Democrats say Trump is illegally blocking them from visiting Ice detention: 'The goal is to bully us'

Source: The Guardian

Wed 13 Aug 2025 06.00 EDT
Last modified on Wed 13 Aug 2025 09.44 EDT


The Arizona representative Yassamin Ansari toured a detention facility in May where immigrants rounded up as part of the Trump administration’s campaign of mass deportation were being housed. She described what she saw inside as “sickening” and “worse than prison” – immigrant detainees were held in overcrowded, moldy cells and many reported that they did not have reliable access to food, water or medical care.

Two months later, Ansari returned to the remote desert complex to conduct another congressional oversight visit. This time, she was denied entry. It wasn’t an isolated incident. From New York to California, Democratic members of Congress have been repeatedly blocked from entering Ice detention facilities where thousands of noncitizens – many with no criminal convictions – are being held.

Democratic officials’ legislative checks – a legal right for members of Congress – have consistently confirmed reports that immigrant detainees are being kept in “filthy” and “inhumane” conditions with little regard for due process. Now, the facilities have become a battleground in the intensifying standoff between the Trump administration and Democratic lawmakers over the president’s supercharged immigration agenda.

“The administration’s goal is to intimidate us and bully us, bully us out of doing our jobs for sure,” Representative LaMonica McIver, a New Jersey Democrat who has been accused of assaulting federal agents during a confrontation at the Delaney Hall detention center, told the Guardian. “If they can get away with doing this to me, they can get away with doing it to anyone. But more importantly, imagine what they’re doing in the dark to others who are not of an elected status, who are not in public eye view.”

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/13/democrats-ice-detention-visits-blocked

---

This is something else that Democrats "are doing" although it doesn't make the national news much anymore (but is often covered in the local media).