(Headline USA) The Biden administration is set to shut down Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s largest detention center amidst the ongoing border surge.
The South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, has the capacity to hold 2,400 illegal immigrants and is run by a private prison contractor, Tennessee-based CoreCivic.
Earlier this month, ICE announced it would be shutting down the Dilley facility, calling it the “most expensive facility” in the country.
“ICE continually reviews the overall detention capacity and in doing so, takes action to close certain facilities that no longer provide a sufficient return on investment,” the agency said. “This includes closing the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, which is the most expensive facility in the national detention network.”
ICE then claimed it would reallocate funding from the detention center to “increase the overall detention bed capacity across the system. … This additional bedspace is being pursued across the country and is expected to be available immediately.”
It is unclear how many illegal immigrants are currently being held in the Texas facility. Since 2021, it has been used to hold single adults ineligible for asylum in the U.S.
It is also unclear what the Biden administration intends to do with the illegal immigrants currently being housed in Dilley, Texas.
However, it comes as Democrats make preparations for the possibility of a November defeat at the hands of Republican Donald Trump, who has pledged to undertake a mass deportation effort.
Biden officials have sought to preemptively take other steps to sabotage Trump’s agenda, including the recent announcement of an amnesty plan with a pathway to citizenship for at least half a million illegals, which Biden intends to implement by executive fiat.
John Fabbricatore, a retired ICE Denver Field Office director, told the New York Post that the decision to close the facility was not just a “lapse in judgment, but a deliberate act of amnesty through inaction.”
He argued most of the illegal immigrants being held in Dilley will now be released into the interior of the U.S.
The decision also flies in the face of President Joe Biden’s recent executive order supposedly meant to help his administration get a handle on the border crisis, Fabbricatore argued.
That order was “nothing more than political theater aimed at appeasing certain voter bases rather than addressing the real issues at hand,” he added.
