The New Yorker:

Children have long been put in migrant detention if they were apprehended at the border. Today, lawyers have found, families are being removed from stable lives in the United States.

By Jack Herrera

In late March, Leecia Welch, a deputy litigation director at Children’s Rights, a legal nonprofit that represents children in government custody, visited a family jail in Texas that the Trump Administration had recently reopened. The immigrant children Welch met were hungry, sleep-deprived, and bored. “All around them people are crying, fainting, and having panic attacks due to the stress,” Welch said. She’s interviewed hundreds of kids who’ve been detained after crossing the border. In Texas, though, she had an unusual experience—some of the children she met weren’t recent migrants. They had been in the country for years.

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.

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