Kristi Noem's new bid to block Congress from ICE centers gets judicial smackdown

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's latest legal argument for blocking Democratic members of Congress from unscheduled inspections of immigration detention facilities just got rejected by a federal court.

In a new order released on Monday, U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb ruled in favor of 13 representatives who sued Immigration and Customs Enforcement after they were denied access to detention facilities.

Rules put in place by congressional appropriations bills have mandated that members have the right to inspect any facility at any time. However, last year, DHS repeatedly attempted to roll this back by fiat and required a week's notice to inspect facilities, which, if it became the standard, would give DHS time to conceal any wrongdoing.

During last year's federal government shutdown, Noem argued that the congressional requirement no longer applied because they were not receiving funding. More recently, she has attempted the same tactic after Democrats refused to sign onto continuing DHS funding without reforms to federal immigration enforcement — which has caused a DHS-localized shutdown that is still ongoing — and argued that the policy will be enforced specifically with money from Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill Act" from last year.

In Cobb's ruling, this isn't allowed.

"Given the restrictions on OBBBA funding and the fact that the Office of the Secretary is funded through the annual appropriations process, the Court finds on this record that the logical conclusion is not that the Office of the Secretary was using OBBBA funds, but that it was acting in an excepted status while the February 2 memorandum was issued and working pursuant to the lapsed appropriation," wrote Cobb. "But as Defendants previously acknowledged in this litigation, an agency that continues work on excepted functions during a lapse in appropriations is not simply working with a blank check, legally or financially."

The ruling ultimately suspended changes to the inspection regulation, as a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.