Houston, Texas — The Trump administration is reviving the controversial practice of detaining migrant families with children in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, the latest front in its effort to carry out a deportation effort the president has promised will be the largest in U.S. history.
ICE on Thursday was detaining the first group of migrant parents and children in a detention facility in Texas designed to hold families with minors, according to an internal government report obtained by CBS News. The group includes three children, the report shows.
Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said the migrants have deportation orders and confirmed the Trump administration is refitting two Texas immigration detention centers to hold families who are in the U.S. illegally.
“We aren’t going to ignore the rule of law,” McLaughlin told CBS News.
The Karnes detention facility is located in Karnes City, Texas, a small town east of San Antonio. The other ICE detention center equipped to house families with minor children is located in Dilley, Texas, another small town south of San Antonio. The Biden administration used those sites to detain migrant adults.
The move by the Trump administration reverses a policy change by the Biden administration, which discontinued the long-term detention of migrant families. It’s a practice that was first implemented on a large-scale by the Obama administration, in an attempt to discourage families from crossing the southern border illegally.
Advocates and child welfare experts have long denounced family detention, saying it is harmful to children and their psychological well-being. A 2016 report commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security called for family immigration to be phased out.
“There is no safe way to detain families and no legitimate justification for this inhumane practice,” said Neha Desai, an attorney at the California-based National Center of Youth Law representing migrant children in a federal court case.
The U.S. government has long faced legal, humanitarian and operational challenges when processing migrant parents and children who are in the country without legal permission. In 2015, for example, a federal judge ruled that the government should generally not hold migrant children for longer than 20 days, dramatically limiting family detention in the immigration context.
The revival of family detention is the latest step taken by the Trump administration to expand ICE’s capabilities to arrest, detain and deport migrants who are in the U.S. illegally.
Officials at ICE have been under tremendous pressure from top Trump administration officials to ramp up arrests and deportations.
Unlike its efforts to seal off the U.S.-Mexico border, which have yielded a 25-year low in illegal crossings, the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign in the interior of the country has run into operational obstacles.
ICE’s detention capacity, for example, has been depleted. As of Thursday, the agency’s detention system was at 120% capacity, holding more than 46,000 migrants, despite only having 38,000 beds on paper, internal government statistics show.
