President-elect Donald Trump’s new “border czar” has suggested that children who are U.S. citizens but whose parents are undocumented could be placed in “halfway homes” as part of mass deportation efforts.
“It’s going to be a difficult situation for American children, because we’re not going to detain American citizen children, which means they’re going to be sent to halfway houses,” Tom Homan told NewsNation. In an interview Thursday.
“Or they can stay home and wait for officers to make travel arrangements and return to pick up their families,” he said.
He did not elaborate on what the halfway house would be like or who would staff it, nor did he mention the possibility of children being able to stay home alone.
There are approximately 4 million mixed-status families in the United States, some of whom have legal status and others who are undocumented.
Homan gave several interviews this week to lay the groundwork for Trump’s plan to deport undocumented people in droves.
He told the Washington Post that the Biden administration plans to reintroduce the family detention practice it ended in 2021. Democrats rebuked reports that President Joe Biden was weighing whether to reintroduce the policy in 2023.
Homan said families can stay in “soft-sided” tent structures.
“We will have to build a family facility,” he said. “How many beds we need depends on the data.”
As part of his role, Homan will not be directly responsible for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but will work closely with South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who was nominated by President Trump to oversee the Department of Homeland Security, the Post said. Her confirmation. ICE is an agency of DHS.
Children can be detained for up to 20 days under a federal court ruling known as the Flores Settlement Agreement, which governs the care and treatment of minors.
Homan told NBC News on Thursday that he believed the Flores agreement was “the wrong decision” and that he would challenge the legal framework.
“We are currently reviewing what is in the law, but we again believe that some of the decisions will need to be litigated,” he said.
The American Civil Liberties Union has challenged family detention in the past and will challenge all aspects of the deportation policy that the group believes are unlawful, said attorney Lee Gelernt.
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“I hope the American public doesn’t want young children spending days, weeks, maybe even months in detention centers,” Gelernt told NBC News.
A study published in January by Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health found that children held in prolonged family detention suffer psychological and physical harm.
Trump himself hasn’t offered many specifics about his campaign promise of mass deportations. He said families with undocumented parents and U.S.-born children would be deported together because “we don’t want to break up families.”
