Exclusive: Trump admin reveals plan to lock 3,000 migrant children in massive new detention facility

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-migrant-children-detention-plans-b3035247.html 

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Exclusive: Trump admin reveals plans to hold 3,000 migrant children in massive new detention facility

Officials have outlined plans for ‘emergency influx facility’ campuses that can hold hundreds of unaccompanied minors

Alex Woodward in New York

Tuesday 18 August 2026 22:38 BST

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The Trump administration is proposing a sprawling shelter facility that can detain up to 3,000 unaccompanied migrant children who arrived in the U.S. without a parent or guardian.

Officials have started to outline plans for the project as federal agencies escalate efforts to detain and remove tens of thousands of people from the country, including children, while effectively closing off the U.S.-Mexico border to people seeking asylum.

Unaccompanied immigrant children — currently housed in more than 150 shelter facilities across the country — could be held inside “emergency influx facility” campuses staffed with physicians, teachers and other “humanitarian care” providers as the administration responds to “surges” at the southern border, according to a market research call with prospective service providers on Tuesday.

Officials have not yet determined a location for the project but appear ready to move quickly once contracts are awarded by the end of this year. A spokesperson for the the Department of Health and Human Services stressed in a statement to The Independent that “there are currently no immediate plans to establish such a facility.”

A virtual roundtable with industry members “is standard procedure” for market research to articulate the agency’s requirements for its facility, the spokesperson added.

Donald Trump’s administration is proposing ‘emergency influx facility’ campuses that can detain up to 3,000 unaccompanied immigrant children who arrived in the country without a parent or guardian (Getty)

“Characterizing this virtual roundtable as anything other than a standard procedure is journalistic malpractice and is a complete misrepresentation of the truth,” the person said.

Tuesday’s roundtable outlined draft requirements that the Office of Refugee Resettlement “may request in order to fulfill its statutory responsibility” to care for unaccompanied minors referred to the agency by the Department of Homeland Security, according to the Health Department.

“ORR solicited feedback and questions from industry leaders as part of a standard method to improve requirements before facility plans are finalized,” the spokesperson added.

The agency “must remain prepared at all times to standup a temporary housing facility” for unaccompanied minors, “should an influx occur,” the person said.

“ORR will not wait for an influx to occur before seeking out a contractor who can meet the statutory requirements of an ORR facility,” the person added. “ORR is committed to ensuring the safety and well-being of the unaccompanied children placed in its care, and that means being prepared for any possible scenarios at all times.”

The proposal comes as the Trump administration shakes up long-standing agreements with legal service providers for thousands of immigrant children in government custody as the president accelerates a mass deportation campaign that has increasingly targeted families and children (Getty)

The proposed facilities could hold up to eight children per room, and up to eight children would share one toilet, shower and sink, according to the call. A spokesperson told The Independent that those parameters are “completely untrue.”

The facilities also would need to be surrounded by an eight-foot perimeter fence.

Facilities would also need to be within 30 miles of a hospital, and officials also are pushing for locations within 60 miles to an airport and 30 miles to a pediatric care facility, behavior health providers, dentists and diagnostic imaging and laboratory services.

Quarantine areas in each facility would need a minimum of 40 beds in a 400-bed facility, 100 beds in a 1,000-bed facility, and 300 beds in 3,000-bed facility.

Recreation areas would not necessarily need to be outside. The government typically requires at least one acre of recreation facilities per 100 children, but that “does not need to be a single continuous plot,” according to the administration. “It can be a combination of indoor and outdoor,” officials said Tuesday.

“Task orders” under the contract may increase to requests for as many as 3,000 beds “depending on the government’s need,” a spokesperson for the agency told The Independent.

“During performance, within the maximum, the government can adjust the actual number of beds ordered up or down as needed in 50-bed increments,” the person added.

The proposal comes as the Trump administration faces growing scrutiny over its care of immigrant children in a mass deportation campaign that is increasingly targeting families with children far beyond the southern border.

Since Trump returned to the White House, immigration judges have issued more than 10,000 removal and voluntary deportation orders for immigrant minors each month, an explosive surge that has vastly outnumbered orders from even Trump’s first term, according to ProPublica.

Last year, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement dismissed widespread reports among immigration lawyers and advocates that it was launching a wider effort to deport migrant children, lawyers and shelter workers scrambled to prevent what they feared are imminent attempts to deport them.

Attorneys for unaccompanied migrant children successfully blocked a middle-of-the-night operation to deport Guatemalan minors in government custody after a series of harrowing affidavits described their fears of abruptly returning to their home country.

Lawyers for the children, who are now in government-supported foster programs and long-term shelters, subsequently accused the Trump administration of trying to get them to self-deport through “misinformation, coercion, threats and fear.”

The proposed facility would be designed to respond to ‘surges’ of unaccompanied children arriving at the US-Mexico border, though officials have not yet determined a location for the project (AFP/Getty)

Unaccompanied immigrant children are in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement through the Health Department’s Administration for Children and Families.

