View Rule

Overall Description of Deadline: VAWA Reauthorization Act

Statement of Need: The purpose of this rulemaking is to finalize regulations setting standards to prevent, detect, and respond to sexual abuse in Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confinement facilities. The standards build on current U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Performance Based National Detention Standards (PBNDS) and other DHS detention policies. Also, this rulemaking is a response to the President's May 17, 2012 Memorandum, "Implementing the Prison Rape Elimination Act," which directs all agencies with Federal confinement facilities to propose rules or procedures setting standards to prevent, detect, and respond to sexual abuse in confinement facilities. In addition, the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013 requires DHS to publish a final rule adopting national standards for the detection, prevention, reduction, and punishment of rape and sexual assault in immigration detention and holding facilities. See Public Law 113-4 (Mar. 7, 2013).

Anticipated Costs and Benefits: The final rule will impose standards to prevent, detect, and respond to sexual abuse and assault in DHS confinement facilities. These facilities consist of immigration detention facilities and holding facilities. The standards will impose new requirements for some facilities and codify current requirements for other facilities. Such standards will require Federal, State, and local agencies, as well as private entities that operate confinement facilities, to incur costs in implementing and complying with those standards. The primary benefit of the rule will be improvements to the prevention, detection, and response to sexual abuse and assault. DHS will follow DOJ methodology for monetizing the value of preventing sexual abuse incidents, which includes consideration for costs of medical and mental health care treatment as well as pain, suffering, and diminished quality of life, among other factors. DHS will use a break-even analysis to assess the trade-off between the beneficial effects of the regulation and the costs of implementing the rule. The break-even analysis uses the monetized estimates of incidents avoided to determine the degree to which the regulation must reduce the annual incidence of sexual abuse for the costs of compliance to break even with the monetized benefits of the standards. This does not include non-monetizable benefits of sexual abuse avoidance. The rule will include a Regulatory Impact Assessment.