The expansion to new cities — including San Francisco, San Diego and San Jose, which will join the program this week — indicates that more migrant families will be subject to the curfew. Government officials want the program rolled out to dozens of cities across the country in the next couple months, according to three sources with knowledge of the plan who were not authorized to discuss it publicly.
The Biden administration has been eager to publicize consequences for migrant families who receive deportation orders. In the last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has sent out press releases on deportations of families, along with video of families boarding planes leaving the country. ICE officials previously said that families enrolled in the home curfew program would be deported if they failed their asylum screenings.
“There are consequences for family units,” an ICE official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity before the program was publicly unveiled, told The Times in May. “If they are not eligible to remain in the U.S., we are going to be moving them toward removal.”
ICE did not provide the number of families deported as part of the program.
The Biden administration initially struggled with increasing numbers of crossings at the southern border. But crossings fell in recent months. Officials have attributed some of the downturn to recently instituted asylum restrictions.
The program, known as Family Expedited Removal Management, subjects families that cross the border and are going to specific cities — including Baltimore; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; and Newark, N.J., — to a home curfew. In addition to the three California cities, Boston is also expected to be part of the next expansion of the program.
The families have their initial asylum screenings in a Department of Homeland Security office and can be deported if they fail and an immigration judge agrees with the decision. Families seeking protection are also subject to a recently instituted policy limiting asylum that is under legal attack.
“While FERM initially began in four locations, DHS is quickly expanding to cities across the country and is removing families who are determined to be ineligible for relief and are ordered removed through this non-detained enforcement process,” an ICE statement to The Times read.
Immigrant advocates blasted the planned expansion.
“The creation of the FERM program is simply the administration playing to the anti-immigrant crowd. This program railroads asylum-seeking parents and children to deportation through a process so rushed and punishing that they will be unable to find lawyers and unable to effectively present their claims to asylum,” said Heidi Altman, director of policy at the National Immigrant Justice Center, an immigrant advocacy organization, in a statement. “This response is not only shameful it’s unnecessary — the United States has the resources and capacity to provide a respectful welcome to people in need of protection, the administration just needs to put resources and political will behind the effort.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials placed families into the program beginning early this summer. The curfew, officials explained, lasts six hours, from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., and the head of the household has to wear a GPS monitor.
The continued expansion of the program is also a sign that there is no plan to hold families in detention centers.
“We have no plan to detain families. As I mentioned we will be employing alternatives to detention, including some innovations in that regard, and we will on a case-by-case basis use enhanced alternatives to detention as warranted,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas said in April.
The Biden administration stopped detaining families in two facilities in Texas and instead released them into the U.S. earlier in Biden’s presidency.
Under Biden, ICE has relied more heavily on so-called alternatives to detention, such as GPS monitors.
Immigrant advocates have said such monitoring can have negative consequences and have criticized the practice.