By Ted Hesson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement aims to open a call center that would have a dedicated unit to track down unaccompanied migrant children with the help of state and local police, an agency contracting document said, part of a wider Trump administration effort to find and potentially deport the minors.
The center would aim to feed information from state and local police to federal authorities, including the locations of unaccompanied children, according to the document, which was posted to a government contracting website on Tuesday. ICE wants to create a round-the-clock facility that could handle 6,000-7,000 calls per day related to immigration enforcement, it said.
President Donald Trump’s administration kicked off an initiative in February to find and deport unaccompanied children, an unprecedented push to track down minors who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally without a parent or guardian.
The Trump administration has since taken other steps to increase enforcement, including an attempt to deport dozens of Guatemalan children despite them having active U.S. immigration cases.
At the same time, the Republican administration has greatly expanded partnerships with state and local authorities to ramp up immigration arrests under a program known as 287(g). The number of state and local agencies participating in the program has risen from 135 just before Trump took office to more than 1,100, according to ICE data.
Critics have said the partnerships can erode trust in immigrant communities and make people less likely to report crimes.
The contracting document said the call center would be located in Nashville, but did not explain why that city was selected. CoreCivic, one of the main companies that contracts with ICE to operate immigration detention centers, is headquartered in Nashville.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, ICE and CoreCivic did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
(Reporting by Ted Hesson; Additional reporting by Disha Raychaudhuri and Kristina Cooke in San Francisco; Editing by Alistair Bell)
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