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More than 20,000 migrants are now in detention; that’s thousands more than Mr. Biden inherited on taking office, although the number has fallen in recent months as border-crossing has eased. Many of the detainees are in the private facilities he had hoped to shutter. Most were detained along the U.S.-Mexican frontier, where U.S. border agents have had their hands full with a record number of unauthorized border-crossers over the past year. Relatively few were picked up in the interior, a fact that reflects the administration’s distaste for “sweeps” that target migrants who have been in the country for years.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that relatively few of those in migrant detention centers have committed crimes or present a threat to society; three-quarters of them have no criminal record. They are held on civil violations of immigration law, typically pending hearings on their asylum applications.
Most should be released as their asylum cases are adjudicated, as is the case for about 165,000 migrants in a government program called Alternatives to Detention, which monitors them using various means, including a smartphone app. To its credit, the Biden administration has nearly doubled the number of migrants enrolled and reportedly plans to further expand the program.....[citing TRAC data and reports].
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