CoreCivic Will Cage Migrant Families in Texas Lockup
On March 5, 2025, private prison operator CoreCivic, Inc. announced a new contract with United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to reopen its South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley.
The massive 2,400-bed prison was used to detain migrant families with children during the first administration of Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) in 2017. That ended after the inauguration of former Pres. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D) in 2021. But now that Trump has returned to office, CoreCivic spokesman Steve Owen said it was the firm’s “understanding that this will be housing families again.”
“It’s a family residential center,” he said.
That benign-sounding phrase obfuscates the harsh reality of holding families with children in cells for the “crime” of seeking asylum in the country. The President’s “Border Czar,” Tom Homan, said that families would be held together so that they could be deported together. However, children cannot legally be detained over 20 days, creating an enormous logistical problem just moving so many families in and out of detention—a large part of the reason why the Biden administration began to fast-track families for deportation without detaining them, sending 67,000 parents and children back to their home countries in 2023 and 2024.
Homan was ICE director during Trump’s first term, when he came up with a “zero tolerance” policy to strip minor kids from their migrant parents and detain them separately until the adults’ deportation process was complete. However, the policy was so badly bungled that thousands of kids got lost in the detention system—some for months—before they were reunited with their parents. A federal court issued an injunction to bar that cruelty, costing the government over $6.4 million for Plaintiffs’ legal fees, plus another $1.35 million to settle a suit brought by eight parents who lost their kids, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Mar. 2025, p.25 and p.41.]
CoreCivic CEO Damon T. Hininger said the firm would also add 784 beds to detention centers it runs in Ohio, Nevada, Oklahoma and Mississippi. “We anticipate continued robust contracting activity throughout 2025 that will help meet [ICE’s] growing needs,” he said. The firm’s largest competitor, The GEO Group, Inc., will also take advantage of Trump’s antipathy for migrants to gorge at the government trough, with a $1 billion contract to operate a massive ICE lockup in New Jersey, as reported elsewhere in this issue. [See: PLN, Apr. 2025, p.39.]
Source: Washington Post
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