Nation’s Largest Family Immigrant Detention Facility Opens in Texas

By Julianne Hing Dec 16, 2014

On Monday, as Congress put off funding the Department of Homeland Security through 2015, the agency opened a new family detention center in Dilley, Tex. The center, with capacity for 2,400, will primarily house women and children and sits about 100 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border.

The United States is "not open to illegal migration," DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said Monday, Reuters reported. The center’s first detainees will be those who are transferred from a facility in Artesia, N.M., which was shut down earlier this year after a lawsuit challenged the federal government’s treatment of detainees in the midst of a child migrant crisis. 

The new Texas facility will be run by Corrections Corporation of America, the New York Times reports. CCA is one of the nation’s largest private prison companies in the country. It will cost the federal government $296 a day to house each detainee.