Karnes facility to hold migrant families again

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will soon resume detaining migrant families at a Texas facility outside of San Antonio, clearing the way for the agency to detain hundreds of additional parents and children.

The Trump administration had stopped holding families at the Karnes County Residential Center in the spring, saying it was unable to transport migrants there because of a record influx of families at the border.

But, after a decline in apprehensions in the summer, officials said in a statement on Saturday that they will revert Karnes “back to a family residential center in the near future.”

Officials had said earlier that they expected the facility to return to exclusively detaining families after a few months.

Karnes has most recently been used to hold about 700 adult women, and intake has been temporarily suspended, ICE spokesman Richard Rocha said in the statement.

Current detainees at Karnes can expect to be transferred to other facilities, he said.

Karnes can house up to 830 parents and children, according to Geo Group, the private contractor that runs the facility.

ICE is housing families at two other facilities in Berks County, Penn., and Dilley, Texas. Karnes is the second largest family center.

Re-adding Karnes restores ICE’s total capacity to detain families to more than 3,000 people, though most recently its family detention centers were well below capacity.

The Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, a nonprofit organization based in Texas, said female detainees were told they would be transferred to other facilities in a few days.

The nonprofit called for ICE to shut down these and other facilities and said women have complained of poor medical care at Karnes.

“ICE is about to transfer women from Karnes Detention Center to Louisiana & other detention centers across the country to make room for family detention,” the nonprofit tweeted Friday.