Last week, The Takeaway reported on Immigration and Customs Enforcement's plan to discontinue a program intended to keep women and children out of detention.
Today, we have a deeper look at the facilities for detainees, called family residential centers. There are three of them in the United States: Berks Family Residential Center in Pennsylvania; the Karnes Residential Center in Karnes City, Texas, run by the private prison company GEO Group; and the South Texas Residential Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas.
The facilities hold women and children, and their use was expanded in 2014 under the Obama Administration in response to the tens of thousands of women and children from Central America seeking refuge in the U.S.
But as we've reported, those who end up in immigration detention centers are often met with confusion, long waits, no access to lawyers, and inhumane conditions.
Amanda Doroshow is a staff attorney at Her Justice and has visited the South Texas Residential Center in Dilley a number of times since November 2015 as part of a volunteer attorney program with the CARA Family Detention Project. She goes for week-long trips, and is often the first person many asylum seekers speak to. Her last visit there was in December 2016, and the number of detainees and their wait times have fluctuated since then, but the conditions persist.
Since Doroshow's last visit in December 2016, immigration lawyers told The Takeaway that the South Texas Family Residential Center continues to hold children, despite not having a childcare license. Detainees also don't have access to clean water, according to Doroshow.
We reached out to ICE for comment on this story. Regarding issues related to water access, they directed us to contact the city of Dilley, which provides water for the facility. The city did not respond to a request for comment. And as for the conditions, ICE points to a June 2nd report from the Office of the Inspector General about family detention center:
"The inspector general stated that contrary to the complaints filed by various immigrant rights advocate organizations, ICE addressed satisfactorily the inherent challenges of providing medical care, language services and ensuring the safety of families in detention. ICE remains committed to ensuring its facilities adhere to ICE's detention standards which provide several levels of oversight in order to ensure that residents in ICE custody reside in safe, secure and humane environments." The Takeaway will continue to follow this story, and others like it, as they develop.