Feds are opening more detention centers in Texas as Trump administration steps up deportations

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After watching news reports of seemingly random immigration raids and hearing White House officials encourage undocumented immigrants to self-deport, a Venezuelan family decided to heed the government’s advice and leave the United States for Canada a few weeks ago.

They were arrested trying to enter Canada, said their San Antonio lawyer, Laura Flores-Dixit.

Now the parents, who are in their 30s, and their two children, ages 6 and 8 — who through Flores-Dixit declined to be identified or interviewed — are among the first families to be jailed at a South Texas immigration detention facility that the Trump administration has repurposed to hold families after former President Joe Biden greatly reduced the practice.

The change at the Karnes County Detention Facility, about 50 miles southeast of San Antonio, is just one of a flurry of developments in recent weeks that’s drawing attention to privately-run immigration detention facilities that have long been criticized for poor conditions, weak standards and even weaker oversight.

When President Donald Trump vowed to deport a record number of undocumented immigrants, it was clear he would face a number of logistical challenges, starting with a limited number of federal agents to search for and arrest people — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency charged with the job, has just an estimated 6,000 officers tasked with monitoring and finding undocumented immigrants. ICE has received help from federal drug agents, Texas state troopers and other law enforcement agencies as it searches for undocumented immigrants.

The second challenge is where to hold the people they apprehend.

Texas is likely to play an outsized role in detaining immigrants because it already has 21 detention facilities that as of late February held 12,186 undocumented immigrants — reportedly the most in any state.

“Texas is the state that has had the largest number of immigrant detainees in the country for quite some time,” said Eunice Cho, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project. “Texas is really the epicenter with respect to immigration detention in the United States.”

More facilities may be opening in Texas soon. The Trump administration plans to reopen a facility in Dilley to hold families as well — which would add space for up to 2,400 people.

Public records obtained by the ACLU through a lawsuit show that ICE has been contemplating expansion of a detention facility in Laredo and considering opening another in Henderson, near the Louisiana border.

Last year, Trump’s top immigration adviser, Tom Homan, said he would accept an offer from Texas state leaders to use a 1,400-acre Starr County ranch as a staging area for mass deportations. Since then, key parties have been largely mum about plans for the property, which the Texas General Land office purchased last fall.

Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham, who made the initial offer to the Trump administration, said in a statement to the Tribune this week that Gov. Greg Abbott was leading conversations with the Trump administration about the property.

Abbott spokesperson Andrew Mahaleris told the Tribune that the governor looked forward to working with the president but did not offer additional details.

“The Governor's Office remains in regular communication with the Trump Administration on effective strategies to secure the border,” Mahaleris said. “Under the Texas Constitution, any effort to lease or donate Texas land to the federal government must be conducted through the Governor's Office and these conversations remain ongoing.”

Immigrants rights advocates are alarmed by the expansion of detention facilities and the resumption of detaining families. They say the private prison companies that run the facilities have an assortment of reasons to minimize costs and maximize profits — which for migrants can mean medical neglect and poor living conditions.

Employees at privately-run detention facilities have been accused of sexually assaulting migrants, violating their religious freedom and using punitive forms of incarceration like solitary confinement.

Immigration charges are civil offenses that don’t carry the same protections as those granted to people charged with a crime, said Edna Yang, the co-executive director of immigration advocacy group American Gateways.

“It’s really problematic,” Yang said. “With the jail facilities, there are several constitutional protections because you’re in a criminal process and criminal proceedings that aren’t the same in the civil context. Also a lot of the kinds of protections for individuals in criminal proceedings are enforceable whereas the civil detention standards are not enforceable — they are guidelines.”

No aspect of immigration detention draws as much condemnation as holding children.

The Trump administration resumed the practice last week when it sent 12 to 15 families to the center in Karnes, according to lawyers who began communicating with detainees this week.

The families detained at Karnes are a mix of nationalities and have been in the country for varying periods of time, said Javier Hidalgo, a lawyer with Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, known as RAICES, which is representing numerous families.

The families came from Colombia, Romania, Iran, Angola, Russia, Armenia, Turkey and Brazil, according to RAICES.

“It’s not just folks who recently arrived and are being put through expedited removal,” Hidalgo said. “It seems like the intent is more punitive, which runs exactly against the whole notion that immigration detention isn’t [the same as criminal incarceration] … Immigration detention is supposed to be civil detention — if there really is such a thing — and it can’t be punitive for deterrence.”

The Biden administration greatly reduced family detention but did not stop it entirely. Now advocates are worried the Trump administration will ramp it up to new levels, with Texas facilities becoming the hubs.

“It’s just clear from every doctor, lawyer, anybody who cares about children that you are really committing child abuse when you lock up children with their parents,” said Denise Gilman, co-director of the immigration clinic at the University of Texas School of Law, who is currently teaching at the Georgetown Law Center. “This is government child abuse.”

Disclosure: The Texas General Land Office has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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