What oversight mechanisms has GAO recommended for 287(g) agreements, and have they been implemented?
Executive summary
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has repeatedly recommended that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) strengthen planning and oversight of 287(g) agreements by building clear performance goals and measures, ensuring consistent eligibility and resource assessments, and creating oversight mechanisms for newer program models; GAO found ICE had not implemented these safeguards across the board at the time of its review [1]. Subsequent public materials track recommendation status but do not show comprehensive, agency-wide adoption of the specific oversight structures GAO sought, and independent advocates warn that rapid program expansion risks outpacing transparency and controls [1] [2] [3].
1. GAO’s core recommended oversight fixes — what the watchdog demanded
GAO’s 2021 review of 287(g) urged three central reforms: establish program-wide performance goals and measurable indicators to assess activities (for example, training compliance and partner performance), adopt consistent eligibility and resource-assessment procedures when approving state and local partners, and institute effective oversight mechanisms for newer program models rather than relying solely on prior inspection approaches designed for older models [1]. GAO’s earlier work in 2009 similarly emphasized the need for better controls over 287(g) arrangements, framing these recommendations as recurring governance gaps rather than one-off critiques [4].
2. The specific implementation gaps GAO documented
In its assessment, GAO found ICE had some policies for managing partner agreements and used inspections and complaint reviews for Joint Enforcement Model participants, but lacked performance goals covering all program activities and had no comparable oversight mechanism tailored to ICE’s newer Warrant Service Officer (WSO) model; GAO highlighted missing measures such as the percentage of partners meeting annual training requirements [1]. In short, ICE’s oversight was uneven: structured where legacy models applied, absent or inadequate where newer execution models had emerged [1].
3. Have the GAO recommendations been implemented? Short answer: not fully
Public GAO tracking and DHS/ICE documentation indicate these recommendations remain active areas of oversight and follow-up, but available sources show no evidence that ICE has fully implemented a comprehensive package of performance goals, standardized eligibility/resource assessments, and a tailored oversight mechanism for the WSO model across the program [2] [1]. GAO’s own framing—recommending ICE “can further enhance” planning and oversight—signals partial steps rather than completed reform [1].
4. Political momentum and practical friction — why implementation lags
The push to revive and rapidly expand 287(g) under recent administrations creates political pressure to deploy agreements quickly, a dynamic that independent groups say has outpaced transparency and oversight; advocates and watchdogs have filed FOIA requests and flagged missing public access to guidance and contract documents, suggesting institutional capacity and priority conflicts complicate GAO-style fixes [5] [3]. That political context implies an implicit agenda favoring expansion that can deprioritize the slower work of building standardized performance measures and monitoring systems [3] [5].
5. Alternative perspectives and what remains uncertain
ICE and its defenders can argue that existing inspection-based oversight for older models and operational urgency justify current approaches, and GAO’s recommendations represent aspirational governance improvements rather than operational necessities; however, publicly available GAO and DHS tracking documents do not show full adoption of GAO’s recommended metrics and the distinct WSO oversight mechanism, and there is limited public evidence documenting ICE’s substantive remediation steps beyond incremental tracking [1] [2]. Reporting is constrained by the absence of contemporaneous ICE-published rule changes or a single public roadmap that maps each GAO recommendation to completed actions, so definitive statements about full implementation cannot be made from the available sources [2].
6. Bottom line — oversight recommendations remain adopted in principle but not fully realized in practice
GAO set out clear, concrete oversight mechanisms — program-wide performance goals and measures, standardized eligibility/resource assessments, and a dedicated oversight regime for newer program models — and found these were not fully in place when it reviewed ICE’s 287(g) operations [1]. Subsequent public tracking confirms continued oversight interest and partial activity, but available documents and advocacy reporting indicate the GAO-recommended framework has not been comprehensively implemented across all 287(g) participants as of the latest public materials examined [2] [3].