Revisiting the shameful legacy of family detention

Yahoo

07-03-2025

Multiple groups led protests across the country to demand the closure of inhumane immigrant detention centers that subject children and families to horrific conditions. Shown here: July 02, 2019 in Denver, Colorado. (Photo byfor MoveOn.org Civic Action)
Around a decade ago, when I was a young lawyer, I hopped in my little truck and drove across the stormy summer desert to see about a family detention center. Even though five years earlier, President Obama had made a show of closing the T. Don Hutto Detention Center and ending our country's shameful legacy of detaining immigrant families, he had quietly started detaining families again during the summer of 2014 at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Artesia. I was invited to come participate in a rapid legal response for the detained families. What I saw and experienced there broke my heart.
Family detention is the practice of holding adults, mostly women, with their minor children, in prison conditions while they go through the process of removal proceedings. It's understood to be a border deterrence strategy, meaning it's meant to impose a level of suffering as an attempt to keep people from migrating. At the time, that family detention strategy was President Obama's response to high numbers of Central American families fleeing violence in the Northern Triangle and arriving in the United States to seek asylum. The summer when I worked there, approximately 800 women and children were detained on any given night. It was a deportation mill. The plan was to send families from the border to a remote facility and quickly put them through deportation proceedings and send them back to their countries. The average age of the children inside was 6.
Nothing prepares you for the first time you see a toddler in a jail. The media can desensitize some of us to seeing men, especially brown men, in prison scrubs and behind bars. But seeing a kid in that setting truly shocks the system. They don't manufacture prison clothing for people that small, so the little ones aren't in standard issue jumpsuits and scrubs. They wear plain sweat suits and little Keds or Croc shoes. Like all people in detention centers, they become hard to distinguish without their own little style choices: T-shirts and leggings and hair clips and light-up sneakers that make their personalities shine. Again, like all people, they seem physically diminished by incarceration and with such little bodies that can be really jarring.
The facility in Artesia only stayed open for six months or so while the Obama administration prepared two ICE detention facilities in South Texas as more permanent sites for family detention: The South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley and the Karnes County Residential Center. Between those two facilities, both run by private corporations, there were over 3,000 beds for mothers and their children.
I continued to make the long drive across the desert to South Texas when I had the chance to lend a hand in the legal efforts and use my access as a lawyer to bear witness to the violence our government was doing to those families. It made me physically ill to be there. Just the sounds while you are there make a symphony of sadness. There is sniffling and whimpering and outright wailing happening at all times. It is the cry of hundreds of kids suffering in unison. The kids also all seem to be sick at the same time, so the sound of coughing and sniffling is an ever-present addition to the miserable chorus. And of course they were sick. They weren't eating and sleeping properly. I met kids who lost 30% of their body weight. I held them on my lap in court and felt their ribs.
My efforts to help stop family detention tapered off after a couple years. I simply couldn't sustain the work psychologically. I was suffering from depression and having panic attacks. There was so much evidence piling up of human rights abuses and unspeakable trauma happening to mothers and their children. Passionate human rights advocates threw themselves at the project of shutting family detention down again. And yet it persisted for eight terrible years. The last family detention center of the era would close in 2021 amid the grim pandemic.
I mention this all today because now, in 2025, our country is fixing to add another chapter to our dark legacy of family detention, again, right in New Mexico's backyard. There are plans to reopen the South Texas facilities in Dilley and Karnes City, and there are rumors that immigrant families will be detained at Fort Bliss in Southern New Mexico. Curiously, this decision comes at a time when the border is as closed and quiet as it has been at any point in modern history. We must speculate that the families detained there will not be recently arrived asylum seekers but, rather, families picked up in the interior — not a deterrence strategy but one borne of pure cruelty. We are told that the Trump administration is detaining and deporting the most heinous criminals. Does this malicious label include the little ones too?
I saw Americans swiftly shut down the Trump administration's deeply unpopular family separation policy in 2018. We can similarly decide that we do not stand for the incarceration of children and raise up our voices to force our community and congressional leaders to let us know where they stand too. We still have a choice. And I, for one, am going to fight.
NM delegation objects to detaining immigrants at military installations