homeland Security officials joined a video conference to discuss an obscure, sparsely funded program overseen by its Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. The office, charged with investigating when the national security agency is accused of violating the rights of both immigrants and U.S. citizens, had found itself in the crosshairs of Elon Musk’s secretive Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
It began as a typical briefing, with Homeland Security officials explaining to DOGE a program many describe as a win-win. It had provided some $20 million in recent years to local organizations that provide case workers to keep people in immigration proceedings showing up to court, staff explained, without expensive detentions and ankle monitors.
DOGE leader Kyle Schutt, a technology executive who developed a GOP online fundraising platform, interrupted. He wanted Joseph Mazzara, DHS’s acting general counsel, to weigh in. Mazzara was recently appointed to the post after working for Ken Paxton as both an assistant solicitor general and member of the Texas attorney general’s defense team that beat back public corruption charges.
Schutt had a different interpretation of the program, according to people who attended or were briefed on the meeting.
“This whole program sounds like money laundering,” he said.
Mazzara went further. His facial expressions, his use of profanity and the way he combed his fingers through his hair made clear he was annoyed.
“We should look into civil RICO charges,” Mazzara said.
DHS staff was stunned. The program had been mandated by Congress, yet Homeland Security’s top lawyer was saying it could be investigated under a law reserved for organized crime syndicates.
“I took it as a threat,” one attendee said. “It was traumatizing.”
For many in the office, known internally as CRCL, that moment was a dark forecast of the future. Several said they scrambled to try to fend off the mass firings they were seeing across the rest of President Donald Trump’s administration. They policed language that Trump’s appointees might not like. They hesitated to open complaints on hot-button cases. They reframed their work as less about protecting civil rights and more about keeping the department out of legal trouble.
None of it worked. On March 21, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem shut down the office and fired most of the 150-person staff. As a result, about 600 civil rights abuse investigations were frozen.
“All the oversight in DHS was eliminated today,” one worker texted after the announcement that they’d been fired.
Eight former CRCL officials spoke with ProPublica about the dismantling of the office on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution. Their accounts come at a time when the new administration’s move to weaken oversight of federal agencies has faced legal challenges in the federal courts. In defending its move to shut CRCL, the administration said it was streamlining operations, as it has done elsewhere. “DHS remains committed to civil rights protections but must streamline oversight to remove roadblocks to enforcement,” said DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.
CRCL staff “often functioned as internal adversaries to slow down operations,” McLaughlin added. She did not address questions from ProPublica about the February meeting. Mazzara and Schutt did not reply to requests for comment.
The office’s closure strips Homeland Security of a key internal check and balance, analysts and former staff say, as the Trump administration morphs the agency into a mass-deportation machine. The civil rights team served as a deterrent to border patrol and immigration agents who didn’t want the hassle and paperwork of an investigation, staff said, and its closure signals that rights violations, including those against U.S. citizens, could go unchecked.
The office processed more than 3,000 complaints in fiscal year 2023 — on everything from disabled detainees being unable to access medical care to abuses of power at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and reports of rape at its detention centers. For instance, following reports that ICE had performed facial recognition searches on millions of Maryland drivers, a CRCL investigation led the agency to agree to new oversight; case details have been removed from the DHS website but are available in the internet archive. The office also reported to Congress that it had investigated and confirmed allegations that a child, a U.S. citizen traveling without her parents between Mexico and California, had been sexually abused by Customs and Border Protection agents during a strip search.
Those cases would have gone nowhere without CRCL, its former staffers said.
“Nobody knows where to go without CRCL, and that’s the point,” a senior official said. Speaking of the administration, the official went on, “They don’t want oversight. They don’t care about civil rights and civil liberties.”
The CRCL staff, most of them lawyers, emphasized that their work is not politically motivated, nor is it limited to immigration issues. For instance, sources said the office was investigating allegations that disaster aid workers with the Federal Emergency Management Agency had skipped over houses that displayed signs supporting Trump during the 2024 election.
“The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties touches on everyone,” one fired employee said. “There’s this perception that we’re only focused on immigrants, and that’s just not true.”
Uncertainty and Panic
The final days of the civil rights office unfolded in a cloud of uncertainty and panic, as with other federal offices getting “RIF’d,” the Beltway verb for the government’s “reduction in force.”
Staff members described the weeks before the shutdown as a whittling away of their work. Dozens of investigative memos posted online in a transparency initiative? Deleted from the site. The eight-person team on racial equity issues? Immediately placed on leave. Travel funds to check conditions at detention centers? Reduced to $1.
As fear intensified that the civil rights office would be dismantled, staff tried to lie low. Leaders told staff to stop launching investigations that came from media reports, previously a common avenue for inquiries. Now, only official complaints from the public would be considered.