The federal government is legally required to facilitate their legal counsel. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act requires the government to “ensure, to the greatest extent practicable,” that all unaccompanied minors receive legal counsel “to represent them in legal proceedings” and to “protect them from mistreatment, exploitation and trafficking.”

Roughly 20,000 immigrant children effectively lost that representation overnight when a long-standing contract with the Acacia Center for Justice ended last month.

Texas-based Burke Law Group, which does not appear to have any experience representing unaccompanied children, recently withdrew from consideration for a government contract after the Department of Health and Human Services announced plans to award the firm $150 million.

Several Democratic senators are now pressing Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to explain how the firm was even on the agency’s radar.

The firm’s founder and managing partner Marcella Burke previously worked as deputy solicitor and senior counsel at the Department of the Interior and as deputy general counsel at the Environmental Protection Agency during the first Trump administration.

The firm later claimed that it was “only considering applying for a small portion of that amount under a grant to help address the humanitarian crisis.”

“We have decided not to apply for a grant or a contract and we withdrew from consideration,” the firm said in a statement last week.

The administration ultimately awarded a no-bid contract worth at least $158 million to an anti-trafficking group whose founder resigned amid allegations of sexual abuse, forced labor and trafficking.

Our Rescue, formerly Operation Underground Railroad, could receive more than $244 million under the contract, according to federal filings.

“Our Rescue is steadfast on our mission to help vulnerable children across the U.S. and around the world,” CEO Derek Benner said in a statement shared with The Independent last week. “These are among the most vulnerable children in the world, and they deserve nothing less than the full weight of our experience. We welcome this responsibility and are working on their behalf.”

This story has been updated with statements from the Department of Health and Human Services

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Revealed: FCC chair Brendan Carr’s close coordination with White House and rightwing media

https://www.theguardian.com/media/ng-interactive/2026/aug/19/brendan-carr-fcc-white-house-exclusive 

Revealed: FCC chair Brendan Carr’s close coordination with White House and rightwing media

Brendan Carr was appointed as FCC chair by Donald Trump. Composite: Rita Liu/The Guardian/Getty Images

Internal documents obtained by Guardian show White House meetings, scheduled calls with top Trump officials and communications with Fox News producers

Jeremy Barr in Washington

Wed 19 Aug 2026 06.00 EDT

Brendan Carr was very firm.

“As a general rule, we don’t get into any discussions that happen with the White House or don’t happen with the White House,” Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), told Politico’s Dasha Burns in a recent interview. Burns had pressed Carr to explain how exactly he came to issue a highly unprecedented order forcing ABC to apply early to renew its eight local broadcast licenses just one day after the man who appointed Carr, Donald Trump, and his wife Melania called for ABC to be punished for a joke made by the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.

“Did you get a call or talk to the president either before or after you made that announcement?” Burns had asked. Later in the interview, Carr repeated his policy: “As a general matter, I don’t speak publicly about conversations with the White House, or whether they happen or don’t happen.”

While Carr may not be keen to detail his relations with the Trump administration, a trove of FCC documents – obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request and lawsuit filed by the advocacy group Democracy Forward, and provided to the Guardian – shed light on the close working relationship between Carr, his top staffers and members of Trump’s White House team.

Between 12 March 2025 and 11 February 2026, Carr attended at least eight meetings at the White House, according to the records, and had at least three scheduled calls with administration officials, including two conversations with the chief of staff, Susie Wiles. He also spoke by phone with administration officials such as the controversial health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.

In addition, the files provide insight into Carr’s media strategy, including communications with producers at Fox News, and make public previously undisclosed meetings he has held with media titans such as the Fox Corp chief executive, Lachlan Murdoch, and Sinclair Broadcast Group chair, David Smith.

Free press advocates at a protest in support of first amendment rights in Washington earlier this month. Photograph: Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Free Press

“These records show a remarkable breadth of access to FCC leadership for this administration’s political allies, conservative media figures, and powerful industry interests, including companies and organizations with business before the commission,” said Dan McGrath, special counsel, oversight at Democracy Forward. “This raises serious questions about whether the FCC is operating as an independent regulator, or whether political relationships and industry influence have become too intertwined with its decision-making.”

The White House meetings, which are memorialized as Microsoft Outlook calendar items, occasionally include details about the topic of discussion. For example, on 29 August 2025, Carr was listed as the organizer of a “White House deputies” meeting focused on “FAA/Spectrum issues,” which also included the FCC’s chief of staff, Greg Watson, and Arpan Sura, a senior counsel focused on spectrum, space and artificial intelligence.

Another White House meeting, in November 2025, was titled “Drones – Principals meeting”, making obvious the focus.

But a 2 June 2025 calendar entry shows only that Carr attended a “WH mtg”, giving no further details on the nature of the visit.

