A detention center in Texas is reopening after the Trump administration prepares to restart the detention of migrant families and kids — a move that advocates worry could usher in another “dark chapter” in America’s treatment of immigrants.
CoreCivic, a company that manages the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, announced Wednesday that it reached an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to reactivate the facility.
The facility, which holds up to 2,400 people, was built in 2014 for ICE to provide additional space to hold migrant families. CoreCivic ran the center until 2024, “when funding for the contract with ICE was terminated and the facility was idled,” the company said in a statement. The newest agreement is set to expire in 2030.
The company expects to see roughly $180 million in total annual revenue, including medical services. CoreCivic has also entered into a new lease with Target Hospitality Corporation, which owns the facility.
While Joe Biden phased out family detention during his presidency, President Donald Trump has already taken steps to resume the controversial practice, NBC News reported last month.
A top ICE official once likened the facility to a “summer camp.” But others’ accounts tell a much different story.
After visiting the Dilley facility in 2015, Carl Takei, then a staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Prison Project, compared the South Texas Residential Center to World War II-era incarceration camps in an article for the Marshall Project at the time.
A tall fence dotted with security cameras surrounded the facility. Each room was cramped, housing as many as 12 people from unrelated families. Showers and toilets were nowhere to be found in the housing units — which in at least one example became an issue for a little girl detainee who peed her pants because a guard refused to let her leave to use the toilet, Takei wrote.
Similarly, a neurologist with Physicians for Human Rights remarked in 2018 on the alarming conditions, including subpar medical care, lack of outdoor recreation and tendency for guards to yell at detainees for minor things, such as “being underneath a blanket for too long, not eating or for making minor noises.”
At least one child died while being held at the Dilley facility, her mother told a House committee in 2019. She later sued CoreCivic for negligence, but a jury ruled against her.
Democrats also wrote a July 2020 letter decrying the “unsafe conditions” that families endured, being detained at the Dilley center as the Covid-19 pandemic. Former Arizona Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick wrote at the time: “Having people detained in COVI- infected facilities is horrendous.”
Current ‘border czar’ Tom Homan confirmed to the New York Times Wednesday that the administration is considering restarting family detention.
“We need family residential centers,” he said, noting that the administration was also weighing reopening facilities in Dilley and Karnes City, Texas. “It’s an option. We got a lot of options on the table.”
Due to a 2015 court order, children cannot be detained in these facilities for more than 20 days. Still, advocates and Congress members warn about the dangers of resuming this controversial practice for any length of time.
“ICE’s plans to resume operations at this facility, known for neglect and abuse of families and children, is the start of another dark chapter in this nation’s treatment of immigrants,” Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, told the Washington Post. “CoreCivic is 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.”
Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley also condemned the plans to reopen the Dilley center. “I visited this facility in December 2018. It was horrifying—the cruelty and abuse of Trump’s family detention policy is a lasting stain on our nation. I’m calling on the Admin to reverse this decision—in no world should this facility reopen,” he wrote on X Thursday.
