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THE IMMIGRANT FAMILIES JAILED IN TEXAS  
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Jack Herrera
April 23, 2025
The New Yorker
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_ Children have long been put in migrant detention if they were
apprehended at the border. Today, lawyers have found, families are
being removed from stable lives in the United States. _

, Illustration by Deena So'Oteh

 

In late March, Leecia Welch, a deputy litigation director at
Children’s Rights, a legal nonprofit that represents children in
government custody, visited a family jail in Texas that the Trump
Administration had recently reopened. The immigrant children Welch met
were hungry, sleep-deprived, and bored. “All around them people are
crying, fainting, and having panic attacks due to the stress,” Welch
said. She’s interviewed hundreds of kids who’ve been detained
after crossing the border. In Texas, though, she had an unusual
experience—some of the children she met weren’t recent migrants.
They had been in the country for years.

For decades, Presidents from both parties have detained migrants with
their children. Processing these families—verifying their
identities, interviewing them about their asylum claims, and so
on—takes time, and the government has claimed that it needs to hold
them in _ICE_ detention centers when Border Patrol gets too
overwhelmed. But now immigrant advocates fear _ICE_ will fill its
family detention centers by raiding cities in the interior. Today, in
Texas, one detained family has been in the United States for a decade,
according to lawyers representing people in the facility; their kids
have gone through elementary school. While travelling on a highway
near the southern border in February, they were stopped at a Customs
and Border Protection checkpoint, about fifty miles from the border
itself. Another undocumented family, fearing Donald Trump
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flee the U.S. through the northern border to seek asylum in Canada.
Canadian authorities handed them over to C.B.P., and the family was
flown to jail in Texas. In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul
assailed _ICE_ for arresting a mother and her three children, from
the village of Sackets Harbor, and sending them to a Texas detention
center. (The family has since been released.) Under the new Trump
Administration, _ICE_ is jailing not just families encountered at
the border but also families who have been here for years.

Javier Hidalgo, the legal director of _RAICES_, a major immigration
legal-services nonprofit in Texas, is overseeing the lawyers
representing the newly detained families. Hidalgo told me he’s never
bought the argument that the government needs to keep children in
jail, even when huge numbers of people cross the border. “There
never really is a need to detain children,” Hidalgo said. “But any
argument that they could make—as far as saying there’s a big
influx of families, and they need to utilize family detention to
process them—doesn’t hold water in this moment.” Not only are
some of the families longtime residents but, for the past year, the
border has been quiet. In February, Border Patrol encountered only
about a thousand people travelling with families, down from more than
sixty-five thousand in February
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last year.

The Biden Administration largely ended family detention. When the
Trump Administration decided to bring it back, it at first used two
detention centers in the dusty ranchlands of South Texas: one, in the
city of Karnes, can hold about thirteen hundred people; the other, in
the town of Dilley, can hold twenty-four hundred. _ICE_ has called
these jails “family residential centers,” and, when I stood
outside them during the day, they didn’t appear particularly
sinister—there were no guard towers or razor wire. But, at night, an
array of floodlights gave away the act: detainees aren’t allowed to
leave. In March, the Administration sent all the newly arrested
families to Karnes, before suddenly transporting them all to the
Dilley facility. The reasons for these moves are unclear; _ICE_ did
not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Hidalgo, like other attorneys I spoke to, worried about how many
families the Administration plans to arrest. The government intends to
use a tent village in Fort Bliss, a city-size military base outside El
Paso, where, the _Times_ has reported
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the Administration is considering holding up to ten thousand
detainees. From recent precedent, there’s reason to believe it will
hold families. After the Taliban reconquered Afghanistan, in 2021, the
Biden Administration kept almost thirty thousand Afghan refugees,
including children, on military bases for months at a time. Just as
Biden used these bases to bring tens of thousands of families into the
country, Trump could now use the bases to detain and remove them.

