The Justice Department’s inspector general found a New Hampshire federal prison running at half its rated population yet short of officers, medical staff and psychologists after it took on immigration detainees. The arrangement was sold as spare capacity. The report shows the binding limit was never beds. It was people.
When the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) agreed in February 2025 to hold Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees in its institutions, the case for it was simple: the federal prison system had empty cells, ICE needed beds, and the Department of Homeland Security would pay the bill. Twenty months later, the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has published a detailed look inside one of those prisons. Its inspection of Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Berlin, released on October 15, 2026, describes an institution that had room to spare and almost nobody to spare.
On the first day of the unannounced inspection, January 12, 2026, FCI Berlin held 600 BOP inmates in its medium-security prison, 52 in its minimum-security camp, and 194 ICE detainees. That is 846 people in a complex rated for 1,660, about 51 percent of capacity. Yet only 82 of its 120 correctional officer positions were filled, and its psychology department had two of five positions filled, neither by a licensed psychologist. The inspectors’ conclusion was blunt: “gaps in critical staffing positions created significant operational strain and affected conditions of confinement.”
What the coverage missed
The report drew modest attention, most of it regional. New Hampshire Public Radio, writing for the New England News Collaborative, summarized the staffing problems, the medical delays and the broken kitchen equipment, and noted that the warden did not respond to a request for comment. That account is accurate as far as it goes. What it did not dwell on is the arithmetic that sits underneath every other finding.
FCI Berlin was chosen for ICE detainees, according to the report, partly because of its proximity to Boston, a regional transportation hub, and partly because of its unused capacity. But BOP headquarters told the inspectors that understaffing had already reduced the number of inmates assigned to the facility. In other words, the empty beds were empty because the prison could not staff them. Filling some of them with a second population, with its own intake rules, escort requirements and medical arrangements, did not use idle capacity. It drew on the same thin workforce that was already failing to cover the first population.
That distinction matters well beyond one prison in the North Country. Federal detention capacity is usually debated in terms of beds and dollars. The Berlin report is a case study in a third constraint, trained staff, which neither a reimbursement agreement nor an appropriation for beds can produce quickly.
Background: how federal prisons came to hold ICE detainees
The BOP and ICE signed an interagency agreement in February 2025. At a House hearing on February 26, 2025, BOP associate deputy director Kathleen Toomey told lawmakers the prison system was then holding about 700 immigration detainees at four facilities, Roll Call reported. The agreement allowed ICE to place detainees at five BOP sites: Miami, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Leavenworth in Kansas, and Berlin. Berlin had none at that point. Toomey also estimated that the bureau needed about 3,000 more correctional officers than its 20,446 authorized positions.
ICE detainees began arriving at Berlin in March 2025. Between then and the end of September 2025, the prison completed 846 ICE intakes. Detainees stayed about two months on average. Under the agreement, ICE is to reimburse the BOP “the full costs” of housing detainees, calculated per detainee, per day, and also covers overtime and temporary-duty costs tied to the detainee mission. ICE remains responsible for transport and for funding outside medical care.
The question of how to house people awaiting removal is not new. Right Side News covered the earlier version of this debate a decade ago, when the concern ran the other way: declining deportations and rising releases of criminal aliens, and proposals to shift money away from ICE. The policy has since swung toward detention. The Berlin report shows what that swing costs when it lands on an institution that was already short-handed.
Inside the report: staffing
The inspection ran from Monday, January 12, to Thursday, January 15, 2026. Overall, FCI Berlin had 222 of its 276 authorized positions filled, about 80 percent, leaving 54 vacancies. The gaps were concentrated where they hurt most:
- Correctional Services: 82 of 120 positions filled (68 percent).
- Health Services: 11 of 16 positions filled (69 percent).
- Psychology Services: 2 of 5 positions filled, and neither of the two employees was a licensed psychologist.
The bureau’s own staffing projections, cited in the report, show that 383 employees would be needed to run Berlin safely at its rated capacity. That is 107 more than the prison is authorized to employ and 161 more than were on board during the inspection. To hold on to the staff it had, the institution paid about $2.4 million in retention bonuses between January 2025 and January 2026. It filled gaps with temporary-duty officers rotated in from other prisons, with overtime, and with “augmentation,” the BOP’s term for pulling non-custody employees such as teachers into correctional officer posts. The acting warden identified “understaffing as the biggest challenge to managing the institution.”
