‘Baby jails’: Trump administration is once again detaining migrant families with children

Parents with children as young as one have begun arriving at an immigration detention center in Karnes, South Texas. They are the first families detained by the Donald Trump administration, which has reintroduced a practice largely curtailed during the Biden administration and denounced by human rights organizations as inhumane. The families will remain in federal custody, in facilities critics have described as “baby jails,” until they are removed from the country under the president’s campaign of mass deportations.

More than a dozen families with children are being held at the family detention center in Karnes, a small town of about 15,000 residents located around 50 miles southeast of San Antonio. According to RAICES, a Texas-based organization that provides services to migrants at the center, the detained families include some who recently crossed the Mexican and Canadian borders, as well as others who were captured in the recent wave of immigration raids across the country. Some had been in the country for up to 10 years, the organization said.

Among those detained at Karnes are immigrants from Colombia, Romania, Iran, Angola, Russia, Armenia, Turkey and Brazil. A second center in South Texas, in the town of Dilley, 71 miles south of San Antonio, is being opened to receive hundreds of families in the coming days. In total, the two facilities, operated by private prison companies contracted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), have a capacity for nearly 3,800 people.

Trump had already used this system during his first term in office in an effort to deter migration across the southern border. The George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations also did it, but Trump went a step further, forcibly separating children from their parents and holding them in detention centers that resembled jails or kennels. There, children had no access to basic services such as showers, beds, or sufficient food. The policy generated such public outrage that the president decided to reverse it, but the damage had already been done. More than 4,600 children were taken from their families, and it is estimated that, to this day, nearly 30% of them remain unaccounted for.

Family detentions were largely halted, but not abolished, during the Biden administration. The Democratic leader released some of the families detained by Trump and converted the Karnes and Dilley facilities into adult detention centers. But when border crossings reached record highs during his first three years in office, he considered reinstating the practice in 2023. However, the idea drew so much criticism that he ultimately abandoned it.

Now, Trump — who has paid no attention to the outrage sparked by his second administration’s immigration agenda, amid applause from his supporters — has put it back on track. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) itself confirmed this earlier this month, when it announced on March 7 that the two detention centers in South Texas would once again house families. In a statement, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin asserted that the detained families have final orders of removal and are in the United States illegally. “This administration is not going to ignore the rule of law,” she stated. “The best option for illegal aliens is to self-deport. If they leave now, they may still have an opportunity to return and live the American dream,” she added.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem echoed that comment in an interview with CBS News a couple of days later. When asked if she was personally comfortable with the practice of family detention, Noem insisted that families who have left their countries in search of a better life for their children, fleeing violence, repression, and poverty, have the option to “self-deport” if they don’t want to be detained.

“Everybody has an option. They have an option to be here legally or illegally, and they can self-deport as well. 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,” said the Secretary of Homeland Security.

An “inhumane, unjust and unnecessary” practice

Migrant advocates and child welfare experts have long denounced family detention. They argue that it is a practice especially harmful to children and point to the long list of allegations of mistreatment, sexual abuse, and lack of access to medical care and other basic needs in the facilities where they are detained.

Several children have died in immigration custody. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, a one-year-old girl died after being released from the Dilley center, which is preparing to hold families again. Her mother alleged that the center failed to provide adequate care after the child contracted a respiratory infection there, but a jury ruled last year that the same company that continues to operate the center, CoreCivic, was not liable.

“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,” said Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition advocating for an end to immigration detention in the United States, in a statement.

Pro-immigration organizations are also concerned that this practice is one step away from bringing back family separations. For now, a court order currently prohibits Trump from separating families again, so the administration has opted to deport them together, as it did with the 10-year-old girl recovering from brain cancer who was deported to Mexico last month. The child, her undocumented parents and her four siblings were detained while going to a medical appointment in Houston, Texas, in a case that has highlighted the cruelty with which the Republican administration is deporting immigrants.

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