ICE Wants Space to Detain Thousands More Immigrant Families
After a week of protests, condemnations, and his cabinet members getting chased out of Mexican restaurants, Donald Trump admitted that his "zero tolerance" policy of splitting up and detaining immigrant families at the US-Mexico border was, in fact, his policy. He issued an unnecessary executive order ending the practice of forcing children and parents apart, but in its place he wants the freedom to detain families, together, indefinitely.
As a sign that the administration only plans to pursue and punish immigrants more aggressively, Immigrations and Custom Enforcement has formally requested facilities to dramatically expand the number of people it can hold in detention. Per PBS NewsHour:
Immigration authorities on Friday issued a notice that they may seek up to 15,000 beds to detain families. The Justice Department has also asked a federal court in California to allow children to be detained longer and in facilities that don’t require state licensing while they await immigration court proceedings
“The current situation is untenable,” August Flentje, special counsel to the assistant attorney general, wrote in court filings seeking to change a longstanding court settlement that governs the detention of immigrant children. The more constrained the Homeland Security Department is in detaining families together during immigration proceedings, “the more likely it is that families will attempt illegal border crossing.”
Felntje is right that the situation is untenable, but it's deliberately that way. Trump's administration is hellbent on scoring political points off of a nonexistent "immigration crisis," which is only a crisis because Trump himself is stripping documented immigrants of their legal status and flat-out lying about the threat that immigrants pose in the US.
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We know that Trump and his administration aren't serious about creating an effective and humane immigration system because they've deliberately chosen the most punishing and brutal conditions they can inflict on families crossing the border. Indefinite detention of every person crossing the border isn't just cruel—it's not an effective way of holding people while assessing their asylum claims or keeping tabs on them until their immigration hearings. Immigrant rights advocates point out that things like ankle bracelets and community-based programs are more effective and less costly. Michelle Brane of the migrant rights and justice program at the Women’s Refugee Commission explained to NewHour that less draconian methods had better results, like the "Family Case Management Program—terminated under the Trump administration—[which] compiled a perfect record of attendance by migrants at court hearings, and a 99 percent appearance record at immigration check-ins, according to a 2017 report by the Homeland Security inspector general."
Meanwhile, Homeland Security is now claiming to have reunited about a fifth of the families forcibly split up since May 5, but by their own count more than 2000 children still remain in camps and detention facilities. If the numbers DHS have provided are accurate, that's a step in the right direction. But the administration doesn't deserve praise for undoing a small percentage of the damage that it deliberately inflicted on families. And their solution of "more for-profit family prisons" is no solution at all.