Welch, the children’s-rights lawyer, told me that the worst site
visit of her career was at Fort Bliss. In 2021, as the number of
unaccompanied minors crossing the border surged, the government put up
tents at Fort Bliss—an “emergency intake center.” Welch told me
she still remembers the smell when she walked into one of the white
tents, which held around nine hundred boys—a deep-set human odor.
There were rows and rows of bunk-bed cots. Dirt blew into the tent
from the desert, and the wind whipped against the tent flaps. “To
say it was soul-crushing is understatement,” Welch said. She and her
colleagues heard about children cutting themselves; she saw others in
serious mental distress. One girl told her she was afraid that the cot
above her would collapse on her while she slept. Another child told
the lawyers, “You spend the day in bed, surrounded by thousands of
kids, with thousands of thoughts racing through your head.”

In 1985, lawyers sued the federal government on behalf of a group of
migrant children, arguing that it should be illegal to jail them. The
named plaintiff was Jenny Lisette Flores, a fifteen-year-old girl who
had fled civil war in El Salvador. After she was arrested at the
border, Flores spent months in a detention center—where guards
strip-searched her—along with both male and female adults. The case,
Flores v. Reno, was battled in the courts until 1997, when the parties
reached a settlement: the government would introduce standards
insuring that unaccompanied minors wouldn’t be kept in unsafe
detention centers indefinitely. But, because the government would need
time to craft new rules and infrastructure, the court would
temporarily supervise the detention of minors.

Three decades later, the counsel remains in effect—and negotiation
and litigation still play a crucial role in protecting migrant
children’s rights. Welch herself has been deeply involved with the
Flores counsel team for the past eight years. In 2014, during the
Central American migration crisis, the Obama Administration kept
thousands of families in detention centers, including the sites in
Karnes and Dilley, some for months at a time, arguing that Flores
protections applied only to unaccompanied minors. The Flores counsel
filed a motion to enforce the settlement, and eventually the court
found a compromise: the government could detain families for a
“reasonable” amount of time—which was further defined as a
maximum of twenty days—as it processed their cases. According to
pediatricians who have visited detention centers, that’s plenty of
time to irrevocably damage children. “Even brief detention can cause
psychological trauma and induce long-term mental health risks,” the
American Academy of Pediatrics said in a policy statement, in 2017.

“It does seem that _ICE_ recognizes the Flores protections that
extend to children,” Hidalgo, the _RAICES_ legal director, said.
“But we are still worried about prolonged detention.” In the
summer of 2020, I spoke on the phone
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a Salvadoran mother locked up in Dilley, whom I’ll call Maritza. She
told me that she and her eight-year-old son had been detained for nine
months—far, far longer than the twenty days that Flores permitted.
In May, Maritza explained, _ICE_ agents had come to the detention
center and placed forms before her and the other mothers. Maritza
alleged that the agents gave her a choice: she could leave the form
unsigned and be separated from her son, or she could sign and waive
her son’s rights to not be held indefinitely. _ICE_ vehemently
denied this allegation, claiming that mothers were simply offered the
option to place their children with outside sponsors—who are often
other family members. Maritza said she couldn’t be sure. She was
only offered a form in English, a language she didn’t speak. (Last
year, the Biden Administration tried to partially terminate the Flores
settlement and instead apply its own regulations through the
Department of Health and Human Services. A judge agreed to terminate
court supervision for unaccompanied minors in H.H.S. custody, but kept
it in place for children and families in C.B.P. and _ICE_ detention
centers.)

Welch said she has a few theories about why Trump is moving so
aggressively to jail families. “Perhaps it is because they have hit
a wall deporting so-called criminals, so now they are going after
children and their families in an effort to bump up their deportation
statistics,” she said. She also noted that there’s money to be
made in detaining families: private-prison companies stand to earn
tens of millions each year. Welch also knows that bringing pain to
immigrant families might be a reason unto itself. “It is awful to
think that our country could be inflicting this kind of treatment on
innocent children to deter families from seeking asylum, but it would
not be the first time,” she said. “Whatever the reason, I have
faith that the American people will not stand for imprisoning children
indefinitely.” 

* Immigrants
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* children
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* incarceration
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