Press Release

A recording of the press call is available here, and a press kit is available here.

Washington, D.C. –  Yesterday, members of the #WelcomeWithDignity Campaign, as well as advocates, pediatricians, and impacted people, held a press call to discuss the Trump administration’s return to the shameful practice of family detention. Last week the Trump administration began detaining families at a facility in Karnes County, Texas, marking the first time that families had been detained in over three years. 

Immigration detention is always harmful, and detaining children is particularly dangerous. The consequences of family detention have been well-documented by former detention staff, medical experts, human rights investigators, and ICE’s own advisory committee, with reports of inadequate medical and mental healthcare, negligence, and rampant abuse. Families deserve to be together and safe, and should be able to navigate their immigration cases with the support of their communities, in freedom.  

“What we know now and what we have known forever is that family detention should never exist. It causes irreparable harm for children to be detained, for any period of time. Families and individuals should be able to pursue whatever their immigration case may be in community, surrounded by the support that they need,” said Amy Fischer, Director, Refugee and Migrant Rights at Amnesty International USA. “On a personal note, I have a drawing in my office above me that was drawn for me by a nine-year-old that I met at the Karnes family detention center back in 2015. In this picture, she drew a large jail-like building with flowers and butterflies and a sun on the outside. No child should have to deal with being inside of a jail and dreaming about being on the outside. Kids, whether they are born in the United States or born outside of the United States should never be incarcerated.”  

“The Trump administration’s cruel, multi-layered detention expansion plan puts lives in jeopardy,” said Setareh Ghandehari, Advocacy Director at Detention Watch Network. “The immigration detention system is rife with abuse. It tears families apart, and it is fundamentally inhumane and unjust. Just last night, the House passed a funding package that will give Trump billions more to carry out his deportation and detention expansion plans while cutting funding for essential programs that serve Americans. Amid increasingly deteriorating conditions, as we’ve heard recently from people in detention at Guantanamo, as well as people from other facilities speak out about what they’re facing, including medical neglect and abuse, transfers to disconnect people from their loved ones and support networks. Everyone and certainly children and their parents deserve to freely and safely move for opportunity and stability, and to go through their immigration cases with the support of their community surrounded by their loved ones.”

“The reception of unaccompanied migrant children and families with children should always be placed in the hands of child welfare experts and never in the hands of law enforcement,” said Dr. Alan Shapiro, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Terra Firma National. “It is deeply concerning to me that family detention centers are being reopened, based on the incredibly detrimental effects that I have witnessed myself visiting all three family detention centers in the last decade. As a pediatrician, I decry the practice of family detention and believe that families should be given the universally accepted right to seek asylum with dignity and without unnecessary trauma to themselves or their children.”

As the co-author of the American Academy of Pediatrics Policy Statement, Detention of Immigrant Children, published in 2017, Dr. Shapiro highlights the recommendation that states unaccompanied children and families seeking humanitarian protection in the US should never be placed in detention and instead, community-based alternatives should be found to ensure the health and wellbeing of children.

“Detention centers are places of torture, of trauma, of death,” said Beatriz Batres, a community organizer with La ColectiVA and a formerly detained individual. “We have to fight to close all family detention. Congress should stop any kind of funding for the detention and deportation of immigrants, which puts everyone in danger. We need elected officials to take action to demand freedom for the families who have been arrested recently in raids. Our communities are being put in a vulnerable place, are being attacked with hate, and with terror. We need to act.”

“They are using the template of Japanese American incarceration again today to target immigrant people,” said Mike Ishii, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Tsuru for Solidarity. “Japanese Americans know from our own family histories and from multi-generational experience the long-term harms that come from this kind of targeting and imprisonment. Family detention was wrong in 1942, and it’s still wrong today. It is a cruel and archaic practice that undercuts the values of a civil society and instead embraces the dehumanizing cruelty of a regime that is leaning into authoritarian, fascist, and white supremacist ideology. This is why Japanese Americans across the country led by our own childhood survivors of U.S. detention are protesting and organizing to demand an end to family detention. And we are saying: Stop repeating history.”

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The #WelcomeWithDignity Campaign for asylum rights is composed of more than 125 organizations committed to transforming the way the United States receives and protects people forced to flee their homes to ensure they are treated humanely and fairly. To learn more about what we stand for, visit us online: https://wwdignity.org/solutions; to request an interview with an experts from the #WelcomeWithDignity Campaign, visit us here: welcomewithdignity.org