Staff was particularly frustrated that under this new mandate it couldn’t open an official investigation into the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student and legal resident who was arrested for participating in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.
Credit:
Bing Guan/The New York Times/Redux
With dozens of employees spread across branches or working remotely, many civil rights staffers had never met their colleagues — until the Trump administration’s return-to-office order forced them to come in five days a week. By early March, when reality had sunk in that their jobs were likely to be eliminated, they began quietly organizing, setting up encrypted Signal chat groups and sharing updates on lawsuits filed by government workers in other agencies.
“It’s inspiring how federal employees are pushing back and connecting,” one worker said.
Beyond Trump’s mandate to remove all references to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, leaders told staff to omit from memos words such as “however,” which might sound combative, or “stakeholders,” which came across as too warm and fuzzy.
“Daily life was one miserable assignment after the next,” a staffer said. The orders coming down from Trump appointees were intended to “basically tell us how to undo your office.”
In what would be the last days of the office, the atmosphere was “chilling” and “intimidating.” Some personnel froze, too afraid to make recommendations, while others risked filing new investigations in final acts of defiance.
When the news came on a Friday that they were all being fired, civil rights staff were told they couldn’t issue any out-of-office reply, one former senior official said.
They are still technically employees, on paid leave until May 23. Many have banded together and are exploring legal remedies to get their jobs back. In the interim, if complaints are coming in, none of the professionals trained to receive them are around.
What’s Been Lost
Days after the meeting in which allegations of money laundering and organized crime were loosely thrown at CRCL employees, the program in question was shut down. That effort had essentially earmarked money to local charities to provide nonviolent immigrants with case workers who connect them to services such as human trafficking screening and information on U.S. law. Created by Congress in 2021, the goal was to keep immigrants showing up to court.
Now, Trump’s DHS is suggesting the case worker program is somehow involved in human smuggling. Erol Kekic, a spokesperson for the charity the federal government hired to administer funds in that program, said Church World Services received a “weirdly worded letter” that baffled the organization’s attorneys.
“They said there could be potential human trafficking,” he said, referring to DHS. “But they didn’t accuse us directly of it.”
The nonprofit is working on its response, he said.
Elsewhere, the absence of Homeland Security’s civil rights oversight is already reverberating.
With their office closed, CRCL staff now fear the hypotheticals: At ports of entry, Americans’ Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizure are relaxed; if CBP abuses its power to root through phones and laptops, who will investigate? And if DHS began arresting U.S. citizens for First Amendment protected speech? Their office would have been the first line of defense.
As an example of cases falling through the cracks, CRCL staff told ProPublica they had recommended an investigation into the deportation of a Lebanese professor at Brown University who was in the country on a valid work visa. Federal prosecutors said in court she was detained at an airport in Boston in connection with “sympathetic photos and videos” on her phone of leaders of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Reuters reported she told border authorities she did not support Hezbollah but admired the group’s deceased leader Hassan Nasrallah for religious reasons.
Staff also wanted to look into the case of a 10-year-old girl recovering from brain cancer who, despite being a U.S. citizen, was deported to Mexico along with her parents when they hit an immigration checkpoint as they rushed to an emergency medical visit.
In Colorado, immigration attorney Laura Lunn routinely filed complaints with CRCL, saying pleas with ICE officials at its Aurora detention center were often ignored. Those complaints to CRCL have stopped her clients from being illegally deported, she said, or gotten emergency gynecological care for a woman who had been raped just before being detained.
But now, she asks, “Who do I even go to when there are illegal things happening?”
Lunn’s group, the Rocky Mountain Immigration Advocacy Network, has also joined in large group complaints about inadequate medical care, COVID-19 isolation policies and access to medical care for a pod of transgender inmates.
She’s among those trying to find clients who were housed in the Aurora facility but have mysteriously disappeared. Her clients had pending proceedings, she said, yet were summarily removed, something she’d never seen in 15 years of immigration law.
“Ordinarily, I would file a CRCL complaint. At this moment, we don’t have anyone to file a complaint to,” Lunn said.
That sort of mass deportation is something CRCL would have inspected. In fact, staff members said they had just launched a review into Trump’s increased use of Guantanamo Bay to detain migrants, an inquiry which now appears to have vanished.
Credit:
Doug Mills/The New York Times/Redux
In New Mexico, immigration lawyer Sophia Genovese said she’s filed more than 100 CRCL complaints, helping her secure medical care and other services for sick and disabled people.
She said she has several pending complaints, including one about a detainee who has stomach cancer but can’t get medication stronger than ibuprofen and another involving an HIV-positive patient who hasn’t been able to see a doctor.
“CRCL was one of the very few tools we had to check ICE, to hold ICE accountable,” Genovese said. “Now you see them speeding to complete authoritarianism.”
