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The End Is Near: Why Family Detention May Soon Be Coming To A Close

Advocates marched from the U.S. Department of Justice to the White House to call on the Obama administration to end the practice of family detention in October 2015. CREDIT: ESTHER YU HSI LEE
Advocates marched from the U.S. Department of Justice to the White House to call on the Obama administration to end the practice of family detention in October 2015. CREDIT: ESTHER YU HSI LEE

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In news that could signal a changing tide in immigration policies, one of the major family detention centers where Central American women and children are held while awaiting their court hearings may soon close its doors. The announcement comes just one day before the deadline set by a federal district court judge for the Obama administration to change the way family immigration detention centers nationwide are operating.

Pennsylvania Department of Human Services officials won’t renew the license for the Berks County Residential Center (BCRC), an immigration family detention center that holds Central American women and children seeking asylum or other forms of humanitarian relief pending their deportation proceedings. In a letter addressed to the Berks County Residential Center, PA Human Services Director Theodore Dallas stated that he believes that the current use of the facility as a family residential center “is inconsistent with its current license as a child residential facility.”

The Department gave BCRC operators until February 26, 2016 — the date its existing license expires — to cease using the facility as a “secure facility for refugee children and their families.”

In July, U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee ruled that the practice of detaining children in such facilities violated a 1997 legal settlement to release children as soon as possible and also to hold them in the least restrictive setting allowed. She gave the Obama administration until October 23 to close the detention centers.

It’s not the same for someone, who hasn’t lived it, to tell it.

A day ahead of the deadline, advocates marched from the U.S. Department of Justice to the White House to call on the president to end family detention. Maria, a Honduran national, was held at the Karnes County Residential Center in Texas for six months after she surrendered to border patrol agents in McAllen, Texas. The experience in detention “drove me crazy,” she said during the rally. “It’s not the same for someone, who hasn’t lived it, to tell it. You suffer. One suffers when they leave their home, not knowing if we’ll end up in jail. We’re treated like criminals. The kids are also treated like criminals.”

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Maria’s experience in detention mirrors some of the stories that other released women and children encountered. But to understand how the use of detention centers for women and children became a shameful stain in how this country handles border crossers, it’s important to take note of how detention became the de facto way of ensuring immigrants who enter the country show up for their deportation proceedings.

Why do we have family detention centers?

CREDIT: Esther Yu Hsi Lee
CREDIT: Esther Yu Hsi Lee

Since last year, a sharp increase of women and children have fled violence and poverty in the Central American countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras and surrendered to border patrol agents along the southern U.S.-Mexico border. In response, the Obama administration sent families to detention centers in Texas, Pennsylvania, and to a now-defunct center in Artesia, New Mexico, to wait out their deportation proceedings.

Many of these women and children have already passed their “credible fear” interviews — a preliminary step to ascertaining whether they can qualify for asylum, which makes them eligible for release. A 2010 Vera Institute of Justice survey of children screened after they make their way into the country found that up to 40 percent of them could be eligible for relief from removal under U.S. laws.

In response to Judge Gee’s ruling, the Obama administration began releasing some mothers and children, though some were put on ankle-monitoring bracelets even after they secured bond to ensure that they would appear at their court hearings. The administration anticipates about 53,000 monitors will be used in the 2016 fiscal year. The administration also promised that some migrants who don’t pose public safety risks would spend no more than an average 20 days in detention. However, many immigrants have stayed in those facilities for months.

What kind of conditions do families face in detention?

Advocates and immigrants alike have long admonished the conditions of the family detention centers, charging that the prison-like setting provide inadequate care and could potentially retraumatize immigrants who were abused in their home countries.

A bloody shirt worn by a child who was told to “drink lots of water” at an immigration detention facility in Pennsylvania. CREDIT: Carol Anne Donohue
A bloody shirt worn by a child who was told to “drink lots of water” at an immigration detention facility in Pennsylvania. CREDIT: Carol Anne Donohue

Lawyers and advocates have provided varying but similar complaints of conditions inside these detention centers. At the Berks facility, Carol Anne Donohoe told ThinkProgress in May that several mothers were told to “drink water” when someone was sick. At the time, she also said that at least 15 children were sick and vomited or had diarrhea “with no effective treatment.” One three-year-old girl who bled on her shirt was told to “drink lots of water.”

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At the Karnes facility, one man said his wife and child were poorly treated and that the food was “so bad.” His wife went on a hunger strike to protest medical conditions and the lack of appropriate food.

And at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, Carl Takei, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, likened his visit to the detention facility to a Japanese internment camp where his family was once held. He noted that guards at Dilley would wake children up “with shouting and lights” at 5:00 a.m., and that there were communal bathrooms for children who sometimes wet themselves.

