# ‘Baby jails’ and first steps behind bars: Trump’s immigration agenda embraces family detention again

The United States  placing immigrant families in detention, re-embracing harrowing operations where scenes unfold such as toddlers  under the supervision of private prison corporations and children marking their birthdays at  they can’t leave.

If the  and first  administrations are anything to go by, parents will have to watch their little ones  without familiar foods, the kinds families cook if their children aren’t stuck in so-called “”.

## Families Continue to Be Detained Despite Biden’s Cease-Fire

Some kids will face getting  with serious illnesses like  or  while contracted medical personnel largely ignore them. Others will turn angry, despondent or  amid the uncertainty of when they will be allowed to leave such a stark place, where strangers police everything they do.

## New Administration Resumes Family Detention Practices

This is not conjecture. It is what happened for years, over and over again, when immigrant families were detained, until the Biden administration  the practice for undocumented families in 2021, opting instead to  through ankle bracelets, wrist monitors or phone apps. And it is what Donald Trump is inviting now as federal officials  two Texas family detention centers, one of which will funnel about  in annual revenue to the private prison corporation CoreCivic.

Already, at least  are in custody with their parents. Family detention and the  it brings to the US carceral industry have returned to the country overnight, in a bruising setback for immigrant families and all who care about their wellbeing and rights. Many kids held by the Trump administration will inevitably endure harm. Could this be another  to deter others from coming to the US?

The overwhelming expert consensus is that family detention is neither safe nor just. The American Academy of Pediatrics  that the federal government’s facilities “do not meet the basic standards for the care of children”.  from the American Bar Association decried the infringement of the “due process right to legal counsel” for detained families.

Even the federal government’s  wrote that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – which oversees  enforcement – should follow “the presumption that detention is generally neither appropriate nor necessary for families”.

These conclusions have been molded by incidents which occurred during years of tragedy: an attorney who watched as a small child experiencing a medical emergency was  without their mother, who wasn’t allowed to join them; parents who lamented how their smiley  turned violent after languishing in custody; a  who experienced sexual assault at the hands of a guard;  who had to sit by as her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter vomited blood for days.

The stories go on and on; there will undoubtedly be more.

In fact, the new administration had already started depriving children of their liberty before it officially brought back family detention stateside. It was simply getting  to do it on American taxpayers’ dime,  to circumvent  in the US that protect immigrant kids and limit their time in custody.

In recent weeks, flights filled with people of nationalities that are harder to deport because of poor bilateral international relations, such as Iranians, Afghans, Russians and Chinese, have  to Panama and Costa Rica, nations whose governments  into acting as  to hold and then supposedly repatriate hundreds of people – or at least take them off the US government’s hands.

Among these deportees have been young children. Two of them cried as they  their mother faint during their US deportation flight onboard a military plane. Other kids have gotten  or .

The terrified asylum seekers sent to Panama were initially trapped inside a hotel, watched over by armed guards. A 27-year-old Iranian Christian used lipstick to  “Help us” on a window; her conversion from Islam was a crime she could be killed for if forced to return to her country.  wrote “China” on a window and told the New York Times he “would rather jump off a plane than go back” there.



## Children Released

Kids stood by the windows, too, partially covering their faces from journalists’ cameras as the adults in the room desperately sought help.

Then, more than a hundred of the US deportees at the hotel who refused to “voluntarily” depart Panama for their home countries were sent to a camp at the edges of the perilous , where they  confiscated, faced restricted access to attorneys and couldn’t leave for weeks.

Now some of them  released, though it is unclear what they will do next – the Panamanian government appears to have largely  of them, and officials have told them they can not apply for protection there.

In Costa Rica, meanwhile,  of the US deportees on one flight have been families, nearly half of them children. They are being  in a remote  that has faced past criticism for squalid conditions, including portable toilets leaking into people’s makeshift living quarters.

And if the Trump administration’s callousness toward migrant children has taken place largely out of sight thousands of miles away in recent weeks, it appears it is about to hit far closer to home. Immigration authorities are  starting a new enforcement operation within the US to round up families – families who have already built lives across the country and often become pillars of their communities. Government attorneys are seeking warrants to conduct their arrests, and the fact that many of them have not committed crimes does not seem to matter.

Ordinary Americans in many parts may soon start to notice that their kids’ classmates have suddenly disappeared into a black box of family detention and deportation – and their taxes are paying for it.

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