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

President 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. less President 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 ... more Photo: Patrick Semansky / Associated Press Photo: Patrick Semansky / Associated Press Image 1 of / 12 Caption Close Federal officials release more migrant families at the border, citing an uptick 1 / 12 Back to Gallery

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 “controlled 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.

She said temporary processing facilities at the border were certainly overwhelmed. Many families released this month in southern Arizona said they had been kept in holding cells for as long as 10 days, longer than the 72 hours children are usually allowed in such short-term detention facilities.

Her organization was first informed about the pilot a day before federal officials dropped off about 450 migrants, mostly fathers and children from Guatemala, over the Columbus Day weekend.

Since then, hundreds more families have been released in southern Arizona, she said, forcing advocacy groups and churches into overdrive.

“It’s just incredibly labor intensive and financially intensive, so we just have to see what we can do next, knowing we have to do something,” Cavendish said. “It’s just hard when we don’t know if we’re responding to 200 people or responding to 500-plus people.”

She said immigrant advocates across the border are speculating about the timing of the releases, coming right before the mid-term elections and as the president is raging against a caravan of Central American migrants marching through southern Mexico in an attempt to reach the United States. Thursday Trump ordered 800 U.S. Army troops to the border, warning about a migrant “onslaught.”

“This is not an administration that is detention-adverse,” Cavendish said. “I think we’re all questioning whether this is an attempt to open space in order to allow for the caravan to come in … or is this possibly an attempt to create additional tension at the border during an election time period.”

In McAllen, the nation’s busiest illegal border crossing, Brenda Riojas, a spokeswoman for the Sacred Heart migrant respite center, said this week the shelter was seeing 600 migrants a day, double that of last week.

In El Paso, Ruben Garcia, director of the Annunciation House migrant shelter, said the organization rented out two motels to house the surplus of families.

“We are being asked to increased our capacity by several hundred a week,” he said. “How long can we keep going? It costs a lot of money.”

lomi.kriel@chron.com

@lomikriel