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Last week, ICE released its own inspection report on Camp East Montana, the detention facility in Texas that has become a symbol of the administration’s overfunded, overcrowded, underregulated mass detention project — where prior reporting revealed that staff bet on which detainee might be next to die by suicide. The new findings were not leaked by advocates or surfaced by investigative reporters. They came from the agency itself: 49 failures in medical care, disease control, and oversight; undocumented uses of force; inadequate sexual assault response. The federal government’s own auditors documented the suffering, and the federal government will do nothing about it.

But while Washington absorbs the daily torrent of executive orders, social media provocations, and congressional paralysis, something significant is happening at a different level of American government. States are moving — aggressively, creatively, and increasingly together — to impose accountability on a detention system explicitly designed to avoid it.

The scale of what’s been built is staggering. Nearly 70,000 people are detained, an increase of over 70% from the end of the Biden administration. Children allegedly denied medical treatment, access to drinkable water and hygiene supplies, subjected to sleep deprivation. Rampant allegations of overcrowding and sexual assaults across facilities. Deaths in ICE custody hit a two-decade high in 2025 — even as ICE detention facility inspections dropped by more than 36%  — and are on pace this year to surpass that record. More people, fewer inspectors, and a private detention industry gleefully profiting from every literal body behind bars.

States are not going to stand by.

For generations, liberals have been ambivalent about state-level power – wary of the other “f........

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