Family detention is the detention of multiple family members together in an immigration detention context. In the U.S. they are referred to as family detention camps, [1] family detention centers, [2] or family detention facilities. [3]
Families crossing the United States border without a visa or other papers demonstrating they are admissible to the country are currently subject to detention by Customs and Border Protection. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security defines only those children traveling with their parents or legal guardians as part of "family units" and all other children as "unaccompanied minors." [4] Adults traveling with children are required by Customs and Border Protection to verify their legal or biological parentage, and if they cannot, the children are deemed unaccompanied. [5] As a result, children traveling with grandparents, adult siblings, and aunts and uncles are separated and referred to the Unaccompanied Alien Children program. [4] Since 2017, the government separated some children from their parents as well under a family separation policy, although this policy was officially rescinded in June 2018. As of December 2021, under the Biden administration, family immigration detention is no longer being used. [6] [7] In March 2023 it was widely reported that the Biden administration was considering restarting the practice of detaining migrant families who cross the border illegally. [8] [9] As of October 2023, the Biden administration has not restarted this practice, opting instead to release families into the United States temporarily and "using ankle bracelets, traceable cellphones or other methods to keep track of them." [8]
In 2014 the Obama administration opened new family detention centers in the United States. At the time there was only one government-operated facility, which was located York County, Pennsylvania. [10]
In 2015, intact families were not regularly separated at the United States border. [11]
In February 2016, the designation Family Unit Aliens or FMUA was introduced. [12] The majority of families apprehended at the border were not linked to fraud according to an official within U.S. Customs and Border Protection. [13]
In July 2016, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld a lower court's decision (in July 2015, by Judge Dolly Gee) to quickly release child migrants from family detention even when accompanied by a parent. [14]
In 2017 and 2018, the number of family units (groups of at least one adult and at least one child) from Guatemala and Honduras detained by the U.S. increased, as families fled gang violence and instability in Central America. [13]
In March 2021, shortly after Joe Biden became President, ICE announced that no families were being held at the Berks County Residential Center any more, and that the detention center would no longer be used for family detention. The other two family detention centers, Dilley and Karnes, were now to be used only for holding families for short, three-day periods. [15] [16] In December 2021, Axios reported that ICE would stop engaging in family detention for the time being, and officials confirmed this. [6] [7]
Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, holds immigrant families after their initial arrest. Under departmental standards, CBP should transfer them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement within 72 hours, but in 2019, many such families are being held for weeks in CBP custody. [17] On June 13, 2019, the government reported that 4,865 members of "family units" were held by the CBP. [17]
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement contracts with several facilities to detain families with children. The General Accounting Office reports that the 3 active facilities have a combined capacity of 3,326 people. [18] Active family detention centers include:
Former family detention centers include:
Executive Order 13841, signed on June 20, 2018, instructs that, "The Secretary of Defense shall take all legally available measures to provide to the Secretary, upon request, any existing facilities available for the housing and care of alien families, and shall construct such facilities if necessary and consistent with law." [33] On June 21, the Department of Health and Human Services requested facilities to house migrant children. Pentagon spokesmen and a memorandum sent to Congress confirmed that the Department of Defense was preparing facilities at four military bases in Texas and Arkansas to house 20,000 "unaccompanied alien children." [34]
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a federal law enforcement agency under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. ICE's stated mission is to protect the United States from the cross-border crime and illegal immigration that threaten national security and public safety.
The T. Don Hutto Residential Center is a guarded, fenced-in, multi-purpose center currently used to detain non-US citizens awaiting the outcome of their immigration status. The center is located at 1001 Welch Street in the city of Taylor, Texas, within Williamson County. Formerly a medium-security state prison, it is operated by the CoreCivic under contract with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency through an ICE Intergovernmental Service Agreement (IGA) with Williamson County, Texas. In 2006, Hutto became an immigrant-detention facility detaining immigrant families. The facility was turned into a women's detention center in 2009.
Reno v. Flores, 507 U.S. 292 (1993), was a Supreme Court of the United States case that addressed the detention and release of unaccompanied minors.
