Trump administration preparing to restart immigrant family detention

The Trump administration is moving forward with restarting the detention of migrant families, including those with young children, which could mean an increase in arrests of children and teens, according to three sources familiar with the planning. 

The sources said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is preparing to publish in the coming days a “Request for Proposal” that will ask private prison companies to bid for contracts to restart detention facilities intended specifically for families. 

The Obama and first Trump administrations detained parents with their children, but the Biden administration ended that in early 2021. Under the terms of a 1997 court settlement, ICE is prohibited from holding families with children in regular ICE detention settings and must hold them for less than 21 days.

The Biden administration allowed undocumented immigrant families making their way through the immigration system to live in the United States while the head of the household was enrolled in a geolocating monitoring program, such as through an ankle monitor, even if the family was slated to be deported.

Since President Donald Trump took office again last month, most of the arrests by ICE that have been publicized have been of single adult men.

That could soon change once family detention centers are brought back online. The two existing facilities ready to take in migrant families are in Karnes, Texas, which has previously been run by GEO Group and has the capacity to hold over 3,000 people and in Dilley, Texas, which can hold up to 830 people and was previously run by Core Civic, according to the facilities’ web sites. Dilley is currently closed but being maintained while Karnes is currently holding adult ICE detainees and would have to change over to a family facility again.  

It is not clear if ICE intends to build new capacity or simply reopen previous family detention centers. Either way, ICE already faces a budget shortfall, and this will be an additional cost. Spokespeople for the Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not respond to requests for comment.

Two former DHS officials under the Biden administration said there are tens of thousands of migrants in the U.S. who are part of families in the and who have final orders of removal, meaning that once arrested they could be fast tracked to detention and then deportation after arrest. That could help ICE boost its deportation numbers, something the agency is under pressure to do now given that Trump made “mass deportations” a key campaign promise. 

One of the former officials also cautioned that many families in the United States are mixed-status, meaning some members are in the country legally while others are eligible for deportation. Families in that situation could be separated if some members are deported. In an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” in October, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said no exceptions would be made for mixed status families, but that people in the country legally could choose to be deported to keep their family together.