The reimplementation of family detention by the Trump administration means more cruelty — and more money for private prisons
The Trump administration is bringing back the detention of migrant families, a costly and unnecessary practice that has been condemned as “cruel and inhumane” by immigrant and human rights advocates for exposing vulnerable children and their parents who had the courage to seek out better lives in the United States to abuses and subpar conditions that no mom or dad would want for their child.
While the Biden administration did the right thing and ceased family detention back in 2021, Trump and Stephen Miller are bringing back this abusive practice as part of their war on children, which includes mass family separation threats and even an attempt to thwart legal help for children who arrived in the U.S. alone in search of safety. Alarmingly, the Trump administration’s family detention plan is in action.
In Karnes City, Texas, a number of families are already being jailed at a facility that most recently detained adult migrants, Border Report said. In Dilley, Texas, notorious private prison company CoreCivic has been newly contracted to detain children and parents at the South Texas Family Residential Center despite past claims of serious negligence at the site. In 2018, a healthy toddler fell sick while detained at the facility with her mother, Yazmin. Mariee Juárez died six weeks after her release. She was just two.
“This is exactly what we were warning all about in terms of Trump’s real agenda,” America’s Voice Executive Director Vanessa Cárdenas said in Border Report. “His obsession with immigration is indiscriminate in that it targets our family members, our coworkers; it targets women and children. This is exactly what we said was going to happen.”
‘MY MARIEE DIED ON MAY 10, 2018’
In a heart-wrenching appearance before the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in 2019, Yazmin Juárez claimed in testimony that officials failed to provide proper medical treatment for Mariee, who she said was healthy when they arrived at Dilley but soon became ill. “I noticed immediately how many sick kids there were—and no effort was made to separate the sick from the healthy,” Juárez said.
She said the pair were turned away from the facility’s clinic twice. At one point, the child had lost two pounds from vomiting and was suffering a fever of over 104F.
While they finally got an appointment with a doctor, that appointment never took place because officials instead cleared them for release (ICE has a history of releasing detained immigrants only after they become gravely ill). While Juarez and her mom rushed Mariee to the hospital, she succumbed to her illness six weeks later. “Mariee died on May 10 after experiencing a catastrophic hemorrhage and ‘irreversible brain and organ damage with no hope of survival,’ the claim states; her cause of death was bronchiectasis, pulmonitis, and a collapsed lung,” ABC News said when reporting on a subsequent lawsuit in 2018.
“When I walked out of the hospital that day, all I had with me was a piece of paper with Mariee’s handprints in pink paint,” Juárez told lawmakers. “The nurses made it for me the day before, as a Mother’s Day gift.”
“Medical and other experts have long documented that family detention can lead to life-long damage to health and development, causing health problems including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, developmental regressions, suicidal behavior, weight loss, sleep disturbance, and frequent infections,” Human Rights Watch said in 2021. “The American Academy of Pediatrics warned the government that detention ‘is associated with poorer health outcomes, higher rates of psychological distress, and suicidality making the situation worse for already vulnerable women and children.’ Studies have shown that immigrant children who were detained experienced a tenfold increase in psychiatric disorders while adults suffered a threefold increase.”
“Even detaining families for days or weeks inflicts severe harm,” Human Rights Watch continued. “DHS’s own medical experts stated as whistleblowers in 2021 that ‘any amount of detention can be harmful to children.’ Studies have shown that the experience of detention for children is ‘acutely stressful…even when detention is brief’ and that ‘any incarceration is damaging for immigrant children, especially those with high levels of previous trauma exposure.’”
PRIVATE PRISONS ARE THRILLED OVER THE RETURN OF FAMILY JAILS
Under Trump’s reimplementation of family detention, prison companies and corporate executives that donated huge sums to help return him to office despite his efforts to violently overturn the rightful results of the 2020 election are already being rewarded with massive federal contracts. As ABC News reported last year, “few industries are set to benefit from the incoming Trump administration as significantly as private prisons, which are expecting a surge in business driven by Trump’s plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.”
And, private prison executives couldn’t be more thrilled with the outcome of the election and the Trump administration’s mass detention proposals.
“CoreCivic president Damon Hininger contributed $300,000 to a joint fundraising committee between the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee over the last year,” ABC News noted. Following Trump’s win, CoreCivic disclosure documents revealed that the private prison company donated $500,000 to Trump’s inauguration. Now following Trump’s return to power, CoreCivic, which previously operated the Dilley facility for ICE, has again been contracted to detain families for ICE under a contract worth an estimated $180 million.
“I’ve worked at CoreCivic for 32 years, and this is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career,” Hininger told investors at the beginning of the year.
In February 2024, GEO Group, another private prison company with a disturbing record of abuses, became the first corporation to max out to Trump during the campaign, CREW said. That same month, company then used a subsidiary, Geo Acquisition II, to donate an additional $500,000 to a pro-Trump super PAC. The subsidiary then donated “$250,000 in August and again in September, according to Federal Election Commission records,” ABC News reported. CEO Brian Evans told investors that GEO Group could “now make as much as $400 million annually by filling empty or underutilized beds at existing detention facilities,” the report continued.
In 2022, GEO Group also hired Matthew Albence, a former official from the first Trump administration who was notorious for once comparing migrant family jails to “summer camp.” But when pressed on his ridiculous and offensive claim and asked by lawmakers under oath if he’d send his own kids to one of these so-called “summer camps,” he refused to answer directly. That’s because he wouldn’t.
IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY – AND IT SHOULDN’T BE
As immigrant and human rights advocates have noted, it’s totally unnecessary to detain children and parents in these dangerous facilities in order to ensure they follow the U.S. asylum process. For example, the Family Case Management Program offered a humane alternative to detention, was cheaper, and resulted in a high compliance rate, with more than 99% of enrolled families appearing for their court appearance dates.
“The program focused on support and rule of law without the use of restrictive and punitive measures that are ineffective,” Women’s Refugee Commission said. “It did not use ankle monitors.” And while family detention costs the U.S. taxpayer nearly $320 per person per day, humane alternatives to detention cost just under $40 per day for the family unit.
But this effective program was, unsurprisingly, terminated by the first Trump administration. Now family detention is back as part of the administration’s escalating and extreme actions to purge immigrants, block refugees, and sow fear. Private prisons will fill their pockets–and children will pay the price.
“Nothing prepares you for the first time you see a toddler in a jail,” immigration attorney Allegra Love wrote in a March 7 op-ed at Source NM. “The media can desensitize some of us to seeing men, especially brown men, in prison scrubs and behind bars. But seeing a kid in that setting truly shocks the system. They don’t manufacture prison clothing for people that small, so the little ones aren’t in standard issue jumpsuits and scrubs. They wear plain sweat suits and little Keds or Croc shoes. Like all people in detention centers, they become hard to distinguish without their own little style choices: T-shirts and leggings and hair clips and light-up sneakers that make their personalities shine. Again, like all people, they seem physically diminished by incarceration and with such little bodies that can be really jarring.”
“I saw Americans swiftly shut down the Trump administration’s deeply unpopular family separation policy in 2018,” she concludes. “We can similarly decide that we do not stand for the incarceration of children and raise up our voices to force our community and congressional leaders to let us know where they stand too. We still have a choice. And I, for one, am going to fight.”
