House Oversight Chairman Blasts Blocked Access to Migrant Facilities

(Bloomberg) -- The House Oversight Committee's chairman demanded the Trump administration provide “meaningful access” to immigrant detention centers after federal officials barred the panel's staff from touring Customs and Border Protection facilities.

“This is not the way effective oversight works,” Maryland Democrat Elijah Cummings wrote in a letter Thursday to acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan.

Cummings wrote that committee staff members learned on Monday while en route to 11 detention facilities that they would be prohibited from making scheduled visits.

He said the committee was told “inaccurately” that the staffers “had not been cooperative“ during visits the previous week, including not following the CBP's timetables or itineraries.

The earlier visits had “raised significant concerns about the treatment of immigrants” held by the department and that many of those concerns were documented by the department's own internal watchdog, Cummings wrote. Committee visits to ICE facilities run by for-profit contractors also “raise troubling questions,” the lawmaker said.

“Congress has an independent responsibility under the Constitution to determine whether federal programs are operating as they should be -- not merely to accept the administration's word for it,” wrote Cummings.

To contact the reporter on this story: Billy House in Washington at bhouse5@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kevin Whitelaw at kwhitelaw@bloomberg.net, Laurie Asséo, Joe Sobczyk

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