The Immigrant Families Jailed in Texas

In late March, Leecia Welch, a deputy litigation director at Children’s Rights, a legal nonprofit that represents children in government custody, visited a family jail in Texas that the Trump Administration had recently reopened. The immigrant children Welch met were hungry, sleep-deprived, and bored. “All around them people are crying, fainting, and having panic attacks due to the stress,” Welch said. She’s interviewed hundreds of kids who’ve been detained after crossing the border. In Texas, though, she had an unusual experience—some of the children she met weren’t recent migrants. They had been in the country for years.

For decades, Presidents from both parties have detained migrants with their children. Processing these families—verifying their identities, interviewing them about their asylum claims, and so on—takes time, and the government has claimed that it needs to hold them in ICE detention centers when Border Patrol gets too overwhelmed. But now immigrant advocates fear ICE will fill its family detention centers by raiding cities in the interior. Today, in Texas, however, one detained family has been in the United States for a decade, according to lawyers representing people in the facility; their kids have gone through elementary school. While travelling on a highway near the southern border in February, they were stopped at a Customs and Border Protection checkpoint, about fifty miles from the border itself. Another undocumented family, fearing Donald Trump’s crackdown, tried to flee the U.S. through the northern border to seek asylum in Canada. Canadian authorities handed them over to C.B.P., and the family was flown to jail in Texas. In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul assailed ICE for arresting a mother and her three children, from the village of Sackets Harbor, and sending them to a Texas detention center. (The family has since been released.) Under the new Trump Administration, ICE is jailing not just families encountered at the border but also families who have been here for years.

Javier Hidalgo, the legal director of RAICES, a major immigration legal-services nonprofit in Texas, is overseeing the lawyers representing the newly detained families. Hidalgo told me he’s never bought the argument that the government needs to keep children in jail, even when huge numbers of people cross the border. “There never really is a need to detain children,” Hidalgo said. “But any argument that they could make—as far as saying there’s a big influx of families, and they need to utilize family detention to process them—doesn’t hold water in this moment.” Not only are some of the families longtime residents but, for the past year, the border has been quiet. In February, Border Patrol encountered only about a thousand people travelling with families, down from more than sixty-five thousand in February of last year.

The Biden Administration largely ended family detention. When the Trump Administration decided to bring it back, it at first used two detention centers in the dusty ranchlands of South Texas: one, in the city of Karnes, can hold about thirteen hundred people; the other, in the town of Dilley, can hold twenty-four hundred. ICE has called these jails “family residential centers,” and, when I stood outside them during the day, they didn’t appear particularly sinister—there were no guard towers or razor wire. But, at night, an array of floodlights gave away the act: detainees aren’t allowed to leave. In March, the Administration sent all the newly arrested families to Karnes, before suddenly transporting them all to the Dilley facility. The reasons for these moves are unclear; ICE did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Hidalgo, like other attorneys I spoke to, worried about how many families the Administration plans to arrest. The government intends to use a tent village in Fort Bliss, a city-size military base outside El Paso, where, the Times has reported, the Administration is considering holding up to ten thousand detainees. From recent precedent, there’s reason to believe it will hold families. After the Taliban reconquered Afghanistan, in 2021, the Biden Administration kept almost thirty thousand Afghan refugees, including children, on military bases for months at a time. Just as Biden used these bases to bring tens of thousands of families into the country, Trump could now use the bases to detain and remove them.

Welch, the children’s-rights lawyer, told me that the worst site visit of her career was at Fort Bliss. In 2021, as the number of unaccompanied minors crossing the border surged, the government put up tents at Fort Bliss—an “emergency intake center.” Welch told me she still remembers the smell when she walked into one of the white tents, which held around nine hundred boys—a deep-set human odor. There were rows and rows of bunk-bed cots. Dirt blew into the tent from the desert, and the wind whipped against the tent flaps. “To say it was soul-crushing is understatement,” Welch said. She and her colleagues heard about children cutting themselves; she saw others in serious mental distress. One girl told her she was afraid that the cot above her would collapse on her while she slept. Another child told the lawyers, “You spend the day in bed, surrounded by thousands of kids, with thousands of thoughts racing through your head.”

In 1985, lawyers sued the federal government on behalf of a group of migrant children, arguing that it should be illegal to jail them. The named plaintiff was Jenny Lisette Flores, a fifteen-year-old girl who had fled civil war in El Salvador. After she was arrested at the border, Flores spent months in a detention center—where guards strip-searched her—along with both male and female adults. The case, Flores v. Reno, was battled in the courts until 1997, when the parties reached a settlement: the government would introduce standards insuring that unaccompanied minors wouldn’t be kept in unsafe detention centers indefinitely. But, because the government would need time to craft new rules and infrastructure, the court would temporarily supervise the detention of minors.

Three decades later, the counsel remains in effect—and negotiation and litigation still play a crucial role in protecting migrant children’s rights. Welch herself has been deeply involved with the Flores counsel team for the past eight years. In 2014, during the Central American migration crisis, the Obama Administration kept thousands of families in detention centers, including the sites in Karnes and Dilley, some for months at a time, arguing that Flores protections applied only to unaccompanied minors. The Flores counsel filed a motion to enforce the settlement, and eventually the court found a compromise: the government could detain families for a “reasonable” amount of time—which was further defined as a maximum of twenty days—as it processed their cases. According to pediatricians who have visited detention centers, that’s plenty of time to irrevocably damage children. “Even brief detention can cause psychological trauma and induce long-term mental health risks,” the American Academy of Pediatrics said in a policy statement, in 2017.

“It does seem that ICE recognizes the Flores protections that extend to children,” Hidalgo, the RAICES legal director, said. “But we are still worried about prolonged detention.” In the summer of 2020, I spoke on the phone with a Salvadoran mother locked up in Dilley, whom I’ll call Maritza. She told me that she and her eight-year-old son had been detained for nine months—far, far longer than the twenty days that Flores permitted. In May, Maritza explained, ICE agents had come to the detention center and placed forms before her and the other mothers. Maritza alleged that the agents gave her a choice: she could leave the form unsigned and be separated from her son, or she could sign and waive her son’s rights to not be held indefinitely. ICE vehemently denied this allegation, claiming that mothers were simply offered the option to place their children with outside sponsors—who are often other family members. Maritza said she couldn’t be sure. She was only offered a form in English, a language she didn’t speak. (Last year, the Biden Administration tried to partially terminate the Flores settlement and instead apply its own regulations through the Department of Health and Human Services. A judge agreed to terminate court supervision for unaccompanied minors in H.H.S. custody, but kept it in place for children and families in C.B.P. and ICE detention centers.)

Welch said she has a few theories about why Trump is moving so aggressively to jail families. “Perhaps it is because they have hit a wall deporting so-called criminals, so now they are going after children and their families in an effort to bump up their deportation statistics,” she said. She also noted that there’s money to be made in detaining families: private-prison companies stand to earn tens of millions each year. Welch also knows that bringing pain to immigrant families might be a reason unto itself. “It is awful to think that our country could be inflicting this kind of treatment on innocent children to deter families from seeking asylum, but it would not be the first time,” she said. “Whatever the reason, I have faith that the American people will not stand for imprisoning children indefinitely.” ♦