While it’s not uncommon for FCC chairs appointed by a president of their party to meet and confer with the administration, Carr is known to be unusually in sync with the priorities of the Trump White House, particularly with its focus on using the levers of government to punish the legacy television networks that Trump has derided as fake news. Countering past precedent, he has denied that the agency is “independent” because the president can remove commissioners at any time. ABC cited Carr’s “repeated public statements confirming his allegiance to the president and the president’s agenda” in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday challenging the FCC’s early license renewal order.

Tom Wheeler, who served as chair of the FCC under President Barack Obama, called the meeting logs “very interesting” and “lots of fun”, particularly those memorializing conversations between Carr and Wiles in the winter of 2025. But, he told the Guardian: “I don’t think it’s terribly unusual.”

In the summer of 2025, a calendar entry noted that the White House office of the deputy chief of staff for strategic implementation, Nick Luna, would “call BC cell”, referring to Carr’s cellphone.

In early February of this year, the calendar shows a scheduled call between Carr and the health secretary, Kennedy, noting “Secretary Kennedy to call Chairman Carr Directly” for what appears to be a quick 15-minute conversation.

Click to see document

*Secretary Kennedy to call Chairman Brendan Carr Directly*

A few days later, Carr was in the West Wing of the White House for a meeting with the director of the domestic policy council, Vince Haley, described by the Wall Street Journal last year as “the Most Influential Trump Adviser You’ve Probably Never Heard Of”.

Also in February, Carr traveled to the Department of Justice to meet with Omeed Assefi, who served as acting assistant attorney general for the antitrust division. No reason was given for the meeting, though there is obvious overlap between the regulatory oversight functions provided by the justice department and the FCC over media mergers that involve the transfer of television licenses.

Carr’s meetings with media power-brokers

There is nothing unusual or nefarious about the chair of the FCC meeting with the leaders of media companies his agency regulates – though such meetings are kept private unless they are directly related to an agency matter, which would then require a publicly filed “ex parte” acknowledgment of the conversation. Notably, though, most of Carr’s meetings with media executives (and personalities) represent companies that appeal to conservatives.

Matt Gaetz at a rally in Henderson, Nevada, in October 2024. Photograph: Mike Blake/Reuters

In June 2025, Carr met in his office with Matt Gaetz, the former GOP congressman and one-time attorney general nominee who in December 2024 joined the far-right cable network One America News as a host. Charles Herring, OAN’s president, was listed as an optional attender.

In January 2026, Carr and his aides had a previously unreported meeting with Lachlan Murdoch, Fox’s head of government relations, Kristopher Jones, and the FCC-focused Fox senior vice-president Joe Di Scipio, who had requested the meeting.

Click to see document

I would like to set up a meeting with Chairman Carr and Lachlan Murdoch at the FCC on Friday, January 30.

In February 2026, Carr met with David Smith, the powerful chair of the conservative media company Sinclair, which in September 2025 had briefly acceded to Carr’s wishes and pre-empted Jimmy Kimmel Live over comments the late-night host had made about the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

An expert communicator who rarely deviates from talking points, Carr is a regular presence on conservative media podcasts, radio shows and television programs.

In April 2024, Carr reached out to a booker for the Fox News morning show Fox & Friends to see if the show might be interested in having him on to discuss “tech issues”, including legislation involving TikTok, and shared links to videos of his past appearances on the network. “No worries at all if there’s nothing that makes sense,” Carr wrote. The Fox News booker responded that there was no availability for the following day’s show but expressed a desire to have him on the show in the future.

Click to see document

No worries at all if there’s nothing that makes sense. Happy to stay in touch or be a resource as tech issues percolate.

Takeaways from files

The emails paint a picture of a telecommunications regular who is extremely cautious about the language he uses in communications that are subject to the Freedom of Information Act. In none of the emails does Carr express pro-Trump sentiments, or suggest that he is doing the bidding of the Trump administration, as some critics have suggested. Carr is professional, diplomatic and respectful in the email exchanges with industry representatives and past and present telecommunications professionals.

But, on one occasion, in an email conversation with a national journalist who covers the FCC, Carr made a slightly off-color remark when the reporter brought up protesters who had interrupted the commission’s monthly meeting a day earlier and called for the chair to be fired for seeming to pressure television groups to drop Kimmel’s show.

“I was going to hit them with the Trump dance if they did the chant a second time,” Carr told the reporter, referring to the president’s signature halting moves.

In the email files, Carr showed himself to be something of a stickler for proper grammar. After Carr emailed his staff with his preferences for document formatting, his chief of staff joked that “those who fail to comply will be reported to DOGE”.

Click to see document

A reminder on the Carr style guide below. Those who fail to comply will be reported to DOGE.

Carr is also a lover of internet memes, and he leaned on a relatively niche pop culture reference in his introductory email to the agency, referencing a scene from the 2018 Coen brothers film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Waiting to be executed, James Franco asks a bereft old man standing with him on the gallows: “First time?”

In his email to employees, Carr made clear that his staff represented the unafraid and irreverent Franco character.

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