Immigration

Government Accountability Project has a history of working with immigration whistleblowers who have spoken up to issue warnings and expose serious abuses and threats of harm from immigration policies, practices, and conditions in the United States.  Our former and current clients include:

• Cathy Harris, a former senior inspector for the U.S. Customs Service (USCS) at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta, Georgia, who alerted us to the USCS discriminatory practice of racial profiling in 1999.
• Scott Allen and Pamela McPherson, the medical and mental health subject matter experts for the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL), who came to us in 2018 to support them in raising their ongoing concerns of harms to children in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention.
• Ellen Gallagher, a former policy adviser at CRCL and current employee at the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General who raised concerns about ICE’s widespread, systemic use of solitary confinement on mentally ill and medically vulnerable adult detainees in 2019.
• Asylum Officer Douglas Stephens and USCIS union president Michael Knowles who early on alerted us to the illegal and dangerous effects of the Migrant Protection Protocols (or “Remain in Mexico” program) shortly after its implementation in 2019.
• Josiah “Jody” Rich, expert in detention health and subject matter expert for CRCL, who along with colleague Dr. Scott Allen warned about the risk to immigrants, workers, and the public from the spread of COVID-19 in ICE detention.
• The Anonymous Richwood Whistleblowers, all current or former detention officers at the Richwood Correctional Center, an ICE facility in Monroe, Louisiana, who also raised concerns about unsafe practices related to the spread of COVID-19 in ICE detention.
• Dawn Wooten, a nurse who worked at the Irwin County Detention Center, an ICE facility in Ocilla, Georgia, whose disclosures of medical misconduct, including hysterectomies performed on women without informed consent, went viral in 2020.
• Laurie Elkin and Justin Mulaire, federal employees assigned to help unaccompanied children at the Fort Bliss Emergency Influx Site in Texas, who witnessed atrocious mismanagement with harmful consequences to the medical and mental health needs of traumatized children in Health and Human Services (HHS) detention.

Government Accountability Project is proud to represent immigration whistleblowers, who help hold our immigration system accountable to the public and to high standards of human rights. If you are an employee or contractor in the U.S. immigration system and are considering blowing the whistle, fill out our intake form here.