How many children were detained by U.S. immigration authorities during the Obama administration, by year and facility?
Executive summary
A definitive, facility-by-facility tally of children detained during the Obama administration is not available in the documents provided; public records in these sources instead report apprehensions of "family units," counts of unaccompanied minors, bed capacities, and episodic reporting on specific family residential centers such as Dilley and Karnes [1] [2] [3]. What the record shows clearly is that family detention was reinstated and expanded in 2014 in response to a surge of Central American arrivals—producing sharp year-over-year increases in family apprehensions and a concurrent rise in detention capacity—but the sources do not supply a complete, year-by-year list of how many children were physically held at each facility [4] [1] [5].
1. What the government tracked: family units and unaccompanied children, not "children-per-facility"
The clearest quantitative pieces in the record are CBP/administration counts of "family units" apprehended and separate counts of unaccompanied alien children; for example, in FY2012 CBP recorded 11,116 family units at the southern border, 14,855 family units in FY2013, and a jump to 68,445 family units in FY2014—a 361 percent increase from 2013—while in FY2014 CBP also recorded 51,705 unaccompanied alien children compared to 20,785 in FY2013 [1]. These figures document the scale of arrivals and the policy response, but “family units” combine adults and children and are not equivalent to a direct count of detained children at each facility, a distinction emphasized in litigation and policy reporting [1] [5].
2. Facilities expanded and reopened, but granular per-year child counts by site are missing
Reporting and oversight documents describe the construction or repurposing of large family residential centers—most prominently the Dilley, Texas center built during Obama’s second term with roughly 2,400 beds and identified as the nation’s largest family detention center—and mention Karnes and other family facilities, while a GAO-like summary reported three active family-detention facilities with a combined capacity of about 3,326 people in later summaries [2] [3]. These sources establish capacity and some snapshots of populations, yet none of the provided materials furnishes a complete, year-by-year breakdown of how many children were in each facility throughout the Obama years [2] [3].
3. Peaks, policy context and what the numbers imply about detained children
The 2014 surge and the administration’s decision to expand family detention correlate with higher numbers of children in the immigration system: CBP’s spike in family units and in unaccompanied minors forced DHS and ICE to reopen or expand family residential capacity and to detain families "recently arrived" as an enforcement strategy intended to deter further migration [1] [5]. By January 2017, detention occupancy and daily detention figures were reported at historically high levels—over 40,000 people in detention on a given day—though that aggregate figure spans adults and children and does not parse children by facility in the sources here [4].
4. Oversight, litigation and the reporting gaps that matter
Litigation (Flores-related and civil-rights complaints) and advocacy reports document conditions, medical neglect allegations, and legal challenges to family detention practices during Obama’s second term, and those records supply qualitative evidence that children were detained for extended periods in particular centers and that enforcement priorities drove detention choices [6] [7] [8]. However, the documents provided emphasize policy, capacity and aggregate flows rather than producing a centralized dataset enumerating children detained each year at each named facility; therefore any precise per-year, per-facility child count cannot be credibly asserted from these sources alone [6] [8].
5. Bottom line and research steps to close the gap
Available official counts in these sources allow confident statements about surges in family-unit apprehensions (especially FY2014) and about facility capacities such as Dilley’s ~2,400-bed scale and the reported combined capacity of several family centers, but they stop short of supplying the requested year-by-year, facility-level child detainee counts—those would require DHS/ICE/ORR internal detention-population spreadsheets, GAO audits, or FOIA-released daily population rosters not present in the material provided [2] [3] [1]. The evidence thus supports a clear narrative of expansion and increased child involvement in detention during 2014–2016, but not the granular numerical table the question requests [4] [5].