Trump reopens controversial detention sites for migrant families south of San Antonio

The Trump White House has reopened a pair of controversy-mired immigrant detention centers near San Antonio so they can hold migrant women and families during deportations, according to news site Border Report, which cites unnamed officials.

The two facilities — the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement compound in Karnes County and the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley — were both shuttered by the federal government last summer. They became lightning rods during the first Trump administration after reports of children being kept in cages, poor inmate living conditions and in-custody deaths.

ICE officials didn’t respond to Border Report’s inquiries about whether the feds have moved immigrant families into the Dilley and Karnes facilities. However, the news site has received reports that families are already arriving at the Karnes site, located an hour southeast of the Alamo City.

Indeed, the Transactional Records Access Clearing House, a nonpartisan group that regularly parses federal data, found that the Karnes County Immigration Processing Center held an average of 1,130 people daily as of Feb. 8.

“This is exactly what we were warning all about in terms of Trump’s real agenda. His obsession with immigration is indiscriminate in that it targets our family members, our coworkers; it targets women and children. This is exactly what we said was going to happen,” Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of nonprofit immigrant-advocacy group America’s Voice told Border Report.

The Biden administration closed both South Texas detention centers last summer, citing the high operating cost of the site in Dilley, located about an hour southwest of San Antonio. Both sites were run by private prison companies with records criticized by human rights groups.

In 2019, human rights groups demanded that 16 infants under a year old be released from the Dilley detention center, citing lack of medical care, baby food and clean water. The babies were released after the story made national news.

U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, lobbied to close the South Texas detention centers, citing the high expense of putting them in the hands of for-profit operators. In 2019, he told the Current his tours of detention facilities in Texas, New Mexico and Florida convinced him the current system is “morally bankrupt.”

“In addition to the problematic profit motives, the use of these private contractors creates a system of less transparency and less accountability,” Castro said at the time.

Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, deputy director of federal advocacy for nonprofit United We Dream told Border report the previous administration closed the South Texas centers due to their abysmal human rights record.

“We’ll probably be seeing those visuals again, of children and and parents in cages and hopefully it will lead to some rightful indignation and to the closing of these detention centers back,” Macedo do Nascimento added.

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This article appears in Mar 5-18, 2025.