WASHINGTON — Jimmy Gomez is racing the clock.
The congressman from Los Angeles got word yesterday that a federal judge had finally told the Trump administration what should have been obvious since 2020: You can’t lock Congress out of detention centers. Not legally, anyway.
So Gomez isn’t waiting around for the appeals. He’s going straight to a detention facility—unannounced, the way the law says he can—to see if they’ll actually let him in this time or if they’ll violate a direct court order.
“I’m trying to get there before they can appeal it,” Gomez told me last night. “I’m going to try and get in and see if they deny me entry.” Full audio here:
That’s what it’s come to. A United States congressman has to race bureaucrats to exercise his legal authority to inspect a jail.
It took twelve members of Congress filing a federal lawsuit to get here. It took Judge Jia M. Cobb writing seventy-three pages explaining what the law actually says. It took months of padlocked gates, chemical irritants, and one congresswoman getting charged with three federal felonies for trying to do her job.
Start in Newark back in May. Reps. LaMonica McIver, Bonnie Watson Coleman, and Robert Menendez Jr. showed up at Delaney Hall—a newly reopened, thousand-bed detention center run by private prison company GEO Group. They had every legal right to be there.
What they got was a physical confrontation with ICE agents. Newark’s mayor ended up arrested. McIver ended up facing felony charges that could send her to prison. She enters a not-guilty plea, says she was exercising constitutional oversight authority, says ICE turned a peaceful situation into chaos.
The administration’s response? Make it harder for Congress to visit.
By June, ICE announced new rules. Seven days’ notice to visit any detention center. Field offices—where people are held for days in twelve-hour “holding facilities”—suddenly don’t count as detention at all, so members of Congress can’t visit them either.
That’s when things got ugly.
In California, Reps. Raul Ruiz and Norma Torres drove to the Adelanto detention center in July and found the gates padlocked shut. Torres had already been sent to the emergency room in June after ICE deployed chemical irritants during her attempt to visit another facility. Now she’s standing outside locked gates in the desert.
“This is an illegal action,” Ruiz said. “This is an obstruction of the law.”
In New York, Reps. Dan Goldman and Jerry Nadler stood in a hallway while an ICE official told them migrants were sleeping on floors and benches for days, but sorry, this isn’t technically a “detention center” under the law, so you can’t come in.
“You have no right to say no to us,” Nadler told him. “That’s a matter of law.”
In Pennsylvania, Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon showed up after a Chinese national died in custody. ICE officials told her explicitly: We know federal law says we have to let you in. But Secretary Kristi Noem ordered us not to allow any members of Congress to visit. So no.
They knew they were breaking the law. They did it anyway.
In Colorado, when Rep. Jason Crow finally got into a facility after providing the required seven-day notice, ICE locked down the entire place for his visit. He couldn’t talk to detainees. Couldn’t get an accurate count. Couldn’t see actual conditions.
This went on for months. Twelve members of Congress—Joe Neguse, Adriano Espaillat, Bennie Thompson, Jamie Raskin, Robert Garcia, Jason Crow, Veronica Escobar, Dan Goldman, Jimmy Gomez, Raul Ruiz, Norma Torres, Luis Correa—all denied access. Different facilities, different times, same result: No.
So they sued in July.
Judge Cobb ruled Wednesday. She found that ICE’s seven-day notice requirement “likely violates federal appropriations law.” She found that facility conditions change too fast for a seven-day delay to mean anything. She found that denying access causes “tangible harm” to Congress’s constitutional oversight.
The law is clear, she wrote. Congress passed it. The president signed it. It says members of Congress can show up to any ICE detention facility without advance notice. It says ICE can’t use taxpayer money to stop them or to clean up the place before they arrive.
“The changing conditions within ICE facilities means that it is likely impossible for a Member of Congress to reconstruct the conditions at a facility on the day that they initially sought to enter,” Cobb wrote.
ICE is currently holding 66,000 people in detention—an all-time high. Nearly half have no criminal record. They’re there for paperwork violations. And for six months, the only people with legal authority to check conditions inside were getting turned away at the gates.
Now Gomez is heading to a detention center to see if they’ll follow the law or break it again. “We have to hold these individuals accountable if they’re breaking it,” he said.
The gates are open again—legally, anyway. Whether they stay open depends on what happens when he knocks.
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