Children in the hands of U.S. Immigration

At the very end of the day on Friday, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission quietly lowered its standards for licensing childcare facilities. The decision paves the way for for-profit immigrant family detention centers in the state to remain open by bringing them in compliance with a federal court order.

According to the terms of a 1997 settlement agreement [PDF], children taken into custody by U.S. immigration officials could not be held in secure, unlicensed facilities. Nonetheless, the Obama administration renewed the mass detention of immigrant families in 2014.

The administration had defended the practice of incarcerating children with their parents by arguing it was better to keep families together. It also crudely argued there was no acceptable state licensing procedure for federal detention centers, so it couldn’t comply with the order that they be licensed.

Federal Judge Dolly Gee disagreed [PDF] with President Obama’s justifications and ordered the administration to cease its detention of children in unlicensed facilities in June 2015. This meant immigrant families like those held in two Texas family prisons, the Karnes County Residential Center and the South Texas Family Residential Center, had to be […]