Newly-elected Rep. Emily Randall (D-WA) arrived in Washington in January, at the same time President Trump returned to the White House and enacted what she calls his “war on immigrants.”

As a member of the House Oversight Committee, the queer Chicana congresswoman has become a leader holding the Homeland Security Department to account in that mass detention. One of the country’s largest ICE detention facilities is in Randall’s home district in Tacoma, Washington.

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While Trump vowed in his campaign to go after “the worst of the worst” undocumented immigrants — the “rapists” and criminals he’s long described as wreaking havoc on the country — just 29% of detainees have a prior criminal conviction.

Arrests of immigrants seeking asylum by masked authorities, in the very courts charged with processing their legal applications, are now commonplace. Nearly 60,000 immigrants apprehended by ICE and Customs and Border Patrol agents are currently in detention.

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ICE has been notoriously evasive about divulging any information about their methods, so it’s up to Congress members like Randall to find out how detainees are being treated in the civil detention facilities that hold them. Since taking office, Randall has visited the Northwest ICE Detention Center four times.

On her latest, she was denied entry, Randall shared in an interview with LGBTQ Nation.

Her visits have lasted an average of two hours, she said, with walkthroughs of the facility’s intake unit, medical unit, law library, visiting spaces, lawyer meeting spaces, a female pod, a male pod, and the center’s outdoor recreational space.

The facility is supposed to hold about 1,500 detainees, but Randall says ICE has exceeded that number, and that the facility also suffers from a staff shortage as the number of detainees rises.

Contact with immigrants at the facility has been limited. Procedures required by ICE and GEO Group, the private prison corporation charged with running the Northwest ICE Detention Center, mandate advanced notice and release forms signed by detainees, a procedure that likely limits candor in discussion of their treatment. Randall has spoken with just four detainees personally.

Despite those obstacles — and the Trump administration’s blatant and serial disregard for Congressional oversight — Randall said she’s determined to bear witness to the authoritarian crackdown, one that could presage the round-up of the president’s other perceived enemies.

“He’s going after anyone he believes to be an enemy or opposed to his agenda, and we won’t let them do that without pressure and oversight and shining a big spotlight on the truth,” she said.

Randall spoke with LGBTQ Nation from her office at the Capitol.

LGBTQ Nation: When we last spoke a year ago in May, while you were running for office, ICE detention centers did not come up in our conversation, but now you and several of your colleagues in Congress are at the forefront of congressional oversight of those facilities. You’ve visited the Northwest ICE Detention Center near Tacoma, Washington in your district four times, and gained entry on three of those visits, including one that was unannounced. On a Saturday, August 30 visit, you were turned away. What happened?

Rep. Emily Randall: Well, I didn’t talk about visiting the ICE detention centers a lot during the campaign, but I knew that it would be an important part of my oversight responsibility as the member who represents the 6th [Washington congressional district], with the detention facility in the district, and I’ve tried to go regularly. As you know, we went for an oversight visit on Saturday, inspired by the detention of two of the firefighting crew from the Bear Gulch fire.

We were signed in, felt pretty normal. I got swapped my ID for a badge, and told the guard on duty that we were there to do our congressional oversight visit. And he called the lieutenant on duty, who came down and told us that we would not be allowed in because it was a weekend.

I showed him the statute — we had it printed out with us, just in case — and he said he’d have to call his supervisor. He did, and then came back and once again said that they wouldn’t allow us in, and they referred us to the Office of Congressional Relations.

I cited our statutory authority and asked if they were comfortable breaking the law. And he said, you know, he was just telling us what his supervisor told him. It was really disappointing.

Both ICE and GEO staff have been on guard when we were there before, but they always accepted that I was there to do my job and ask questions, and they’ve been respectful. And this feels like a real loss of accountability. Like, what are they hiding? Why do they feel like they need to deny us access? Blocking our congressional oversight duty undermines our democracy, but we’ll keep showing up.  

