For decades, detaining immigrant families who are in the country illegally has been a contentious enforcement tactic. Critics of “family detention” have said young children suffer in confinement. Proponents say that locking families up while they await likely deportation sends a stark message about the consequences of entering the United States illegally.
Now, after falling out of use under the Biden administration, family detention is being resurrected by President Trump, as his administration marches forward on its promise to crack down on immigrants.
Families have begun to arrive in recent days at a detention facility in South Texas, and immigration lawyers are expecting more to be brought in the coming days. A second detention center, also in South Texas, is being prepared for families.
Each of the facilities is being set up to hold thousands of people. At one site, lawyers say, multiple families are being detained in rooms with four to eight bunk beds and shared bathroom facilities.
Family detention was used during the previous Trump administration and during the Obama administration, and children were provided some medical care and some educational instruction. Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, said the same services would be offered at the reopened facilities.
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Most of those families previously detained were Central Americans who had recently crossed the southern border, and many were expected to be swiftly deported, unless they sought asylum and expressed credible fear of returning to their home countries.
With the border now quiet and illegal crossings notably low, immigration enforcement has shifted to the interior of the country to make good on the Trump administration’s pledge to carry out mass deportations.
That has led to arrests of people with established ties to communities, who had been working or going to school before their families were taken into federal custody. And some of them are bound for the newly reopened detention center in Karnes, Texas, and the soon-to-be-reopened detention center in Dilley, Texas, both south of San Antonio.
Families crossing illegally into the United States with young children have long presented particularly thorny legal and political challenges for the White House and the federal government because minors are guaranteed special protections.
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When he first took office in 2017, Trump moved quickly and aggressively to try to curb border crossings, and many arrivals were families. But after his administration began separating migrant children from their parents, the public outcry was so loud that the White House ultimately halted the practice.
Now, back for another term, Trump and his advisers have made it clear that they plan to make family migration a key target, and resuming detentions is an effort to discourage families from seeking to enter the United States.
Tom Homan, the border czar, has said that family detention must be reinstated. He has also indicated that the administration would go to court to challenge a long-standing accord that limits how long migrant children can be detained.
Asked if she was personally comfortable with the practice of family detention, Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, suggested families had the option to return home to their countries if they did not want to be detained. “We’ve set up a system and a website where people who are here illegally right now can register, and they can choose to go home on their own and keep their families united,” she told CBS News this month.
Many human rights organizations and religious groups see family detention as inhumane and ineffective. Immigration lawyers point to a lengthy history of litigation over due process violations, insufficient medical care, and sexual abuse allegations at the facilities. Officials have said that in many cases families were detained for less than two weeks at the facilities when they were last open; immigration lawyers say the lengths of detention varied, and some families were held for months.
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The two family detention centers in Texas are being run by private prison companies that contracted with US Customs and Immigration Enforcement. The site in Dilley, which is operated by CoreCivic, can hold up 2,400 people. The other, a 1,328-bed facility in Karnes, is managed by the GEO Group.
The Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, an organization based in Texas, said its lawyers found more than a dozen families at the Karnes facility, including both recent border crossers and people swept up in enforcement operations in cities. The immigrants had been in the United States anywhere from three weeks to 10 years and were from several countries, including Angola, Brazil, Colombia, Iran, Romania, and Russia, according to the organization.
A Venezuelan family with two children, 6 and 8, were among the first sent to Karnes after it opened this month. After living in Ohio for nearly two years, they had decided to immigrate to Canada when Trump returned to office, said their lawyer, Laura Flores-Dixit, managing attorney at American Gateways, a legal advocacy group.
On crossing the northern border, the family was intercepted by Canadian officials and returned to the United States. They were held for 20 days at a border facility in Buffalo, she said, before being transferred to the detention center in Texas.
Flores-Dixit said it was unconscionable that a family trying to leave the United States was being subjected to lengthy detention with young children. “Detaining children is never a humane solution,” she said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.