U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents have temporarily shut down the notorious South Texas warehouse where detained families were crammed into chain-link cages during President Trump’s migrant crackdown, reports the Washington Post.
Over the next 18 months or so, the warehouse will be renovated and its capacity reduced from 1,500 to 1,100, then put back into service in 2022.
“The chain-link partitions will be removed, and the warehouse will be redesigned to provide detained migrants with more humane conditions,” CBP officials told the Post. During the renovation, Border Patrol agents will be left without a large-volume facility if a new migration surge occurs in 2021.
The Obama administration opened the facility in 2014 when unprecedented numbers of Central American families, and some unaccompanied children, began streaming across the southern border in the Rio Grande Valley, which stretches more than 800 miles from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico.
The river has many shallows that are easy to cross, making the valley the busiest area for illegal migration on the whole southern border. But the bare-bones detention cells of its Border Patrol stations were designed to hold adults, not families and children, and by 2014 it was clear that a larger facility was needed.
“CBP obtained a large warehouse and hastily converted it into a clean, air-conditioned processing center to accommodate the surge,” the Post says. “Inexpensive chain-link fencing was used to create partitions in the cavernous space, but its grim appearance came to symbolize the dehumanizing treatment of migrants in U.S. custody.”
By 2018 and ’19, the situation had become a major scandal — and a potential threat. One official called the overcrowded facility a “ticking time bomb.”
At the height of its use, whole families with children and others detained at the border found themselves caged and sleeping on thin mats on the facility’s concrete floor.
The warehouse has been little used in the past year as the CBP began expelling more than 90% of migrants back into Mexico.
But last week, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to halt the practice of expelling underage migrants. That could put border agents back in the same position as earlier in the Trump presidency, but without a large facility to hold detained migrants.
“Department of Homeland Security officials and migration experts have warned that the incoming Biden administration risks facing a new migration crisis next year,” the Post says. “Mexico and Central America have been battered by the economic squeeze of the coronavirus pandemic, and catastrophic flooding and crop damage this fall from multiple hurricanes.”
Last month, the number of migrants taken into custody along the Mexico border topped 69,000, up 21% from September and the highest one-month total since February 2019.