One of the most disturbing aspects of that visit was the Department of Homeland Security’s official reaction to your effort to gain entry.

In a statement to CNN the day after your visit, Tricia McLaughlin, the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, dismissed you, saying, “This was nothing more than a political stunt to get media clicks and 15 minutes of fame as ICE law enforcement have seen a surge in assaults, disruptions and obstructions to enforcement, including by members of Congress themselves,” with the implication that Congress members had been responsible for many among a large, dubious number of assaults cited. She added that unannounced visits were “an intrusion on the President’s Article II authority.”

What does DHS’s reaction say about the Trump administration’s respect for congressional authority, and are unannounced visits now off the table?

I think this is a repeated pattern that we’ve seen. This administration has no respect for congressional authority, and in fact, congressional Republicans are doing nothing to stand up and reclaim it.

The statutory language that gives us oversight authority of ICE detention centers says, “Nothing in this Act may be construed to require advanced notice of a visit.” It’s very clear that we do not have to give advance notice, and this administration is doing everything that they can to hide from the public their war on immigrants and the overcrowded facilities.  

Are you and your colleagues going to take Trump to court over that issue?

Well, finding standing to sue the President is tricky.  For it to be an official suit by Congress, we would need to have the Speaker of the House sign on. There are members of Congress who, in their capacity as individuals, have a lawsuit against the administration for denying them access to ICE facilities. I’m not party to that lawsuit, but certainly have shared my experience with them, should it be helpful.

What are you seeing at ICE detention facilities that has the Trump administration so worried?

In the facility of my district, I’ve seen a steady increase in detainees since the first visit, and — every visit since — those numbers have climbed, and the staffing is not keeping pace with the individuals being detained.

That means getting access to medical care is harder. Getting access to timely meals is harder. We’re hearing some reports from folks who don’t receive their dinner meal until midnight or after.

They say they’re “trying” — and I’m using air quotes here — “trying” to get every unit outside time, which is a requirement under the guidelines for detention. But there are some units that never get actual outside time in the yard. That’s not a function of overcrowding, but a function of really troubling management.

There are women who are getting yeast infections and UTIs because they’re forced to keep wearing soiled underwear. Sometimes, when they request new underwear, they’re just given somebody else’s soiled underwear, when, under the detainee manual, they are supposed to be given four pairs of underwear and laundry is supposed to be sent out weekly, if they’re even able to do laundry weekly. That is really, really disturbing to me.

You’ve visited inside Northwest four times now. What’s the difference between a one-off visit and regular visits?

In a one-off visit, especially if you coordinate beforehand, you know you’ll get a sanitized tour. You’ll see what they want you to see. It’s easier for them to feel like they’ve checked the box of showing their member of Congress the view that is acceptable to the administration.

But this isn’t a photo opportunity for me. This is a continued effort to ensure that the human rights of individuals being detained are being met, that we know how many bodies are inside those walls, that we’re in communication with organizations who are representing individuals being detained, and that we won’t let up.

I went on the one unannounced visit so far, and this fourth time when I went, they didn’t let me in the facility beyond just the foyer. I want to know what I would have seen if they let me in on that unannounced, unsanitized visit.

Like, what would the kitchen have looked like? How many people would have said that they had gotten outside recently? What’s the capacity in the medical unit? How many folks are actually on staff right now over the weekend? So we’ll keep coming back.

You’ve made it a point to call out members like Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who recently said that her downtime is watching YouTube videos of people being detained in immigration courts.

It’s disgusting.

What does her giddy reaction to Trump’s roundup say about the Republican leadership enabling and actively supporting his anti-immigrant policies?

Yeah, it makes it really hard for me to believe that this is about public safety and about making the immigration system work in the way that it is supposed to for the benefit of all of us.

Celebrating in cruelty and using the detention of human beings as entertainment speaks to a really, really horrifying reality, which is that this isn’t about a system that keeps us all safe. This is about an attack on immigrants, and shows us that this administration and those celebrating it have no moral compass.

