Author’s Note About Gender

INTRODUCTION

CONTENT WARNING

This report touches on the following topics, all of which are issues inherent to incarceration: physical and verbal abuse, suicide, solitary confinement, racism, sexism, anti-queer violence, anti-trans violence, family separation, and medical neglect, among others. It includes harsh, offensive language from government officers including the use of racial epithets and expletives that migrant women experienced. The report includes aggregate data as well as firsthand accounts of these issues.

PURPOSE OF THE REPORT

This report covers the unique time in immigration enforcement in which ICE detained single adult women at one of its three family prisons. Since the Bush administration, but particularly during the Obama administration, the government has lauded the three Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) family immigration prisons as model and humane approaches to custody of noncitizens. However, during the Trump administration, ICE used Karnes, a facility built to detain adults before Obama converted it into a family prison, as a sort of “flex” detention center. In 2019, for the first time in five years, adults were again detained at Karnes.

This period of time provides an interesting snapshot into what “humane” adult immigration detention might be. For instance, for a period of time during the detention of adult women, ICE operated Karnes under the slightly more generous family residential standards, not the detention standards to which all other ICE prisons for adults are subject. Furthermore, in the family immigration prisons, legal services organizations such as RAICES developed a unique presence at Karnes, Dilley, and Berks by which a model of universal representation was possible. Such presence and access to free legal services is all but unheard of in the world of immigration detention. Improvements in access to counsel to permit for more legal services models such as those that exist in family prisons remain a rallying cry for advocates who seek to better conditions of immigration detention. However, RAICES’ experience offering universal representation to detained adults at a model ICE prison indicates that, in effect, such reforms provide little meaningful benefit to detained adults overall. Therefore, prison closure and the end of immigrant detention are requisite steps to effectively further due process for those in immigration proceedings.

This report is particularly timely for two reasons. First, the Biden administration has shifted response to family migration from prior administrations. Beginning in 2021, the Biden administration re-named the family prisons “staging centers.” Instead of subjecting families to fast track expedited removal proceedings, they are allowed entry into the U.S. to begin court proceedings and seek asylum outside of immigration custody. Coincidentally with this change, the administration emptied the Berks family prison, and reports indicate that ICE may detain single adult women there as it did at Karnes in 2019. Furthermore, ICE again detained adult women at Karnes during the summer of 2021 amidst several changes in population. Additionally, this report is timely as expedited removal continues to be a tool to deter migration of adults who either migrate alone or who are separated from their families during the migration experience. Because of the unique existence of legal services organizations that historically have offered legal services under a universal representation model in the three family prisons, the RAICES family detention services team was able to obtain an unprecedented