IN RECENT days,the Trump administration has ended its policy of separating undocumented migrant children from their parents. Faced with inadequate capacity at family detention centres it has also set aside a temporary halt on its policy of imprisoning every undocumented family that it apprehends. But the administration is clear that its preferred solution is to expand the employ of family detention. The evidence of the final 15 years suggests that this would be a mistake. Asylum seekers who are part of a family overwhelmingly comply with the immigration system even if they are released on parole —despite the fact that they face language difficulties, lack of representation, and over-reaching immigration officers. The family detention infrastructure is already unnecessarily and inefficiently large.
America operates the world’s largest immigrant detention system,holding 30000 people at a time. And it locks up a lot of families. In 2016, family detention centres had...
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Source: economist.com