The Trump administration plans to start pulling back on a key and controversial plank of U.S. immigration policy in a busy border region, saying Tuesday it will stop sending some migrant families who illegally cross the border in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley to jail.
Starting this week, hundreds of families caught each day in that area are being released by Border Patrol agents, instead of being handed over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for potentially longer detention, government officials said. The exact number will depend on how many there is room for in ICE detention facilities, which have filled up as a record volume of families are crossing the border.
The officials said they are making the change because of crowding and safety concerns. The conditions under which the federal government detains migrant families, particularly those with young children, have drawn frequent criticism in the past few years. Two migrant Guatemalan children died in Border Patrol custody in December.
ICE’s three family detention centers can hold several thousand people at a time. Families with children can spend up to 20 days in them under current law. Under the new policy, some families will be processed by Border Patrol and then released and ordered to show up later to start their deportation or asylum cases. The policy change runs counter to President Trump’s repeated pledge to end what he called “catch-and-release” at the border in favor of “catch-and-detain.” But as the volume of families have reached record levels in the past several months, immigration authorities have struggled to make room for them all.
An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.
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