Immigration advocates are expressing concern about the conditions in which migrant children are being held at mass shelters.
The shelters, run by the Department of Health and Human Services, include a military base in El Paso, Texas, a convention center in Dallas, a coliseum in San Antonio, and a former oil field in Midland, Texas.
The locations were set up when the Biden administration intended to move tens of thousands of migrant children out of jail-like detention facilities run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection along the U.S.-Mexico border and into safer emergency shelters, according to NPR.
Leecia Welch, an attorney at the nonprofit National Center for Youth Law, said she saw “a lot of very traumatized children” in the tent shelters at Fort Bliss.
“The girls told us that a lot of the girls in the tent were crying a lot,” Welch said, “and they needed to talk to someone because they were having thoughts of self-harm.”
The Biden administration, claiming it inherited an under-resourced program for unaccompanied migrant children, defended the use of the emergency shelters.
The shelters currently are housing nearly 20,000 migrant children who came to the U.S. without their parents.
The average stay at the shelters has dropped from 45 days to about 30 days, according to a senior administration official, who added they have high standards for childcare.
Some children, however, are remaining in the shelters much longer than the average.
Advocates say one problem is there are not enough case workers working to find families and vet sponsors for the children.
Welch said it was premature for the administration “to take a victory lap” when there was government data showing more than 300 children have been at the Dallas convention center for more than 50 days.
“From my perspective, as a child advocate and as a mom,” Welch said, “when you’ve got 2,300 kids sleeping in the same massive conference room and they’re only getting a few minutes of fresh air a day while they’re waiting to take a shower in the loading dock, and it’s going on for months, I mean, the government is just not living up to an acceptable standard of care.”
NPR cited 16-year-old Guatemalan Lidia Cuyuch Brito, who has been in U.S. government custody for 70 days. Initially held in Texas, she’s presently in Pennsylvania.
Brito’s older sister, 32-year-old Juana, lives in Iowa City, and says she repeatedly has sent paperwork seeking to take custody of Lidia, but has received little information.
“The truth is I don’t know what is happening with her,” said Juana Cuyuch Brito, adding Lidia was lonely and confused about why other children have been able to leave and not her.
Attorney Peter Schey, co-founder of the nonprofit Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, has argued the emergency shelters are a violation of the Flores pact, which determines the conditions for holding migrant kids.
Schey said the shelters are not licensed, but his team has been warned against pursuing the case in court.
“If we put too much pressure on the administration for its violations of the Flores settlement and its unnecessary detention of these children,” Schey said, “it could easily respond, and the suggestion has been made to us that it may respond by simply changing part of its policy.”
Schey said, for example, the government could stop allowing children older than 14 into the country, and remove kids ages 15-17.
“We do not want to be responsible for that,” Schey said. “As bad as the conditions may be for these children in stadiums and in convention centers, they are an improvement over being forced to live on the streets in some border town where children are subject to extortion, to rape, to crime, etcetera.”
One Justice Department official in the Obama administration said the facilities should be licensed but added there was some leeway under the law during emergency conditions.
“In times that there is a surge, the administration does not have to have the minor in a licensed facility that is not secure, but they have to show that they’re moving as quickly as possible to having that infrastructure,” said Leon Fresco, who previously worked on this issue. “But it’s not an infrastructure you can get in a matter of days or weeks; it takes months.”
Department of Health and Human Services officials, who said they were working to increase the number of licensed beds, told NPR they notify Flores lawyers about every new shelter and welcome them to visit.
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Source: Newmax
