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The United States has resumed placing immigrant families in detention, re-embracing harrowing operations where scenes unfold such as toddlers learning to walk under the supervision of private prison corporations and children marking their birthdays at government facilities they can’t leave.
If the Obama and first Trump administrations are anything to go by, parents will have to watch their little ones go hungry without familiar foods, the kinds families cook if their children aren’t stuck in so-called “baby jails”.
Some kids will face getting sicker and sicker with serious illnesses like failing kidneys or intestinal parasites while contracted medical personnel largely ignore them. Others will turn angry, despondent or suicidal amid the uncertainty of when they will be allowed to leave such a stark place, where strangers police everything they do.
This is not conjecture. It is what happened for years, over and over again, when immigrant families were detained, until the Biden administration indefinitely suspended the practice for undocumented families in 2021, opting instead to surveil them through ankle bracelets, wrist monitors or phone apps. And it is what Donald Trump is inviting now as federal officials re-operationalize two Texas family detention centers, one of which will funnel about $180m in annual revenue to the private prison corporation CoreCivic.
Already, at least three children are in custody with their parents. Family detention and the profits it brings to the US carceral industry have returned to the country overnight, in a bruising setback for immigrant families and all who care about their wellbeing and rights. Many kids held by the Trump administration will inevitably endure harm. Could this be another misguided attempt to deter others from coming to the US?
The overwhelming expert consensus is that family detention is neither safe nor just. The American Academy of Pediatrics warns that the federal government’s facilities “do not meet the basic standards for the care of children”. A report from the American Bar Association decried the infringement of the “due process right to legal counsel” for detained families.
Even the federal government’s advisory committee wrote that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – which oversees immigration enforcement – should follow “the presumption that detention is generally neither appropriate nor necessary for families”.
These conclusions have been molded by incidents which occurred during years of tragedy: an attorney who watched as a small child experiencing a medical emergency was airlifted away without their mother, who wasn’t allowed to join them; parents who lamented how their smiley seven-year-old turned violent after languishing in custody; a young mother who experienced sexual assault at the hands of a guard; another mom who had to sit by as her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter vomited blood for days.
The stories go on and on; there will undoubtedly be more.
In fact, the new administration had already started depriving children of their liberty before it officially brought back family detention stateside. It was simply getting other countries to do it on American taxpayers’ dime, likely in part to circumvent existing requirements in the US that protect immigrant kids and limit their time in custody.
In recent weeks, flights filled with people of nationalities that are harder to deport because of poor bilateral international relations, such as Iranians, Afghans, Russians and Chinese, have been dispatched to Panama and Costa Rica, nations whose governments were pressured into acting as middle men to hold and then supposedly repatriate hundreds of people – or at least take them off the US government’s hands.
Among these deportees have been young children. Two of them cried as they watched their mother faint during their US deportation flight onboard a military plane. Other kids have gotten sick or injured.
The terrified asylum seekers sent to Panama were initially trapped inside a hotel, watched over by armed guards. A 27-year-old Iranian Christian used lipstick to scrawl “Help us” on a window; her conversion from Islam was a crime she could be killed for if forced to return to her country. Another captive wrote “China” on a window and told the New York Times he “would rather jump off a plane than go back” there.
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Kids stood by the windows, too, partially covering their faces from journalists’ cameras as the adults in the room desperately sought help.
Then, more than a hundred of the US deportees at the hotel who refused to “voluntarily” depart Panama for their home countries were sent to a camp at the edges of the perilous Darién Gap, where they had their phones confiscated, faced restricted access to attorneys and couldn’t leave for weeks.
Now some of them are being released, though it is unclear what they will do next – the Panamanian government appears to have largely washed its hands of them, and officials have told them they can not apply for protection there.
In Costa Rica, meanwhile, all of the US deportees on one flight have been families, nearly half of them children. They are being forcibly held in a remote former factory that has faced past criticism for squalid conditions, including portable toilets leaking into people’s makeshift living quarters.
And if the Trump administration’s callousness toward migrant children has taken place largely out of sight thousands of miles away in recent weeks, it appears it is about to hit far closer to home. Immigration authorities are reportedly starting a new enforcement operation within the US to round up families – families who have already built lives across the country and often become pillars of their communities. Government attorneys are seeking warrants to conduct their arrests, and the fact that many of them have not committed crimes does not seem to matter.
Ordinary Americans in many parts may soon start to notice that their kids’ classmates have suddenly disappeared into a black box of family detention and deportation – and their taxes are paying for it.
