Jon Ossoff

Yeah, so most of the oversight in Congress is like one party investigating the other party's efforts.

And, you know, there's a role for that in ensuring that there's accountability, right?

Like you have to have that kind of hostile exchange in order to ensure that things are brought into the public light and debated no matter who's in power.

But what gets neglected is oversight that's essential for principled moral reasons, human rights reasons, but for which there's no obvious political reward.

You know, like there's not a lot of political upside to investigating the abuse of federal inmates.

And so we have this federal prison system where there's this ongoing multi-decade human rights crisis that gets very little attention from Congress.

You know, so I've led investigations of corruption and civil rights abuses in federal prisons.

of uncounted deaths in state and local prisons and jails.

One investigation from two or three years ago, it was a bipartisan investigation where the ranking member on the Subcommittee of LA was Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, not exactly a fellow traveler ideologically, right?

But I got him to work with me on an investigation into an ICE detention facility in Georgia where we found, and it was a bipartisan finding,

that multiple female immigration detainees at this facility had been subjected to unnecessary, invasive, and in some cases, non-consensual gynecological surgical procedures while in US detention.

Surgical procedures?

Surgical procedures.

Jesus Christ.

So I say all that to say that my efforts to investigate human rights abuses in prisons, jails, and detention facilities is not new.

This year, I opened a new inquiry anticipating that there would be an even higher level of brutality by this administration in these facilities.

Uh, and what we had found through July was more than 500 credible reports of human rights abuses in DHS detention facilities, including of pregnant women, children, some of whom were us citizens.

And the last thing I'll just say about this, because I think it just speaks to like the character of this administration is I released that report within like 90 minutes.

The administration just issued a blanket denial and basically said everything is fine in all of our facilities.

And this is all lies.