The United States government holds tens of thousands of immigrants in detention under the control of Customs and Border Protection and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Immigrants are detained for unlawful entry to the United States, when their claims for asylum are received, and in the process of deportation and removal from the country. During Fiscal Year 2018, 396,448 people were booked into ICE custody: 242,778 of whom were detained by CBP and 153,670 by ICE's own enforcement operations. A daily average of 42,188 immigrants were held by ICE in that year. In addition, over twelve thousand immigrant children are housed by facilities under the supervision of the Office of Refugee Resettlement's program for Unaccompanied Alien Children. Prior to referral to these other agencies, the CBP holds immigrants at processing centers; between mid-May and mid-June 2019, it held between 14,000 and 18,000 immigrants.
The Marcelino Serna Port of Entry is a crossing of the United States–Mexico border. It opened on November 17, 2014, replacing the nearby Fabens Port of Entry. The crossing is built around the Tornillo–Guadalupe International Bridge about 1,800 feet (550 m) west of the previous two-lane Fabens–Caseta International Bridge and can accommodate vehicular, pedestrian, and commercial traffic. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facility at the crossing served as the site for the Tornillo tent city, which housed as many as 2,800 detained migrant youths from June 2018 to January 2019. As of July 2019, a 2,500-bed holding facility for adult migrants is under construction at the site.
The 2014 American immigration crisis was a surge in unaccompanied children and women from the Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA) seeking entrance to the United States in 2014. According to U.S. law, an unaccompanied alien child refers to a person under 18 years of age, who has no lawful immigration status in the U.S., and who does not have a legal guardian to provide physical custody and care.
In United States immigration enforcement, "catch and release" refers to a practice of releasing a migrant to the community while he or she awaits hearings in immigration court, as an alternative to holding them in immigration detention. The migrants whom U.S. immigration enforcement agencies have allowed to remain in the community pending immigrant hearings have been those deemed low risk, such as children, families, and those seeking asylum.
Casa Padre is a shelter for unaccompanied or separated immigrant minors in custody of the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of Health & Human Services, located in Brownsville, Texas. The site opened in March 2017, and is still housing children in 2022. The building was formerly a Walmart store. The center is run by the nonprofit group Southwest Key Programs under contract from the federal government. Casa Padre is the largest licensed childcare facility in the United States, housing approximately 1,500 youths. The former Walmart store houses boys ranging from ages 10 to 17. According to the Internal Revenue Service, the group houses approximately 5,129 immigrant children in the United States, approximately 4 percent of the unaccompanied minors in the United States today.
The United States family separation policy under the Trump administration was presented to the public as a "zero tolerance" approach intended to deter illegal immigration and to encourage tougher legislation. In some cases, families following the legal procedure to apply for asylum at official border crossings were also separated. It was officially adopted across the entire US–Mexico border from April 2018 until June 2018. Under the policy, federal authorities separated children and infants from parents or guardians with whom they had entered the US. The adults were prosecuted and held in federal jails or deported, and the children were placed under the supervision of the US Department of Health and Human Services. More than 5,500 children, including infants, were removed and hundreds have still not been reunited as of August 2022.
Protests against the Trump administration family separation policy are a reaction to the Trump administration policy of separating children from their parents or guardians who crossed the U.S. border either illegally or to request asylum, jailing the adults and locating the minors at separate facilities under the care of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Ursula is the colloquial name for the Central Processing Center, the largest U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention center for undocumented immigrants. The facility is a retrofitted warehouse that can hold more than 1,000 people. It was opened in 2014 on W. Ursula Avenue in McAllen, Texas. In June 2018, it gained notoriety for the practice of keeping children in large cages made of chain-link fencing.
Unaccompanied Alien Children is a United States government classification for children in immigration custody and the name of a program operated by the Office of Refugee Resettlement to house and care for them. The term designates unaccompanied minors who are aliens, typically those who have been apprehended outside of a legal port of entry or judged inadmissible upon their entry.
The Tornillo tent city was a temporary immigrant detention facility for children located in Tornillo, Texas and operated by BCFS on behalf of the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement. The Department termed it an "emergency influx care facility" and named it the Tornillo Influx Facility. When it was built in June 2018, the capacity was 400 minor immigrants with a one month contract. It was later expanded to a capacity of 4,000 minors. As many as 2,800 teenagers were held at the site before its closure was announced in January 2019. This made it one of the largest facilities in ORR's Unaccompanied Alien Children Program. All immigrant children had left the facility by January 11, 2019. Nearly 6,200 minors cycled through the facility within the seven months it operated. The area was previously used for a few months in 2016 to process migrant families and unaccompanied minors.
Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children is a 3,200-bed migrant children's detention center in Homestead, Florida. Until August 3, 2019, the center had been operated by Comprehensive Health Services, Inc. (CHSi), which is a subsidiary of the homeland security operator Caliburn International. It was believed to be the only remaining for-profit child detention center for migrants. The organization has faced severe criticism concerning immigration. Senator Elizabeth Warren had demanded that the detention facility be "closed down", and calls for investigation and oversight grew stronger when it was revealed that the federal government had paid $33 million in just 46 days for 1,200 of the empty beds.
The Trump administration has detained migrants attempting to enter the United States at the United States–Mexico border. Government reports from the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General in May 2019 and July 2019 found that migrants had been detained under conditions that failed federal standards. These conditions have included prolonged detention, overcrowding, and poor hygiene and food standards.
This is a timeline of events related to migrant children's detention centers in the United States.
Enforcement with consequences is the policy implemented within the US to help deter the rising tide of immigration that has grown in the US. It is the expansion of policy and consequences for people who choose to enter illegally and subjects them to legal, political and educational debates concerning legality status.
Joe Biden's immigration policy is primarily based on reversing many of the immigration policies of the previous Trump administration. During his first day in office, Biden reversed many of Trump's policies on immigration, such as halting the construction of the Mexican border wall, ending Trump's travel ban restricting travel from 14 countries, and an executive order to reaffirm protections for DACA recipients. The Biden administration and Department of Homeland Security, under leadership of Alejandro Mayorkas, dramatically reined in deportation practices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), prioritizing national security and violent crime concerns over petty and nonviolent offenses. However, Biden has also faced criticism for extending Title 42, a Trump administration border restriction that arose due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as restarting the use of expediting families in Central America, which can cause families to be sent back in weeks, compared to years for an average immigration case. In the fiscal year 2021, the US Border Patrol confirmed more than 1.6 million encounters with migrants along the US-Mexico border, more than quadruple the number in the previous fiscal year and the largest annual total on record. In January 2023, Biden announced a program to strengthen the admission of immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, while at the same time his administration will crack down on those who fail to use the plan's legal pathway and strengthen border security. In May 2023, the Biden Administration approved sending 1,500 more troops to the U.S.-Mexico border following Title 42's expiration.
Berks County Residential Center (BCRC), also known as Berks Family Residential Center and as the Berks County detention center, is a 96-bed immigration detention center in Leesport, Berks County, Pennsylvania, operated by Berks County on contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The center operated as a family detention center from March 2001 to March 2021.
a family detention facility in McAllen, Texas
The administration did not immediately say how many people the new family detention centers will house or where they will be located. The government currently operates only one such facility, in York County, Pennsylvania, with space for fewer than 100 people.
The rumors correctly suggested that "family detention" as a whole came before the Trump administration, but as of August 2015 intact families at the border were rarely separated.
Apprehensions of Family Unit Aliens (FMUA), consisting of children who are apprehended with one or more parent or legal guardian, were approximately 68,445 in FY 2014; in FY 2015, CBP apprehended over 39,838. FMUA generally kept together unless one member of the family group is deemed harmful to another member.
Between October 2017 and May 2018, 99.75 percent of family units apprehended by at the border were not linked to fraud (i.e. pretending to be a parent). A Customs and Border Protection official said Tuesday that out of 59,113 total family unit apprehensions during that period, there were 148 cases of alleged fraud.
President Obama's immigration policy was dealt another blow Wednesday when the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court's opinion that child migrants who are accompanied by a parent and currently in family detention should be quickly released. It left the fate of the parents up in the air, however. The case centers on a 1997 legal settlement — known as the Flores agreement — that set legal requirements for the housing of children seeking asylum or in the country illegally. ee In July 2015, U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee in Los Angeles found the government had violated key provisions of the court settlement that put restrictions on the detention of migrant children.