Ron Vitiello, former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, claimed President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed internment centers for immigrant families would be like a “really nice summer camp.”
The Washington Post noted Thursday that Trump border czar Tom Homan intended to once again hold undocumented immigrant families with children in “soft-sided” tent structures.
“The government will not hesitate to deport parents who are in the country illegally, even if they have young U.S.-born children, he added, leaving it to those families to decide whether to exit together or be split up,” the report said.
Vitiello defended the internment camps in a Thursday interview with Newsmax.
“I suspect that under the Trump administration, once we fix the border, once they apply consequences for people’s illegal behavior, then these facilities will be used to house people until they can be put on a plane and repatriated back to their homes,” he explained. “And so, again, they’re very safely designed.”
“Think about a really nice summer camp that your kids go to,” Vitiello continued. “It’s a lot of soft-sided facilities, but playground activities. They have libraries. They have a place where they can get medical and dental care, a barbershop, anything you might need in a very small town or city.”
During the first Trump administration, ICE’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Office found that the agency “systematically provided inadequate medical and mental health care and oversight to immigration detainees in facilities throughout the U.S.”
Before Trump left office in 2020, the ACLU said ICE “eliminated standards that help to preserve detainees’ basic dignity.”
