More than 1,400 unaccompanied migrant children are being sent to the site of a WWII internment camp. Why is the system this broken?
Families wait to be searched and loaded into transport vans taking them to the U.S. Border Patrol McAllen Station after they were caught in a group of 102 immigrants that illegally crossed into the United States from Mexico on Wednesday, May 29th, 2019 in Los Ebanos, Texas.On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it will begin holding unaccompanied migrant children at Fort Sill, a 150-year-old military base in Oklahoma.
In the month of May alone, 11,000 children arrived the border unaccompanied, and in a statement the DHS said it has detained 40,900 children from the beginning of the year through the end of April, a 57% increase from last year. As of early June, over 13,000 migrant children were being in shelters contracted by the government. Unaccompanied children are kept in federal custody until they can be placed with a sponsor, usually a relative already living in the United States.
Housing is not the only service the Trump administration is struggling to provide to migrant children. Last week, it was announced that activities, including “education services, legal services and recreation” for migrant children, would be “scaled back or discontinued,” as it was costing too much money given the record numbers of children in custody. The HHS has requested nearly $3 billion from Congress to expand care and shelter.
Such reports of incompetence at the border are becoming increasingly commonplace. Earlier this month,that a botched family reunification effort last July left 37 migrant children between the ages of 5 and 12 in vans overnight. Most spent close to 24 hours in the vans, baking in the Texas heat.
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