April 23, 2025
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.
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.
It is awful to think that our country could be inflicting this kind of treatment on innocent children to deter families from seeking asylum, but it would not be the first time. Whatever the reason, I have faith that the American people will not stand for imprisoning children indefinitely.
Leecia Welch, Deputy Litigation Director