The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization, has recorded the number of children held under detention in U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facilities from January 2017 to January 2020. The dataset includes information on the number of hours a child has spent in custody, as well as their gender, age group, and country of citizenship. The dataset shows that in 2019, CBP held 40 percent of children in custody for longer than 72 hours, exceeding the time limit required by the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act and a 1997 settlement agreement known as the Flores Agreement. The dataset also shows that the federal government carried out approximately 250,000 detentions of children with families in 2019, far greater than the 40,000 detentions CBP carried out in 2014.
Image: Mitchel Lensink
