Thread: More Catch and Release, migrant families released

Federal officials release more migrant families at the border, citing an uptick

Lomi Kriel Oct. 25, 2018 Updated: Oct. 25, 2018 9 p.m. More Comments



1of 8President Donald Trump’s administration is releasing thousands of Central American families after detaining them at the border, overwhelming nonprofits from El Paso to San Diego who are scrambling to find them temporary housing and transportation to their final destination.Photo: Patrick Semansky / Associated Press


2of 8Jose Oscar Martinez Cruz, 23, right, from El Salvador, holds his 9 month-old son Carlos Samuel Martinez Alfaro, as Orlando Guifaro, 53, middle, from Honduras, reaches for his son Justin Guifaro, 5, while staying with other Central American migrant families in an El Paso, Texas, motel on October 23, 2018.Photo: Genaro Molina, TNS


3of 8Victor Joel Fuentes Godinez, 25, from Honduras, becomes emotional while praying before lunch in a makeshift tent in the parking lot of an El Paso, Texas, motel on October 23, 2018.Photo: Genaro Molina, TNS

President Donald Trump’s administration is releasing thousands of Central American families after briefly detaining them at the border, overwhelming nonprofits from El Paso to San Diego who are suddenly scrambling to find them temporary housing and transportation to their final destination.

The "coordinated release" began earlier this month in Arizona, where nonprofits had to rent motel rooms to handle the influx.

This week, federal officials asked Annunciation House, an El Paso shelter, to take in 1,300 adults and children with even more expected next week. In San Diego, Pastor Bill Jenkins said his church was told to anticipate as many as 150 migrants a day, double its usual intake.

“We are going to be slammed,” he said. “If they have to sleep on the pews, they’ll sleep on the pews.”

The number of families coming here has steadily increased for months since the administration ended its controversial practice of family separation in June with a near-record 16,658 arriving in September, a 30 percent jump from August.

The White House, which has pushed to change federal regulations to allow the indefinite detention of families until they can be deported, also blamed legal limits on the amount of time children can be held in processing facilities and family detention centers.

“After decades of inaction by Congress, the government remains severely constrained in its ability to detain and promptly remove families with no legal basis to remain in the U.S. As a result, family units continue to cross the border at high volumes,” said Sarah Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in a statement. “To mitigate the risk of holding family units past the time frame allotted to the government, ICE began curtailing all reviews of post-release plans from families apprehended along the southwest border on Tuesday.”

Immigration agents often conducted such reviews that included confirming bus routes, coordinating with nonprofit groups and relatives, and ensuring that families had a means to reach their destination and were not simply left on the street.Usually migrant families apprehended at the border were processed and, if there was space, transferred to the three federal detention centers that hold immigrant families — two outside San Antonio and one in Pennsylvania.

The remainder were released, typically with GPS-enabled ankle monitors or other forms of supervision and provided notices to appear in the backlogged immigration courts.

The agency “no longer has the capacity” to conduct the additional review procedure without risking the violation of how long minors can be detained, an ICE spokeswoman said in a statement.

As a result, starting on Columbus Day weekend in Arizona, and now expanding to across the southern border, families are being freed en masse in greater numbers than before, with the burden of providing temporary shelter and travel coordination falling solely to nonprofits.

White House officials have characterized the bottleneck at the border as the fault of too many families and not enough space to hold them.

“[F]irst and foremost, it’s just a lack of facilities,” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told CNN earlier this month. “We’re out of space unfortunately, given all of the increase in numbers.”

Testifying in front of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, she said she would keep asking Congress to allow the agency to detain immigrant families until they are deported.

But federal statistics show that the three family detention facilities are currently only at 54 percent capacity, dropping more than 400 detainees since Oct. 18.

Only 1,977 beds are occupied out of a listed capacity of 3,654, according to Oct. 23 population counts ICE provided and total capacity numbers as of December 2017 that private prison companies filed with the government.

The agency’s current budget only funds 2,500 family detention beds a day, with additional space costing more, and the agency has been under scrutiny for transferring money from other agencies, including from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to pay its bills.

Family detention centers are never at 100 percent capacity because of restrictions on what genders and ages can be housed together.

A spokeswoman for ICE also noted that the facilities have had similar population counts at other periods when the flow of families coming here was nearly as high. In December 2016, for instance, after about 15,590 families were apprehended in November, about 2,480 detention beds went filled.

In a fact sheet the White House posted this week to illustrate the “dire state of the crisis at our border,” officials said immigration detention facilities were at “98 percent capacity,” blaming families and unaccompanied children for taking up “vital resources.”

Spokeswomen with ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions about which facilities that statistic referred to. Shelters for unaccompanied minors are at 88 percent capacity, with 13,350 migrant children in government care as of last week.

A Homeland Security official, speaking on background because she was not authorized to discuss the matter, said the problem was not the available detention space but the length of time the government can hold families.

“The crisis isn’t bed space,” she wrote in an email. “We can’t hold family units throughout the pendency of immigration proceedings.”A 1997 legal settlement known as Flores prevents the detention of minors for longer than 20 days and has forced the administration to release most parents with their children, a practice Trump has consistently railed against. Critics say many don’t show at their later court hearings or if they do, they take months or years to conclude.

The White House blamed the settlement for forcing it to separate families this summer and last month published a proposed regulation that would replace the agreement and allow the government to detain families for longer periods of time in facilities with lower standards than currently required.

The Washington Post also reported this month that the administration is considering a “binary choice” proposal to have parents waive their rights under the Flores Settlement and stay in detention with their children until their deportation cases conclude.

Otherwise, they would remain detained while their children go to a government shelter until they are placed with guardians in the United States.

Bridget Cambria, an immigration attorney in Pennsylvania who often works in the Berks family detention center, said she views “coordinated release” this month as an attempt to pressure the undoing of the Flores Settlement.

“They see an emergency coming with the caravan and they have a narrative they want to use to make sure we continue much higher enforcement and the No. 1 target is obviously Flores,” she said. “If they can purport to have a surge they can use it as a reason to try get rid of it all together.”

In Arizona, Teresa Cavendish, director of operations for Catholic Community Services, a Tucson nonprofit that urgently arranged temporary housing for hundreds of migrant families in recent weeks, said she was surprised at the many vacant family detention beds.

“We thought they didn’t have any more space to hold them,” she said.

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/new...s-13337631.php

Trump Catch and Release Continues Along Arizona Border. 700 illegals released

Central American Families Released from Detention ... - NBC San Diego
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/.../Cent...rom-Detention-...

VIDEO AT LINK
3 hours ago - A San Diego Church is ready to house them and, in some cases, reunite them with their families. NBC 7's Llarisa Abreu has more.

"Reunite" them with their ILLEGAL family members!

Where is ICE...why are they NOT deporting these illegal family members they release them to

Originally Posted by Beezer

"Reunite" them with their ILLEGAL family members!

Where is ICE...why are they NOT deporting these illegal family members they release them to

Where is ICE? Oh they are waiting for about another 3 million to get in, then a couple years from now, they will go to a meat packing facility and make a big news splash about rounding up 80. The news report will say they could be deported. Perhaps 3 will actually be deported, and we are in the hole 2,999.997.