U.S. immigration agents are planning a new operation to arrest migrant families with children as part of a nationwide crackdown, according to three sources familiar with the planning.
The operation will target adults and minor children who entered the country together and have orders of deportation, the source said. After the families are arrested, agents will place them into detention before they are removed.
A separate operation to find children who entered the United States unaccompanied and were released without court dates is also underway, the sources added.
The sources said lawyers at Immigration and Customs Enforcement are now working to secure warrants to enter homes and conduct the arrests.
Spokespeople for the Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump and border czar Tom Homan said that plans for mass deportations would initially focus on migrants who had committed crimes. The new plans for national operations show that many of the families and children to be targeted do not have criminal histories.
As the plans take shape, the Trump administration is also working with private prison companies to bring back family detention centers that were closed under the Biden administration, NBC News has reported.
On Wednesday, one private prison group, Core Civic, said it would reopen its family detention center in Dilley, Texas. The facility holds up to 2,400 people at a time.
Multiple past efforts
Since 2014, the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations have all attempted to deter families and unaccompanied minors from crossing the border.
The Obama and first Trump administrations had ICE hold families in detention centers after they crossed the border until they were released with pending court dates.
In a more aggressive attempt to deter families from migrating to the U.S. in 2018, the first Trump administration enacted a“zero-tolerance” policy that separated adults and children from over 5,000 families that crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. After wide-scale condemnation, Trump reversed the policy.
After Joe Biden took office in 2021, his administration started a program that placed migrants who had crossed the border as part of a family on a path for expedited removal, which required the head of households to be tracked with an ankle monitor until the family was deported. The program was costly, former ICE officials say, and was limited to certain cities in the U.S.
Under a longstanding federal court settlement known as the Flores agreement, minors being held with their parents cannot remain in ICE custody longer than 20 days. Those rules could make the second Trump administration's new plan for large-scale family detentions more costly and logistically difficult than deporting single adults, two former ICE officials said.
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