Experts urge Texas not to license immigration lockups as “child care” centers

*Federal officials plan to open three shelters in Texas and California. There’s been a surge in unaccompanied child crossings compared to last year, more than double the number from October and November of 2014. In Texas there’s a plan to change the designation of for-profit detention centers to “child care” centers, they say it’s in order for the state to have jurisdiction over the institutions. VL

By Michael Barajas, Houston Press

Child welfare experts, immigrant rights advocates, former immigrant detainees and even a woman born behind barbed wire in a Japanese internment camp are urging Texas not to license federal immigration lockups as “child care” centers.

Officials with the Texas Department of Family Services heard some three hours of testimony Wednesday from more than 40 witnesses deeply troubled by the agency’s plan to create a whole new child care licensing category for two facilities that primarily detain asylum-seeking women and children. The compounds, built in the tiny, geographically isolated South Texas towns of Karnes and Dilley, are run by the same private prison behemoths that have seen profits soar with the rise in immigration enforcement and detention.

Such “family residential centers,” as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials call them, have come under fire not just by advocates but also by the courts. This summer, a federal judge in California ruled that the family lockups violate a longstanding legal settlement designed to keep the feds from ever again holding immigrant children in prison-like conditions.

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