FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
December 21, 2021
Years After DHS Medical Experts Blew the Whistle, A Small Step Forward for Immigrant Families
WASHINGTON— Government Accountability Project welcomes reporting that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is no longer detaining migrant families in three Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities. Since 2014, thousands of families have been held in these “family residential centers” (FRCs) in substandard conditions for weeks or months as they fight the first stages of their immigration cases. This decision to stop detaining families en masse at the FRCs is long overdue given the well-documented harmful effects of detention on children.
Government Accountability Project clients Drs. Scott Allen and Pamela McPherson, the medical and mental health subject matter experts for DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) who conducted multiple inspections of FRCs, raised concerns internally for several years about the grave risks of harm to children at these facilities. In 2018, in response to the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, they escalated their concerns about systemic failures of ICE’s FRCs to Congress and went public later that year on 60 Minutes, warning that FRCs as well as border facilities could not meet minimum standards of medical and mental health care for the hundreds of immigrant children in custody, some of whom had already died.
Drs. Allen and McPherson renewed these...
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