500,000 Kids, 30 Million Hours: Trump’s Vast Expansion of Child Detention

When U.S. Customs and Border Protection holds migrant children in custody, the child’s detention is supposed to be safe and short. That’s true whether the child is with a parent or without one.

But new data shows that over the last four years, detention times lengthened as the number of children held at the border soared to almost half a million. The detentions, which include both unaccompanied children and children with their families, peaked last year at over 300,000, with 40 percent held longer than the 72-hour limit set by a patchwork of legislation and a court settlement.

“The government regularly violated the 72-hour rule,” said Dr. Bill O. Hing, a University of San Francisco law professor and immigration lawyer who was part of an inspection group touring border stations in the summer of 2019 at the height of the crisis. Hing said he witnessed minors being held for increasingly long times in unsafe facilities designed to hold adults, not children and babies.

The rising numbers of children detained