AUSTIN, Texas — The Border Patrol has reopened the South Texas facility that was criticized for holding “kids in cages” during former President Donald Trump’s tenure, debuting a renovation that has replaced wire fences with brick walls and glass.
The Central Processing Center in McAllen, Texas, was closed in November 2020 to undergo major renovations following two years of protests over the government’s handling of unaccompanied children and adults who illegally came across the border from Mexico. The purpose of the facility remains as it was — to detain and process those apprehended at the border within 72 hours of their arrival.
The CPC will reopen Tuesday, but the chain-link fences used throughout the rooms where children and families were held have been hauled away, according to Chris Cabrera, a spokesman for the National Border Patrol Council in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, who recently toured the remodeled building.
“It’s a lot different. It looks more jail-like,” Cabrera said in an interview Monday. “The layout is fairly similar to the old one — the difference being there’s no chain link fences. It’s brick and glass.”
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Groups of families totaling no more than 20 people will be kept in the rooms that have access to common spaces, which Cabrera compared to “living rooms.” The Border Patrol’s statements in 2020 about the facility back up Cabrera’s descriptions.
The building was set up eight years ago as the go-to facility in the region to detain people in custody, the Washington Examiner learned during a tour of the CPC in June 2018. As thousands of minors showed up at the border in the Rio Grande Valley in late spring 2014, the Border Patrol was unable to process quickly as many children coming into custody or temporarily house them in its nine stations across the region, which can only hold 50-200 people. In response, the Border Patrol leased a McAllen warehouse and quickly turned it into the processing center.
In 2018, when the Trump administration announced it would begin referring all adult illegal border crossers for prosecution for unlawful entry, families were separated in order for the adult to be jailed. Because so many children crossed the border in the Rio Grande Valley, the CPC became a center for housing the children. It also become the hub for protests, including lawmakers and celebrities who visited the facility. The following year, the CPC came under new scrutiny from Democrats and immigrant rights groups as growing numbers of illegal immigrants were taken into custody and the facility became significantly overcrowded.
Katy Murdza, an advocacy manager for the American Immigration Council’s Immigration Justice Campaign, toured the CPC in December 2017 and worked for two years with mothers in federal custody who had passed through the facility before being transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for longer detention.
“My concern is that any time people have been detained by CBP or ICE, detained individuals, their attorneys, and advocates have reported medical neglect, severe barriers to due process and language access, inhumane conditions, harassment, and abuse,” Murdza wrote in an email, adding that her organization filed a complaint over this issue in 2019.
“Unfortunately, replacing chain-link fences with clear barriers doesn’t even begin to address these problems, and thousands of reports from individuals who have been detained make me confident that any other renovations that may have occurred won’t fundamentally change them either as they are inherent to detention,” Murdza said.
Although the new CPC will feature an area inside for representatives from outside charitable organizations to meet with and help people in custody, Murdza said those in custody ought to be released as soon as possible to work with community-based organizations that can provide housing, transportation to final destinations across the country, a legal orientation, and more.
Images circled on social media of children in the fenced-in rooms and the facility was dubbed online as being home to “kids in cages,” causing a major blowback for Trump. The Trump administration discontinued the family separations in mid-2018.
President Joe Biden criticized Trump’s handling of migrants, and the Biden administration is focused on releasing families from the CPC and other Border Patrol facilities rather than detaining families or children at family residential centers run by ICE. A court decision in the Flores settlement agreement bars the government from holding a family or child in custody more than 20 days, which is not enough time for an immigration judge to hear an asylum claim or decide if the individual should be removed from the country, resulting in mass releases nationwide.
The 77,000-square-foot CPC facility has two sections: a 22,000-square-foot area for adults that contains jail cells and a 55,000-square-foot area for families and unaccompanied children. It could hold up to 1,200 people and is expected to hold around 1,100 this time around.
When someone was brought in from the border before the CPC was remodeled, his or her personal items were collected and stored until the person was either transferred to a different agency such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, removed from the country, or released into the United States. Then, depending on whether he or she is a lone adult or part of a family, they would be directed to one of the two large holding warehouses.
In the center of the adult holding room were processing booths to speak with federal officials and other spaces for preliminary medical screenings. Next, fingerprints were taken and checked against national databases.
The larger facility had 25-foot ceilings, giant fans blowing across the rooms, and lights that never go out for security reasons. The fenced-in rooms were filled with green cots to sleep on, and each person was given an aluminum-like blanket. The Border Patrol’s parent agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, did not respond to a request for comment about the renovations, including whether detainees will sleep on cots or if beds were installed into the rooms.
Despite the congressionally funded changes, Cabrera does not expect the new facility to elicit support from everyone.
“Unfortunately, it’s going to be divided politically, just like it was last time. One group was good with it, and the other will not be,” said Cabrera.
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Those in custody will no longer need to ask permission to leave their holding rooms to use portable toilets in the hallways, as was the case before the renovation, because each room has been outfitted with aluminum toilets. The downside to the new setup is that it does not allow staff on site to look easily into the rooms because of the new brick walls, according to Cabrera.
CBP will keep a separate overflow facility in nearby Donna, Texas, which was approved by Trump on his final day in office as a backup to the CPC during renovations.
