On April 7, 2020, Amnesty International issued a report, ‘We are adrift, about to sink’: The looming COVID-19 disaster in US immigration detention facilities, documenting how the Trump administration was failing to adequately protect tens of thousands of immigrants and asylumseekers whom the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (“DHS”) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) agency was detaining in over 200 detention centers across the United States.
Three of these facilities detain families, including infants as young as 1-year-old who are still breast-feeding. Deceptively named “family residential centers” (FRC), these detention facilities are: the Berks County Residential Center (“Berks”) in Leesport, Pennsylvania; the South Texas Family Residential Center (“Dilley”) in Dilley, Texas; and the Karnes County Residential Center (“Karnes”) in Karnes City, Texas.
This document from Amnesty International reports on the family separations happening at these ICE facilities in light of the COVID-19 crisis.
