Newly elected President Donald Trump’s “border czar” said Thursday that the use of family detention centers for migrants is “on the table,” raising the possibility that the practice ended by the Biden administration could return as early as next year.
“It’s something we’re considering,” Tom Homan, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the first Trump administration, said in an interview.
“Look, we need to end catch and release – and that includes family units,” he added, using a phrase sometimes used to describe migrants being released from detention while they wait for a proceedings in the immigration court.
ICE stopped detaining families who entered the country illegally with their children not long after President Joe Biden took office, although administration officials last year considered reviving the practice.
Homan, who Trump announced as his border czar on Nov. 10, less than a week after winning a second term, said the plans were still being discussed.
He said that if the Trump administration chooses to implement family detention, “we will try to attract immigration judges to these locations.”
Tom Homan at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix on Sunday.
During the first Trump administration, Homan supported the divisive “zero tolerance” policy. The policy made it possible to separate young children from their parents.
Homan said Thursday that he does not expect migrant children to be separated from their parents on a large scale during Trump’s deportation effort.
“I don’t like that at all,” he said.
A federal court ruling known as the Flores Settlement Agreement limits the time migrant children can be held in detention to 20 days.
Homan said Thursday that he is in favor of challenging that legal framework, which would make the use of family detention centers more difficult.
“We’re looking at what the law currently says, but I think we’re going to have to litigate part of the decision,” he said. “I think the Flores settlement agreement was the wrong decision.
“At this point we know what the rules say. And this is something we will work on until we get a new decision or a better decision from the court,” he said.
Homan said the number of detention centers would depend on the data. At the start of the Biden administration, ICE operated three facilities.
“I need to collect the data we’re getting access to now to figure out how much we need,” Homan said. “And again, based on the data, how are we going to do it.”
He said detention facilities would not be prisons, but “open-air campuses” designed for families.
Homan suggested that the Trump administration would not consider whether people in the country without permission have children who are U.S. citizens.
He said parents who lose their immigration cases “will have to make a decision about what you want to do: you can take your child or leave the child here in the United States with a relative.”
Homan also criticized local governments, such as San Diego County and Los Angeles, that have taken steps they say will protect undocumented immigrants and prevent or limit local resources available to federal immigration authorities.
“We are going to carry out this operation with or without,” Homan said of the deportation plan. “If they want to sit back and watch – disappointing, but we’re going to do it.”
Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who led lawsuits to reunite migrant children during Trump’s first term, said the ACLU is prepared to challenge any aspects of the deportation plan that they consider unconstitutional.
“We have challenged family detention in the past. We’ll have to see what they actually do,” Gelernt told NBC News on Thursday. “But I am hopeful that the American public does not want small children to spend days, weeks or possibly months in a detention center.”
Gelernt said a court order prohibits the government from taking children directly from their parents, but Homan’s comments suggest the new administration plans to go after families indirectly, by forcing parents to make terrible decisions about whether or not to leave their children in the US.
“We would have thought they would have learned the lesson the first time — that even if the public wants immigration laws changed, they don’t want children and families to be targeted,” he said.
Trump campaigned on a promise to deport people who are in the country without permission. Details of his plan have not been made clear; he has said his government will start with those who committed crimes.
During his campaign, he called migrants an “invasion.” Some Republicans have tried to play down Trump’s threats of mass deportations after his election victory.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
