The Trump administration is reintroducing the contentious policy of detaining migrant families with children in the custody of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This move is part of the administration’s endeavor to execute a deportation initiative that the president has pledged will be the most expansive in American history.
Recently, ICE began holding the first set of migrant parents and minors in a Texas detention facility tailored for families with children, based on an internal government report that CBS News obtained. This group includes three children, as per the report.
Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, confirmed that the migrants have deportation orders and that two Texas immigration detention centers are being reconfigured to house families residing illegally in the US. McLaughlin emphasized that the administration would not overlook the rule of law.
The Karnes detention facility is located in Karnes City, Texas, a small town to the east of San Antonio, while the other ICE detention center designed to accommodate families with children is situated in Dilley, Texas, another small town south of San Antonio. The Biden administration previously used these sites to detain adult migrants.
The Trump administration’s decision overturns a policy by the Biden administration, which terminated the long-term detention of migrant families. This practice was initially introduced on a large scale by the Obama administration, in an attempt to dissuade families from illegally crossing the southern border.
Advocates and child welfare experts have consistently criticized family detention, arguing that it adversely affects children and their psychological health. A 2016 report commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security recommended that family immigration detention should be phased out.
Neha Desai, an attorney at the National Center of Youth Law in California representing migrant children in a federal court case, stated that there is no safe method to detain families and no legitimate justification for this cruel practice.
The US government has historically faced legal, humanitarian, and operational difficulties when handling migrant parents and children in the country without legal permission. For instance, a federal judge ruled in 2015 that the government should generally not detain migrant children for more than 20 days, significantly limiting family detention in the immigration context.
The reintroduction of family detention signifies the Trump administration’s latest move to enhance ICE’s ability to arrest, detain, and deport migrants residing illegally in the US. High-ranking Trump administration officials have exerted significant pressure on ICE to increase arrests and deportations.
Unlike its efforts to seal the US-Mexico border, which resulted in a 25-year low in illegal crossings, the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign within the country has encountered operational challenges. For instance, ICE’s detention capacity has been strained, with the agency’s detention system at 120% capacity, holding over 46,000 migrants despite only having 38,000 beds on paper, as shown by internal government statistics.