The detainee mission added work that a bed count does not capture. Detainees live in dedicated housing units, and BOP inmates’ movement is restricted whenever detainees leave those units, so that the two populations stay apart. Officers escort detainees to recreation, visits and medical appointments. Meals are delivered to detainee units rather than served in the dining hall, which the report describes as time-consuming. Because ICE detainees turn over quickly, intake and discharge processing became a constant load. And because detainees may arrive with what the report calls “incomplete or inaccurate medical and criminal histories,” staff run their own intake examinations and security checks.
Medical care: weeks became months
BOP policy calls for routine sick-call requests to be addressed within 14 days. In a sample of 10 requests from January 2026, the inspectors found an average of nearly two months between the request and the visit with a provider. One inmate was not seen for more than six months. Of 134 outside medical appointments in the prior year, 98, or 73 percent, took place after the target date, with an average delay of 53 days.
For ICE detainees, outside care is ICE’s responsibility, and the numbers are starker. From March 2025 through January 2026, BOP clinicians ordered 13 outside medical referrals for detainees. ICE approved two.
U.S. Public Health Service clinicians assigned to detainee care were available on weekdays only, leaving BOP’s already short Health Services staff to cover detainees’ needs at other times. The inspectors also observed a Public Health Service provider using detainees to translate medical instructions for other detainees, a practice the report says violated both the interagency agreement and expectations in current BOP policy. Local BOP officials reported periodic difficulty “in reaching and coordinating with regional ICE counterparts.”
Security: rounds not walked, contraband in the mail
Correctional officers are required to make regular rounds of housing units. Reviewing 128 hours of camera footage from three days, the inspectors found that officers did not conduct any rounds in two general population housing units during overnight periods, including one unit housing ICE detainees. More than 20 percent of the prison’s 289 cameras did not retain footage for the 14 days the bureau requires.
Contraband was a persistent problem. In the year before the inspection, employees stopped 74 smuggling attempts, most of them drugs hidden in inmate mail, including two involving ICE detainees. Several employees needed medical attention after exposure to illicit drugs, and one was treated with naloxone for opioid overexposure. The prison’s pallet x-ray machine, used to screen large deliveries, had been out of service for almost three years. BOP policy requires random pat searches of at least 30 employees a month, spread across shifts. Fewer than 30 were searched in 2 of the 12 months reviewed, and searches on evening shifts were absent.
The report also found that FCI Berlin tracked only sexual misconduct allegations that merited a full investigation, so the total number of allegations could not be determined. The institution changed that practice in March 2026. Separately, BOP sexual abuse reporting posters in ICE housing units had been replaced with ICE posters at ICE’s request. The BOP’s national coordinator for Prison Rape Elimination Act compliance told inspectors that reporting information should direct detainees to BOP officials, and the bureau confirmed in September 2026 that BOP posters were back on the walls.
Aging systems, unfunded repairs
FCI Berlin has requested more than $17 million from BOP headquarters for major repairs, about $13 million of it to replace the heating loop that carries water from the boiler. The requests were unfunded at the time of the inspection. Twenty-three pieces of food service equipment needed repair or replacement, some out of service since 2020. BOP policy keeps shower water between 100 and 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Of 24 showers the inspectors tested in occupied housing units, one reached 146 degrees, and many others were too cold or broken.
The cost to the prison’s own inmates
The least visible cost fell on the BOP’s sentenced population. The report found that the augmentation of Education Department employees into correctional officer posts “created significant backlogs” in programming, and that movement restrictions designed to keep inmates and detainees apart made it harder for inmates to reach classes. Waitlists for vocational training alone exceeded 410 names. Psychology Services waitlists exceeded 1,200 names, counting inmates on more than one list.
RSN analysis: Vocational and drug-treatment programs are not amenities. They are the part of a federal sentence that is supposed to reduce the odds of a released inmate offending again, and under the First Step Act they are also a route to earned time credits. When a prison cannot run them because its teachers are standing in for absent officers, the cost shows up years later, in communities that receive less-prepared releasees. None of that appears in a per-diem reimbursement.
The other side
Several points cut against a simple reading of the report as an indictment of the ICE arrangement.
First, the staffing problem predates the detainees. The report itself records that understaffing had reduced the inmate population before ICE arrived, and the bureau’s shortfall of roughly 3,000 officers was on the record in February 2025, when Berlin held no detainees at all. Most of the failures the inspectors documented, from missed rounds to broken refrigerators, would exist without a single ICE detainee in the building.
