Migrant centers OK'd as child care facilities

But House might not support Senate’s vote on licensing.

The Texas Senate gave initial approval Tuesday to a bill that would allow a state agency to license federal immigrant detention centers for families as child care facilities, circumventing court rulings that have raised questions about the legality of two facilities in South Texas.

In a party-line 20-11 vote, Republicans approved Senate Bill 1018 by Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, over the objections of a group for pediatricians who say the “baby jails” in Dilley and Karnes City traumatize children, and immigrant advocates who say that many families in those facilities shouldn’t have been locked up in the first place because they are seeking asylum.

Hughes, however, said licensing the facilities will prevent fam- ilies from being split apart during immigration proceedings and ensure quality child care. Closing the centers, he said, would require immigration authorities to either release the children while holding the parents or release the whole family and risk them not resurfacing in court.

“If these facilities close, the feds must release (the immigrants) and hope they return for hearings, or separate children from parents,” he said. “Neither of those seem acceptable.”

A final Senate vote on SB 1018 is expected Wednesday.

The bill faces an uncertain future in the House, where the State Affairs Committee has declined to take action on an identical measure, House Bill 2225, by Rep. John Raney, R-College Station.

Raney told The Associated Press that he was asked to carry the bill by a lobbyist from GEO Group, the private prison company that is paid by the federal government to run the Karnes County Residential Center in Karnes City, one of the two South Texas facilities built by the Obama administration to deal with a flood of asylum-seeking immigrants fleeing violence in Central America.

The other is the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, which is run by another major private prison operator, CoreCivic.

In 2015, a federal court in California ruled that facilities housing immigrant families must be licensed at the state level as child care facilities, prompting the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to create an emergency licensing mechanism for the two lockups. A state district judge in Austin, however, ruled last year that the department didn’t have the authority to do so under state law.

Hughes’ bill gives the agency that authority by allowing the agency’s director to lower standards for child care facility licensing for immigrant family detention centers.

The legislation was “completely shameful,” said Bob Libal, executive director of the Austin-based nonprofit Grassroots Leadership, which opposes prison privatization and has sued over the facilities.

“This is a piece of legislation bought and paid for and supported only by a private prison corporation and whose results, according to the private prison corporation, will be to prolong detention of children,” Libal said.

The main effect of the bill, he said, will be to allow immigration authorities to detain families longer. Currently, the family detention centers are operating as shortstay processing centers for immigrants seeking asylum.

Getting licensed will allow them to hold immigrant families, according to statements that the Boca Raton, Fla.based GEO Group executives have made to their shareholders.