ICE will now target illegal migrant families for deportation — and is reopening 2 detention centers to hold them
The Trump administration is expanding its mass deportation effort to include families in the country illegally — and ICE is opening two previously-shuttered Texas detention centers to hold them, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed to The Post Thursday.
The families targeted by this new wave of President Trump’s mass deportation raids “all … have final deportation orders from federal judges,” said DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.
“This administration is not going to ignore the rule of law,” she added.
The policy was first reported by NBC News.
The migrant families will soon be housed in Karnes and Dilley Detention Center, which will both be “retrofitted” to hold them, according to McLaughlin.
Dilley, which is located about 75 miles southwest of San Antonio and had a capacity of 2,400 detainees, was ICE’s largest detention center when it was in operation.
Last year, the Biden admin closed the massive facility, saying it was “the most expensive facility in the national detention network.”
ICE said at the time that private prison contractor-run detention facility would be replaced with 1,600 existing detention beds made available in the region, explaining that it was a cheaper option.
Former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office director John Fabbricatore previously told The Post that the decision to close Dilley showed not only a “lapse in judgment, but a deliberate act of amnesty through inaction.”
The Karnes detention center, which previously held adult detainees by then-President Joe Biden, will also add more than 600 beds for ICE to detain families.
The Obama administration opened both facilities, and used Dilley to detain families. The Biden admin then transitioned the facility to only house single adults.
During his address to Congress Tuesday, Trump touted his “largest deportation operation in American history, larger even than current record holder, President Dwight D. Eisenhower,” asking Congress to provide funding “without delay” for the operation.
ICE is currently “burning well over” their funding to hold 41,500 illegal migrants “to the tune of several hundred million dollars,” a senior agency source previously told The Post.
While the Trump administration continues to expand its effort, immigration advocates are firing back.
Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, told The Washington Post that Dilley is “known for neglect and abuse of families and children” and its reopening “is the start of another dark chapter in this nation’s treatment of immigrants.
Cho also took swipes at CoreCivic Inc., the private contractor set to run the facility, saying it’s “celebrating the opportunity to profit off the detention of immigrant children and families at the Dilley detention facility, which will only result in more unnecessary suffering at taxpayers’ expense.”
The facility will yield $180 million in revenue each year, according to the contractor.
Former ICE deputy director Scott Mechkowski hit back at the critiques of detention, arguing that ICE has “higher” standards “than any state” prison.
“To anybody that is concerned as to the treatment and the human rights that the people ICE is detaining … the national detention standards far exceed” those of domestic correctional facilities, said Mechkowski.
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