Second, ICE pays. The agreement calls for full per-detainee, per-day reimbursement plus overtime and temporary-duty costs. Supporters of the arrangement argue that using federal space the government already owns is a better deal for taxpayers than contracting new beds at private or county facilities. The inspectors also praised the institution’s people, finding that “leadership and employees were dedicated to maintaining a safe environment,” and that required medical screenings were generally completed.
Third, the BOP did not contest the findings. According to the OIG’s summary, the bureau agreed with all eight recommendations, and the report notes repairs and procedural changes made after the inspection, including the new allegation-tracking practice and completed repairs by March 2026 to a failed heating and cooling component in an ICE housing unit.
Critics of detention make the opposite argument from the same facts. In early 2025, Senate Democrats wrote to the attorney general that the BOP had suffered “years of understaffing, inadequate resources, and crumbling infrastructure” and lacked the resources to hold immigration detainees safely, according to Roll Call. The Berlin report gives that warning some support. The report does not, however, document abuse of detainees. Its detainee findings concern missed rounds, delayed outside care and administrative lapses.
What is established, disputed and not established
Established (from the OIG report): FCI Berlin held 846 people against a rated capacity of 1,660 on January 12, 2026, including 194 ICE detainees. It had 54 vacancies, with correctional services at 68 percent of authorized strength. Sick-call and outside-appointment delays far exceeded BOP targets.
ICE approved 2 of 13 outside medical referrals for detainees over ten months. Overnight rounds were not conducted in two housing units on the days reviewed. The facility’s $17 million repair request was unfunded. The BOP agreed with all eight recommendations.
Disputed or open to interpretation: How much of the strain is attributable to the ICE mission rather than to longstanding BOP understaffing. The report documents specific added burdens, such as escorts, segregated movement and satellite meals, but does not quantify their share of the staffing deficit.
Not established: Whether ICE’s reimbursements actually cover the full cost to the BOP. The inspectors state plainly that “we did not audit BOP-ICE reimbursements.” Nor does the report establish whether the conditions at Berlin are typical of the other BOP sites holding ICE detainees, or why only 2 of the 13 outside referrals for detainees were approved. Right Side News could not locate public answers to either question.
Why this matters for immigration enforcement
RSN analysis: Supporters of stronger immigration enforcement have the most at stake in getting detention right. Detention that is underpowered becomes a liability: it invites litigation, it gives courts reasons to order releases, and it undermines public confidence in removals. Federal courts are already weighing how far the government may go in detaining people without bond, a question the Supreme Court agreed on October 1 to decide. Facilities that cannot document rounds or deliver timely medical care hand opponents ready-made evidence.
The pattern is familiar from other watchdog work this year. A Homeland Security inspector general audit found vetting errors in 40 percent of sampled Afghan evacuee files, years after warnings were first raised. In both cases, a policy was announced at scale before the agencies carrying it out had the capacity to execute it, and the shortfall surfaced only when inspectors went looking.
What accountability would look like
- An OIG or Government Accountability Office audit of BOP-ICE reimbursements across all participating facilities, testing whether ICE payments cover staffing, overtime, temporary duty and lost programming, not just per-diem housing.
- Public reporting by the BOP of detainee headcounts, staffing levels and vacancy rates at each facility that houses ICE detainees, updated quarterly.
- An explanation from ICE of why it approved 2 of 13 outside medical referrals at Berlin, and a deadline standard for responding to BOP referrals.
- A funding decision on Berlin’s $17 million repair request, including the $13 million heating loop, before another New Hampshire winter.
- Congressional oversight hearings that pair any expansion of BOP-held detention with a staffing plan, since the bureau’s own projections show a gap of 161 employees at this one prison.
- Follow-up by the OIG on all eight recommendations, with public status reporting until each is closed.
The Berlin report does not argue against holding immigration detainees in federal prisons. It argues against pretending that empty cells are the same thing as available capacity. A prison at half occupancy that cannot walk its overnight rounds is not underused. It is understaffed, and the next agreement to fill it should start from that fact.
Sources: U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, Inspection of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Federal Correctional Institution Berlin, Report 27-002, October 2026 (PDF); DOJ OIG report summary page; Roll Call, “Federal prisons holding hundreds of immigration detainees,” February 26, 2025; New England News Collaborative / NHPR, October 15, 2026.
Featured image: Aerial view of Federal Correctional Institution Berlin, New Hampshire. Federal Bureau of Prisons, public domain (U.S. government work), via Wikimedia Commons.
How this article was made: Right Side News researched and drafted this article with the help of AI tools. Sources are linked so readers can check them. Spot an error? Tell us in the comments and we will correct it.