Controversial immigrant family detention center in Texas to reopen
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An immigrant child plays in a gymnasium as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) hosts a media tour at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, in August 2019. Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
A detention center will resume operations as a controversial immigrant family housing facility under a new agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, private prison company CoreCivic has announced.
Why it matters: The South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, was a target of civic rights advocates during the first Trump administration amid family separations and mistreatment allegations, but ICE needs more detention space for President Trump's mass deportation plans.
The big picture: The restart of the South Texas Family Residential Center reverses a Biden administration's policy of ending the practice of holding undocumented migrant families in detention centers.
- President Biden turned to remote tracking technology such as ankle bracelets as alternatives.
- Then-presidential candidate Joe Biden called for releasing families from ICE detention and Trump had vowed to reopen it.
Zoom in: CoreCivic said Wednesday that it has approved an amended agreement between the City of Dilley, Texas, and ICE to resume operations and care for up to 2,400 individuals at the facility.
- CoreCivic managed the Dilley facility from its construction in 2014 through August 2024, when funding for the contract with ICE was terminated. It has housed adults but was no longer being used to hold families.
Context: The Dilley facility was built in 2014 for ICE to detain immigrant families following a surge of migrants escaping violence in Central America.
- The facility came under criticism during Trump's first term for housing immigrant families while children were being separated from families.
- The Biden administration later transformed some family centers into quick-turn processing facilities, with the goal of releasing families within 72 hours.
What they're saying: "We are grateful for the trust our government partner has placed in us. We have an extensive supply of available beds," CoreCivic CEO Damon T. Hininger said in a statement.
- "We are entering a period when our government partners — particularly our federal government partners — are expected to have increased demand."
- CoreCivic COO Patrick Swindle said the company is offering workers from centers the opportunity to transfer to the Dilley.
Zoom out: The reopening comes a week after CoreCivic announced it inked a deal with ICE to expand detention capacity for immigrants at four of its prisons.
- CoreCivic said it has expanded its contracts with ICE to accommodate up to 784 detainees at Mississippi, Nevada, Ohio and Oklahoma facilities.
Between the lines: Holding immigrants in detention is by far the largest cost of the deportation process.
- A backlog of 3.7 million cases in immigration courts, where immigrants are entitled to make their case to stay in the U.S., means detained immigrants can wait months, even years, for a hearing.
- Undocumented immigrants facing criminal charges can't be deported immediately, as Trump has suggested. Instead, they typically have to go through the criminal justice system, serve sentences if found guilty, then face deportation.
- A rapid surge would require a mass building project of "soft detention" centers, or temporary facilities, to house immigrants beyond the system's current capacity of about 42,000 people.
