For decades, detaining undocumented immigrant families 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 crackdown 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 readied 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 spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said the same services would be offered at the reopened facilities.
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.
When he first took office in 2017, Mr. 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, Mr. Trump and his advisers have made 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.
Thomas D. 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 longstanding 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 at the facilities less when they were last open; immigration lawyers say the length of detention varied, and some families were held for months.
Leecia Welch, a children’s rights lawyer, has visited detention centers for years to ensure that the government is complying with its legal obligation to properly care for children.
“I have talked to hundreds of children in detention, and their stories still haunt me,” said Ms. Welch. “They have shared that they rarely go outside and see the sun, that they’re cold, don’t have toys and are left in filthy clothing.”
The two family detention centers in Texas are being run by private prison companies that contracted with U.S. 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, or Raices, 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 U.S. 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 Raices.
A Venezuelan family with two children, 6 and 8, were among the first sent to Karnes after it opened earlier this month. After living in Ohio for nearly two years, they had decided to emigrate to Canada when Mr. 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.
Ms. Flores-Dixit said that 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.
Family detention has faced legal obstacles under both Republican and Democratic administrations. The University of Texas at Austin School of Law and the American Civil Liberties Union filed some of the earliest lawsuits against the practice after former President George W. Bush, a Republican, in 2006 opened a family detention center in Hutto, Texas, northeast of Austin.
Former President Barack Obama, a Democrat, then restarted the practice in the fall of 2014 on a much larger scale, amid a surge in families crossing the border after fleeing gang violence. He opened the facilities in Karnes and Dilley and another in Artesia, N.M. Within months, as a result of widespread backlash and criticism over due process delays, federal immigration officials closed the facility in Artesia. All three were used under the Trump administration, though legal challenges limited the time that families were confined.
After President Biden took office in 2017, promising a humane approach to immigration, his administration began releasing families from detention facilities. But as officials grappled with a rise in migrant families fleeing authoritarian governments and poverty, the Biden administration weighed reinstating the practice in 2023. That drew sharp criticism and was ultimately not carried out.
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
