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We started this newsletter in 2018 to closely document the treatment of refugee children in U.S. care. It was a story that dominated the Trump era after the zero-tolerance immigration policy brought family separation.
Now, the issue is once again front and center, less than two months into a Biden administration that pledged to dramatically change how the U.S. treats immigrants. Pushed by the fallout from deadly hurricanes and an even deadlier pandemic, record numbers of refugee children are showing up at the U.S. border without their parents. Facing an overwhelmed immigration system, the Biden administration is turning to the same problematic solutions that have left children living in squalid conditions that violate federal law.
As of this week, more than 4,200 youth are now languishing at Border Patrol stations with an average custody time of 120 hours. Under federal law, they can spend only up to 72 hours in these facilities, which are the same ones that came under scrutiny under former President Donald Trump. In 2019, lawyers and doctors who toured the stations told horrifying stories about older children taking care of toddlers, lice infestations and children in soiled clothes with no regular access to showers.
The children are supposed to be transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which runs a shelter system charged with keeping them safe until they can be placed with a relative or suitable sponsor. But that system has now reached capacity.
And the situation is worsening. Border agents are encountering 565 children on average per day, up from 313 children per day last month, NBC News reports. To process children out of border facilities at a faster pace, the Department of Homeland Security has directed FEMA to “support a government-wide effort over the next 90 days to safely receive, shelter, and transfer unaccompanied children who make the dangerous journey to the U.S. southwest border.”
“We are on pace to encounter more individuals on the southwest border than we have in the last 20 years,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Tuesday.
The border facilities, with their frigid temperatures, cramped concrete cells and hard benches, are not built to keep children for long periods of time. Agents are bringing in bunk beds, some of them three bunks high, to accommodate children as young as 6 years old, CNN reports. Many haven’t taken a shower or seen the sunlight in days. Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar of Texas, who visited a border facility last week, told the El Paso Times that the conditions inside are “unacceptable.”
"The center is at capacity – pre-COVID capacity,” she said. “COVID capacity should be significantly lower. I did see everybody, including small children, wearing masks. It's an unacceptable situation."
The government is also opening emergency “influx” shelters. These makeshift shelters of tents and trailers are used during peak immigration periods when the government’s regular shelter system can’t contain the number of children in detention. Unlike the regular shelters used by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, influx shelters aren’t monitored by state agencies for child care violations and can house thousands of children at a time. Lawyers and advocates previously criticized the Trump administration for keeping children in these settings for months, sometimes without access to legal services. In 2018, we wrote about the secrecy surrounding an influx shelter made up of large tents near El Paso, Texas. It closed the following year.
But in spite of these previous problems and faced with a growing number of children at the border, the new administration is resorting to these influx facilities. A 66-acre site in Carrizo Springs, Texas, that served as an influx shelter under Trump is being reactivated to hold up to 700 youth between the ages of 13 and 17. Another temporary shelter is opening in Midland, Texas. And this week, the Biden administration announced plans to house boys between the ages of 15 and 17 at a convention center in Dallas in what it is calling a “decompression center.”
Some immigration advocates say they want to see the Biden administration move children to smaller shelters or foster care programs, where they can receive more individualized care.
“We’d really like to see them reform the system and really focus on smaller, better places for kids and improving the process overall,” Leah Chavla, a senior policy adviser at the Women’s Refugee Commission, told Politico.
Other advocates point out that withdrawing the Trump administration’s pandemic ban on immigration at the border would allow children to come with their families, so there would be no need to place them in influx or regular shelters. Last year, the Trump administration invoked the ban, under Title 42 of the U.S. Code, to turn back migrants at the border during the pandemic. The policy no longer applies to unaccompanied children, but it does to other migrants such as adults and families traveling with children.
As my colleague Aura Bogado told Democracy Now last week, President Joe Biden knew he was likely to face a humanitarian crisis at the border. She noted that shortly after the election, border agents had apprehended 1,000 children within six days.
“The Biden administration long knew that there would be an increase of children at the southern border and had a long time to prepare. While he’s only been in office less than two months, he had been elected prior to that,” Aura said. “And he campaigned on specifically changing policies and practices that happened under the Trump administration. Some of that has indeed happened. But when it comes to the number of children that are in certain facilities, whether they’re cages or shelters, and how long they’re being kept for, we haven’t really seen that much of a change.”
Watch the interview here.
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