Donald Trump’s return to detaining immigrant children and families is reviving a brutal process from his first administration and must be heavily protested, human rights advocate Amy Fischer said during a March 12 press briefing.
“It causes irreparable harm for children to be detained for any period of time. Families and individuals should be able to pursue whatever their immigration case may be in community, surrounded by the support that they need,” said Fischer, director of refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International USA.
Amy Fischer
Fischer joined several other immigration experts on the webinar organized by the #WelcomeWithDignity Campaign. It was held to sound a warning about the practice and to protest reports the Trump administration is again resorting “to the shameful practice of family detention.”
Earlier this month, NewsNation reported the federal government had reopened two family detention centers in Texas, including one in Dilley and another in Karnes City. Both locations are just south of San Antonio.
The article also cited a Department of Homeland Security official who said families held in those facilities had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally and were being prepared for deportation.
But the humanitarian group RAICES said it had been in touch with families in the Karnes facility, including 14 with children as young as 1 year hold, and not all the families and children had recently crossed the southern border, according to a report by The Hill.
“From what we know right now, there’s evidence of apprehensions from the northern border, from Canada. Also, strong indications of interior enforcement, so families being swept up in some type of action across the United States and being brought into Karnes,” a spokesman for the group said.
“Detention of immigrant families inflicts irreversible harm.”
Trump was infamous during his first term for the way his administration handled immigrant detentions. In his previous term, he continued an Obama administration policy of detaining families while their asylum cases worked through the immigration courts. But Trump severely curtailed asylum and separated children from parents at the U.S. border. This time around, the president has all but eliminated asylum, is detaining families and is again targeting migrant children for separation.
#WelcomeWithDignity pointed to a Human Rights First study demonstrating the thoroughgoing harm caused by family detentions.
“Detention of immigrant families inflicts irreversible harm. Medical experts, international authorities, members of Congress, faith leaders, human rights advocates, whistleblowers, the American Bar Association and Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s own advisory committee have condemned the detention of families as unjustified, unlawful, unnecessarily costly, and wasteful, and warned that it causes life-long damage to those detained. Family detention is an inhumane, failed policy that should never be resurrected,” the study asserts.
Setareh Ghandehari
But the cruelty and danger for immigrant families already has commenced, said Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network.
“The immigration detention system is rife with abuse. It tears families apart, and it is fundamentally inhumane and unjust,” she said during the briefing. “Everyone, and certainly children and their parents, deserves to freely and safely move for opportunity and stability, and to go through their immigration cases with the support of their community surrounded by their loved ones.”
Immigration cases for families with children and for unaccompanied minors should be handled by child welfare experts, not by law enforcement, said Alan Shapiro, a physician and chief strategy officer for Terra Firma National, a program founded to address the legal and health care needs of immigrants.
“It is deeply concerning to me that family detention centers are being reopened, based on the incredibly detrimental effects I have witnessed myself visiting all three family detention centers in the last decade. As a pediatrician, I decry the practice of family detention and believe families should be given the universally accepted right to seek asylum with dignity and without unnecessary trauma to themselves or their children.”
Mike Ishii
The emerging detention system harkens back to other dark times in U.S. history, said Mike Ishii, executive director of Tsuru for Solidarity, a nonviolent, direct-action group of Japanese American social justice activists.
“They are using the template of Japanese American incarceration again today to target immigrant people. Japanese Americans know from our own family histories and from multi-generational experience the long-term harms that come from this kind of targeting and imprisonment.”
Family detention is just as wrong in 2025 as it was in 1942, Ishii added. “It is a cruel and archaic practice that undercuts the values of a civil society and instead embraces the dehumanizing cruelty of a regime that is leaning into authoritarian, fascist and white supremacist ideology. This is why Japanese Americans across the country led by our own childhood survivors of U.S. detention are protesting and organizing to demand an end to family detention.”
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