Families are housed together at two Texas facilities.
Both centers have operated since 2014 to house detainees
Forgotten in the furor over the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy that has separated over 2,300 children from their parents are two large South Texas detention centers that continue to hold immigrant women and their children, in apparent contradiction of that policy.
The South Texas Family Residential Center, which opened in December 2014 in Dilley, 74 miles southwest of San Antonio, has the capacity to house 2,400 women and children.
Converted from a former oil field camp, the Dilley center was created by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to deal with the surge of families that crossed into South Texas starting in 2013. It has served since then as the largest immigrant detention center in the country.
That same year, a second detention center was opened in Karnes City, 66 miles south of San Antonio, with a capacity of 1,158 — again, for mothers and children only.
Private prison operation
With a combined capacity of more than 3,000 beds, the centers comprise the only large family detention centers in the country.
Most families in the centers are seeking asylum in the U.S. after fleeing gang and domestic violence in their home countries of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, advocates said.
ICE officials couldn’t immediately confirm the number of women and children currently being held in the two centers, or whether the zero-tolerance policy has had any effect on their operation.
Both facilities are run by private prison companies and can’t hold children for longer than 20 days, according to a federal court ruling.
President Donald Trump’s reversal Wednesday of his family separation policy compels authorities to now detain parents who are charged with illegal entry with their children as they apply for asylum.
He directed the Pentagon to identify “existing facilities” that could house families, or build new ones. The Dilley and Karnes centers were not mentioned in the president’s executive order.
Katy Murdza, advocate coordinator with the Dilley Pro Bono Project, said the center today holds about 2,000 mothers and children, 400 short of the capacity. She said she’s worried the 20-day rule might be lifted.
“Just in three weeks, we see children here not getting adequate medical care,” she said. “We see kids getting sick, not eating right. We see them regressing behaviorally. If that time gets extended even longer, it’s going to be a huge problem.”
Family detention is not a good solution for the asylum-granting system, she said — nor is it cost effective.
It costs $340 a night per person to keep someone in a detention center, versus $5 a day to have them living in the community and working with a caseworker, according to the National Immigrant Justice Center. The latter program, discontinued recently, was proven effective in getting asylum seekers to court, she said.
Families on average stay at Dilley for three weeks, she said, and almost all of them pass their initial “credible fear” interview to seek asylum, meaning a judge believes they could be persecuted in their countries. They’re released with notices to appear in court. Fewer than 1 percent of them are deported.
Mixed reviews
Both Dilly and Karnes have been a focal point for criticism since they opened, with critics arguing they house women and children in prisonlike conditions, echoing the current outrage over youths being kept in cages in a McAllen detention processing center.
Last year, the census in both centers dropped as the number of people being detained at the border declined, with only a few hundred residents between them for a time. The reason for the decline included migrants’ fears of enforcement under the Trump administration, activists said.
A 2017 report by the homeland security inspector general gave both family detention centers mostly good marks. Immigration activists had argued that neither center provided adequate medical care and that staff lacked services for families that speak languages other than Spanish.
The report found health care at the centers “was readily available” when inspectors visited in 2016, but one one of the two facilities — the report didn’t identify which — lacked a pediatrician, even though ICE’s contract with the private operator mandated one.
Both family centers previously had some problems.
In 2015, medical staff at the Dilley mistakenly gave adult doses of the hepatitis A vaccine to about 250 children. (There were no reports of injuries.) The next year, a mother from El Salvador reportedly suffered repeat epileptic seizures at the same facility.
In 2014, women detainees at the Karnes center alleged that staff sexually assaulted or harassed them in front of their children.
Sara Ramey, an immigration attorney and executive director of the Migrant Center for Human Rights, works with adult clients detained at the South Texas Detention Complex in Pearsall, close to the Dilley center.
The Pearsall center has a capacity of 1,900 adults, and many of the detainees are parents who’ve been separated from their children because of the zero-tolerance policy.
Ramey said one of her recent clients was a women who was reunited with her child after she was released from the Pearsall facility about a week ago
Ramey said her clients represent a mix of those seeking asylum from Central America and Africa, and that she gets “about 12 new clients each week.”