As U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement continues sweeping arrests of criminal illegal aliens throughout the country, the agency has utilized a downtown Austin building as a detainment center.
The J.J. Pickle Federal Building on East 8th Street is being used to hold illegal aliens as they await possible deportation. Gov. Greg Abbott’s press secretary Andrew Mahaleris told KXAN that the governor “fully supports using every tool and strategy to aid in the Trump Administration’s deportation of illegal immigrants.”
Last week, protestors gathered outside of the building in support of the illegal aliens, with one of them even referring to the foreign nationals as the “epitome of the American Dream.”
While the state offers facilities to ICE, Mexico has reportedly almost finished preparations for a tent complex in the city of Juarez—which sits across the border from Texas’ El Paso.
According to Juarez officials, the new tent complex is meant to serve as a temporary holding facility with a capacity of up to 2,500 deportees. It is set to be fully operational within the next few days.
“When the deportations come, even if it’s minors—accompanied or not—we will be involved,” Juarez Mayor Cruz Perez Cuellar said while in El Paso. “Not just city government but also the state.”
“I think everything will be well,” Cuellar continued. “Juarez and El Paso have lived through many migrant crises and we had never seen such (federal) support like we are seeing now.”
Meanwhile, ICE’s arrests of illegal aliens are chugging along. In its latest enforcement update, the agency boasted 1,016 arrests.
Yet Trump Administration Border Czar Tom Homan is not satisfied with the pace.
“We’ve got to step up the pace,” Homan said in an interview with Newsmax. “We’re going to expand the number of teams out there because we’ve got a lot of criminals arrested.”
The border czar said that the violent Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua currently tops the list of priorities for ICE’s targeted enforcement actions.