At least one former employee backs up some of those allegations, charging that mothers and children are locked up and “know they’re in a prison. They know they can’t leave.” The former employee, Olivia Lopez, stated at a Judiciary Democrats’ Forum in July that she had to maintain a “clean” document because the facility was under various audits, stating, “the audit stops at the document.” Her account closely aligns with accounts previously provided to ThinkProgress finding that mothers and children experienced threats of deportation and were subjected to isolation in a dark room as a punitive measure.

What effect does detention have on women and children?

At least one study indicates that placing women and children in confined spaces like the ones they experienced in their home countries when they hid from gangs is generally a terrible idea. A recent Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC) report found that immigrants are at high risk of re-experiencing past traumas when they’re detained. After they were released, more than half of all respondents in the UUSC report reported symptoms of depression and anxiety.

“Shutting down family detention centers is critical so that these families finally can live normal lives. The ‘centers’ are prisons that are a form of psychological torture, especially for the children who are permanently traumatized by this experience,” Luis Vera, member of Make the Road Pennsylvania and an immigrant resident of Reading, told ThinkProgress.

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And a Human Rights First report released this week noted that detention for less than two weeks is still associated with negative health outcomes and potential long-term health and developmental consequences.

In July 2015, the American Academy of Pediatrics wrote a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson stating, “The act of detention or incarceration itself is associated with poorer health outcomes, higher rates of psychological distress, and suicidality making the situation for already vulnerable women and children even worse.”

What do mothers and children have to say about their time in detention?

Advocates call on the Obama administration to end the practice of detaining families in detention centers in October 2015. CREDIT: Esther Yu Hsi Lee
Advocates call on the Obama administration to end the practice of detaining families in detention centers in October 2015. CREDIT: Esther Yu Hsi Lee

Maria crossed the U.S. border once before but was detained and deported from San Antonio, Texas. When she recently crossed again, her detention in Karnes left her believing that the “little booklet of all the rights that immigrants are supposed to have” to be “a complete lie.”

While she was in Karnes, Maria said that she didn’t know how long her detention would last. “It was terrible being there thinking, ‘when? When would we be free?’” she said at the rally. “I’m here to ask God and the president, no more detentions of moms and their kids. We need an opportunity, not to go to jail.”

“There’s many reasons why someone would come to the country and there are a lot of women currently in jail who have different reasons for having come,” Maria told ThinkProgress through a Spanish language interpreter. “Thanks to God that I’ve been able to recover a little bit and eliminate from my mind some of the things that happened to me.”

Three teenagers, who showed up at the rally with Maria, also had strong words for the Obama administration since they themselves had crossed the border and faced miserable conditions in detention centers. Over the past few years, the three teens came to their country unaccompanied without guardians or parents. They now live in the Washington, D.C. area.

Everybody has the right to have a better future.

Erminia, a 17-year-old Salvadoran national, whose name has been changed to reflect the name used by the Washington Post in its photo feature, told ThinkProgress that she spent two nights and three days walking through the Mexico desert “without shoes.” She made the 22-day journey from her home country into the United States two years ago and one day hopes to become a family lawyer.

“I think it’s not a good thing that the government has put people in detention,” Erminia said. “They don’t give rights to them. Everybody has the right to be equal. Everybody has the right to have a better future.”

Daisy, an 18-year-old Mexican national, whose name has been changed, has been in the United States for four years. She left her country after an assault at the age of 10. Standing in front of the White House while holding a banner reading “protect don’t detain,” she told ThinkProgress that she spent sleepless nights crossing the border even staying at a house where immigration agents were eventually called.

“I am telling Obama to end deportations and I support the children since I am [also one of] them,” Antonio, a 17-year-old Guatemalan teen, whose name has also been changed, told ThinkProgress. He arrived in the country a year ago after taking 28 days to make his way from Guatemala to the United States. Antonio left his country because his grandparents forced him to quit school and work as a fisherman. He is now in the process of applying for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, an immigration option for children under the age of 21 who were victims of abuse or neglect.

If and when family detention centers are shut down, how should the Obama administration handle immigrants?

Having been inside detention, Maria believes that the process of detaining mothers and children “shouldn’t take more than a day. They can catch us, fingerprint us, then release us.”

That’s what immigration officials did before the “surge” of immigrant families and unaccompanied children showed up at the southern U.S. border. It used to be that the United States processed border crossers quickly and released them into the community. They relied on community-based appearance assistance programs — which have been effective in the past — to ensure that immigrants show up at their required court hearings.

Between 1997 and 2000, the then-Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) allowed the Vera Institute of Justice to create a community-supervision program to make sure that immigrants show up. That program had a 90 percent success rate. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Migration and Refugee Service and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service also had two pilot programs providing “holistic social services” with initial compliance rates of about 96 percent.