Washington, DC — The Trump administration is preparing to publish a Request for Proposal (RFP) for private prison companies to reinstate family detention, according to new reporting.
For the last three years, families have largely not been subjected to family detention since the Biden administration stopped detaining families at the Berks Detention Center in Pennsylvania, the Karnes Residential Center in Texas, and the South Texas Family Residential Center - proving that the U.S. can welcome families to the United States without jailing them.
Family detention centers have a well-documented history of negligence and abuse, including inadequate medical and mental health care, unhealthy weight loss among children, and inappropriate disciplinary tactics including threats to separate families if children misbehave. Numerous studies have shown the psychologically damaging effects of family detention: medical and child welfare professionals have noted again and again that it is especially harmful to children, leading to emotional and mental health issues, including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, and weight loss, among other physical and behavioral health problems.
In response to this news, advocates issued the following responses:
Setareh Ghandehari, Advocacy Director of Detention Watch Network, said:
“It is enraging to see the Trump administration making plans to reinstate family detention, a policy of jailing immigrant parents with their children – including babies. Detention is harmful and traumatic for everyone, but especially children. Families should be able to navigate their immigration cases in community with support services provided and facilitated by local community based groups – never Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an enforcement agency that is plagued by egregiously poor conditions and a culture of violence. Taking away a child’s freedom and deliberately putting them in these conditions is unconscionable, as is denying a parent their most fundamental role of providing their child with a loving and nurturing environment. Family detention, like all immigration detention, is inhumane, unjust, and unnecessary. Everyone, certainly children and their parents, deserves to freely and safely move for opportunity and stability.”
Mike Ishii, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Tsuru for Solidarity, said:
“My mother was just a young girl when her entire family was rounded up and imprisoned in a U.S concentration camp. This horrible precedent helped lay the foundation for a cruel system that dehumanizes and abuses immigrants today. What country allows this kind of violence and cruelty? As we approach the 83rd commemoration of EO 9066 that authorized forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese Americans, we call upon our neighbors everywhere to stop the Trump administration from once again enacting cruel policies targeting children and families.”
A Look at Family Detention
President Obama ended family detention at the Hutto Detention Center in Texas in his first year in office, only to bring large scale family detention back in 2014. By the end of 2014, Karnes Residential Center in Karnes City, Texas (Karnes) and South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas (Dilley) had opened and a fourth facility, the Artesia Family Residential Center in New Mexico, had both opened and closed amongst a firestorm of criticism. (See our report: Expose & Close Artesia Family Residential Center, New Mexico). With Berks, Karnes, and Dilley all detaining families, the family detention program in the U.S. became the largest since the internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s with a combined capacity to jail over 3,000 people.
Shocking examples of abuse within family detention centers:
- In 2014, a guard at Berks pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a 19-year-old mother and asylum applicant.
- In 2019, a guard was accused of physically assaulting a five-year-old boy at Family Residential Center in Dilley.
Obama’s policy of family detention paved the way for the expansion of family detention by the first Trump administration. President Biden promised to end family detention on the campaign trail and repeatedly condemned the Trump administration for detaining families. As of December 2021, the Biden administration stopped detaining families at Berks, Karnes, and Dilley.
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Detention Watch Network (DWN) is a national coalition building power through collective advocacy, grassroots organizing, and strategic communications to abolish immigration detention in the United States.