WASHINGTON – In a federal court that filed Friday night, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it is switching family detention centers to short-term facilities that release families after no more than 72 hours.
The disclosure of ICE, which was brought in the Flores case more than a decade ago on behalf of immigrant children, indicates that the agency is ending family detention, a policy that began under the Obama administration in 2014.
The Trump administration has sought to expand family detention by holding families for more than 20 days, the limit set by the judge in the Flores case.
As of Friday, only 13 families remained in ICE custody, and seven were released on that day. The remaining six families will be released on March 7, unless they are positive for Covid-19, in which case they must stay for a quarantine period before being released.
At the beginning of the Biden administration, ICE operated three family detention facilities: two in Texas, located in Dilley and Karnes, and one in Pennsylvania. According to the filing Friday, all families from the Pennsylvania institution were released on February 26th.
The two facilities in Texas will become short-term centers, while the Pennsylvania plant, Berks Family Residential Center, will no longer house families, the documentation reads.
In an interview with NBC News on Thursday, Home Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said ICE detention was “not where a family belongs.”
Bridget Cambria, an immigration lawyer for the nonprofit Aldea – The People’s Justice Center, praised ICE’s announcement as a victory for lawyers, but said the agency’s family detention policy was not over before all the facilities are not closed.
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‘The removal of parents and children from Berks is the result of years of advocacy, organization and litigation which have all shown that the detention of families is immoral and inhuman, that the imprisonment of children for any period is harmful and, of course, that we community absolutely rejects the idea of a baby jail in our backyard, ‘says Cambria, who says her organization has represented thousands of families detained in Berks since 2014.
She added: ‘However, we do not welcome the further incarceration of people in Berke in any form of mountains. And the fight against family detention is only coming to an end [the Department of Homeland Security] cancels his contracts with existing family detention centers in Texas, and closes Dilley and Karnes. ”
NBC News reported earlier that the Biden government plans to drastically reduce the number of immigrant families in ICE detention, paving the way for an end to family detention policies.
