AI Generated Image (does not depict the real facility)
For more than two decades, federal law has drawn a firm line around children who reach the United States alone: they belong in the care of the Department of Health and Human Services, not in immigration enforcement custody. A planned site in central Louisiana would test that line. ABC News reported on October 2 that the Alexandria Family Staging Center, a 528-bed facility linked to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, would hold unaccompanied minors along with families with children and single women as they wait to leave the country, and could begin receiving people within a week or two.
The line was drawn in two steps. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 moved responsibility for the care of unaccompanied children to HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 then required other federal agencies to transfer an unaccompanied child to HHS within 72 hours of determining that the child is unaccompanied, absent exceptional circumstances. ABC News noted that unaccompanied minors are usually held in HHS shelters before they are deported or released, and described Alexandria as the first such facility to hold them. Its report did not say how the site would operate within the 72-hour rule.
Children who arrive with a parent fall under a separate regime, the Flores settlement, a 1997 court agreement that sets custody standards for minors held by immigration authorities. It favors release and limits how and where children can be held, and courts enforcing it have generally treated prolonged family detention as inconsistent with its terms. That is a large part of why family detention in recent years has been counted in days or weeks rather than months. Successive administrations have tried to narrow or end the settlement.
Against that legal backdrop, the details matter. According to ABC News, the facility occupies renovated former Air Force barracks at England Airpark in Alexandria, approved in February by the board of commissioners that governs the airpark. It would be run by the LaSalle Family Foundation, the nonprofit arm of LaSalle Corrections, with a company called Anovaeon handling daily operations. The network said its account drew on a draft agreement between ICE and the airpark’s development district, a pamphlet handed out at a board meeting, and documents obtained by the National Immigration Project, an immigrant-rights legal group. No DHS or ICE document describing the site has been published, and the facts here rest on ABC’s reporting alone.
The people involved do not agree on what the site is. Eric Fritz, chief executive of the LaSalle Family Foundation, told ABC it is “not a detention center” but a staging center for families leaving voluntarily, with an average stay of under 48 hours and medical care, meals, soccer fields and free international calling. An ICE spokesperson described a staging facility as a place where people “await their deportation flight to their destination country or transfer to a detention facility.” Stephanie Alvarez-Jones, an attorney with the National Immigration Project, said flatly that “people are not free to leave.” Jeffrey Lynch, identified by ABC as a senior director involved in the project, said staff would open the gate for someone who wanted to go but would be in contact with ICE if that happened. Advocates have also raised concerns that the property may be contaminated with PFAS chemicals, and DHS, the development district and Anovaeon did not respond to ABC’s questions on that point.
Those competing descriptions are not just a matter of wording. Whether a place counts as custody determines whether Flores standards attach, whether the 72-hour clock for unaccompanied children applies, and what rights to counsel and review the people inside can claim. A short average stay, as the operators describe it, would keep most families well within the time limits courts have applied under Flores, which may be part of the design. That is our inference from the reported figures, not something ICE or the operators have said.
The word “voluntary” also covers more ground than it may seem. A person can leave the country on their own. A person can ask ICE or an immigration judge for voluntary departure, a formal status under Section 240B of the Immigration and Nationality Act with its own conditions and deadlines. Others are removed under a final order. The administration has also promoted self-deportation through its CBP Home app, which offers help with travel. ABC’s report does not say which of these groups Alexandria would serve, and ICE’s own reference to transfers to detention suggests not everyone there would be leaving on purely voluntary terms.
Much is still undefined. ICE has not published an operating standard for the site or explained how it would handle unaccompanied children. It is not known whether lawyers will have regular access, whether residents will appear in ICE’s online detainee locator, or what happens to a family that changes its mind. The contamination questions have not been answered publicly.
Once the site opens, its practices are likely to draw scrutiny in the federal court in California that oversees Flores compliance, and possibly in new litigation over the treatment of unaccompanied minors. How quickly that happens will depend on what lawyers and monitors can learn about who is held there and for how long. The outcome could matter beyond Louisiana, since a model that holds children briefly while describing their stay as voluntary could be replicated elsewhere if it survives legal challenge.
For families weighing whether to leave, the decision deserves care before anyone boards a bus or a plane. Departure can abandon a pending application such as a green card case, and people who have accrued more than six months of unlawful presence may face a three-year or 10-year bar on returning. Getting individual legal advice first, including on eligibility for any form of relief, can prevent consequences that are hard to undo.
For attorneys and legal service providers, the immediate task is tracking. Lawyers whose clients may be routed through Alexandria should confirm their location directly with ICE, document any difficulty reaching them, and note whether unaccompanied minors are transferred to HHS within the time the law requires.
Source: ABC News.
This article is for general information and is not legal advice. The situation is changing quickly, so please consult an immigration attorney about your specific case.
About the Author
Discover more from Immigration Analytics
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