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The Trump administration’s antipathy to trans incarcerated people is well known. Have your visits revealed news of any trans immigrants in detention or anything about their treatment?

Not yet. And I haven’t heard any reports from any of the organizations that we work with that that is something on their radar. But obviously we’ll continue to work closely with folks who are representing detainees. We get outreach from family members and attorneys of folks being detained, and certainly would advocate for the human rights of all individuals during their detention and incarceration.

In July, a gay detainee from Venezuela, Andry Hernández Romero, was released to his home country, which he fled for asylum in the U.S. last year. He was already in detention waiting for his asylum claim to be processed when Trump came to office, and was interviewed by the new immigration regime and accused of having gang tattoos and being a violent criminal, when there was no evidence — besides the mischaracterized tattoos — that he was. How is his treatment emblematic of the Trump administration’s approach to all immigrants in this massive sweep?

This is a real example of how we are facing intersectional challenges. Those community members who are both LGBTQ and immigrants are under increased scrutiny and risk.

We’re seeing the Trump administration use the Justice Department and FBI and Immigration and ICE and Homeland Security — and the Bureau of Land Management — to target individuals. Anyone who is an enemy of this administration, their values, and their goals is under attack.

In Washington State, we saw a farm worker organizer get targeted because he’s someone who organized and spoke out, and was used as an example. They’re trying to silence people, and they’re trying to erase LGBTQ folks and immigrants from our communities, and we won’t let them.

Members of detainee advocacy group La Resistencia accompanied you to Northwest on your visit in June, where they held a banner reading, “The time to free them all is now.” They said detainees were being treated like animals. Do you agree with that characterization?

I think the treatment inside the detention facility is really atrocious. And it’s my job to make sure that we are highlighting that treatment, that we’re highlighting the truth and we’re not letting this administration sweep it under the rug. It’s why I’ve talked about underwear so much more than I ever thought I would (laughing). And in fact, while I was in the facility in June, I asked every official on the tour with me how many times a week they changed their underwear.

Yeah, happy to stand side by side with La Resistencia to work for the fairer treatment of individuals within those walls.

I think you mentioned one woman had an epileptic seizure for 20 minutes. Could you elaborate on that?

Yeah, this was a story I heard from someone I met with and traveled with there. She said she watched someone in her pod have a seizure, and she herself had a family member with epilepsy, so knew what she was looking for, and the guards did not seem to take that instance seriously.

Not only are folks having to wait in line and not always getting proactive medical care when they’re seeking it out, but emergencies — actual emergencies — are not responded to.

In DHS’s dismissive response to your last visit, Assistant Secretary McLaughlin cited Trump’s Article II authority to bar your entry and flout the will of Congress. If he can do that at detention centers with immigrants, where else can he do it? Who else can he detain and/or deport? Where does it stop?

Those are really good questions. I don’t know that there is a stopping point there. This administration is coming for all of us that disagree with them, that don’t fit into their ideals for what it means to be American.

And I’ll say — this hasn’t happened to me — but some of my colleagues have reported that their visits to VA (Veterans Affairs) facilities have been canceled or denied. We’ve also heard from local leadership at other federal agencies, like parks or the Forest Service, that earlier were able to speak candidly with member offices and are no longer able to have such candid conversations. They’re attempting to shut us out of our oversight authority at every federal agency.

What I’ll say is, regardless of crimes folks have committed or their status, everyone deserves to be treated like a human being. Everyone deserves to access healthcare and to have food on time and to have clean underwear to wear. And I would advocate for the same things in state or federal prison as in this detention center.

But I want to underscore that this is civil detention. It’s not a criminal detention facility, and when Trump said he was going after ‘the worst of the worst,’ I think folks believed him. But now what we’re seeing is he’s going after anyone he believes to be an enemy or opposed to his agenda, and we won’t let them do that without pressure and oversight and shining a big spotlight on the truth.

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