Alan Gomez:

Well, that's one of the major problems that we found in this system.

ICE uses either five or six different methods to inspect these facilities, all of which the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general has said are deficient. They don't do a good enough job of either analyzing the conditions that are in these facilities, or even some of the methods that they use that might be up to par just aren't done enough.

And so what you have are these situations where facilities, they will check for certain things, but we will look — we have looked at inspection reports where they will show dozens of cases of sexual assault, of physical force against detainees, and they get a passing grade and laudatory comments from inspectors.

And one of the problems there that we found is that the majority — that most of the inspections that are done are announced ahead of time. We have spoken with the people who do the inspections who say that unannounced inspections would probably be better.

Some of the private companies that run these facilities have said, sure, we will take that. We will take on unannounced visits. We're happy. We're confident we can do that. But it's ICE that pushes back. They say that these unannounced inspections might cause a — quote — "disruption 'to the facilities, and that they just want to ensure that the proper people that they need to talk to are there on the day that they visit.

So there's a lot of questions about that inspection process that we found throughout this investigation.