THE IMMIGRANT FAMILIES JAILED IN TEXAS
For decades, Presidents from both parties have detained migrants with their children. Processing these families—verifying their identities, interviewing them about their asylum claims, and so on—takes time, and the government has claimed that it needs to hold them in ice detention centers when Border Patrol gets too overwhelmed. But now immigrant advocates fear ice will fill its family detention centers by raiding cities in the interior. Today, in Texas, one detained family has been in the United States for a decade, according to lawyers representing people in the facility; their kids have gone through elementary school. While travelling on a highway near the southern border in February, they were stopped at a Customs and Border Protection checkpoint, about fifty miles from the border itself. Another undocumented family, fearing Donald Trump’s crackdown, tried to flee the U.S. through the northern border to seek asylum in Canada. Canadian authorities handed them over to C.B.P., and the family was flown to jail in Texas. In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul assailed ice for arresting a mother and her three children, from the village of Sackets Harbor, and sending them to a Texas detention center. (The family has since been released.) Under the new Trump Administration, ice is jailing not just families encountered at the border but also families who have been here for years.
Javier Hidalgo, the legal director of raices, a major immigration legal-services nonprofit in Texas, is overseeing the lawyers representing the newly detained families. Hidalgo told me he’s never bought the argument that the government needs to keep children in jail, even when huge numbers of people cross the border. “There never really is a need to detain children,” Hidalgo said. “But any argument that they could make—as far as saying there’s a big influx of families, and they need to utilize family detention to process them—doesn’t hold water in this moment.” Not only are some of the families longtime residents but, for the past year, the border has been quiet. In February, Border Patrol encountered only about a thousand people travelling with families, down from more than sixty-five thousand in February of last year.
