For a growing number of migrant children, this is their first home in the US: a sprawling campus dotted with beige buildings, massive white tents and metal trailers, next door to a US Air Force base in Homestead, Florida.
The federal government is holding nearly 1,600 migrant children there, at what it calls a “temporary influx” shelter. It has added 250 beds in the past two months and could soon house 2,350 children who crossed the nation’s southern border on their own.
It is the country’s only such temporary quarters for migrant children, after the closure last month of a similar facility in southern Texas, and the only shelter for migrant youths that is run by a for-profit company.
The site is a topic of heated debate, as immigration advocates and US Democratic legislators complain that many traumatized children who fled violence and poverty in their home countries are held in an institutionalized setting for too long before being released to sponsoring families who can better care for them.
Government officials have said that they are trying to safely release children to family members as fast as they can, and that the facility provides the first experience of stability that the children have had after long and often perilous journeys northward.
Their arduous journeys are not necessarily over: Some of the children will gain asylum, which can take years; others will be deported.
As the government seeks to rapidly expand the site’s capacity, it has waived a federal requirement at Homestead meant to ensure that children receive sufficient healthcare.
The US Department of Health and Human Services, which cares for the children, previously required Homestead to maintain a clinician-to-child ratio of 1-12 to provide mental health services, according to a report in November last year, but that requirement has been relaxed to 1-20, a Homestead program director said on Wednesday last week.
The facility sits on federal property, and unlike established children’s shelters, such as smaller group or foster homes that hold migrant children across the country, is not governed by state child welfare regulations designed to protect young people from harm.
On a day when a steady rain poured down, children wearing clear plastic ponchos walked in single file across the grounds, attended by shelter staff members. Some waved and yelled greetings in English and Spanish to visiting reporters.
US President Donald Trump’s administration opened the doors of the Homestead site to the media on the condition that reporters not interact with children, or photograph or record them inside, which they said was to protect the children’s privacy.
For these youths, aged 13 to 17, school is held in large white tents divided into small classrooms. Their instructors are not required to be certified teachers, but must have a bachelor’s degree, and speak English and Spanish.
The younger children sleep in rooms with six sets of bunk beds each. Seventeen-year-olds, who are housed separately, sleep in large, long “bays” with 144 beds each. The older children use toilet stalls in an attached tent.
In recreation areas near the beds were games of dominoes, Jenga and Parcheesi. Outside, children can play soccer, volleyball and basketball on the palm-dotted campus.
Inspirational slogans and other art work by the children decorate building walls, including a drawing of Martin Luther King, Jr with the words “I have a dream” written in Spanish. Another sign atop a doorway says: “Through these doors walk the greatest people in the world” in English.
The facility was first opened during former US president Barack Obama’s administration, but immigration rights advocates said that the Trump administration has stranded children there for longer periods by making it more difficult for them to be released to sponsors, which are usually parents or close relatives.
Youngsters have been there for months, one of them for more than eight months, they said.
Officials said that the children spend an average of 67 days at Homestead before they are released.
About 56km south of Miami, the facility is run by Comprehensive Health Services Inc, a private, for-profit company with a growing line of business in housing immigrant children.
In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission last year, the firm’s parent company, Caliburn International Corp, said that Trump’s immigration policies were driving “significant growth.”
It costs about US$250 per day to house a migrant child at a standard, permanent shelter, Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Mark Weber said.
However, at an influx facility like Homestead, the cost is triple that — about US$750 per day. It is covered by US taxpayers.
In December last year, US Democrats in the US Congress introduced a bill that would ban the use of unlicensed, temporary emergency shelters for unaccompanied minors, saying that stays at the shelters can retraumatize children.
In 2014, record numbers of children crossed the border and were held at US Border Patrol stations in the southwest for days longer than the 72 hours allowed by law, he said.
(That limit applies to how long children can be kept in Border Patrol custody, not Department of Health and Human Services custody, such as at Homestead.)
A lawsuit filed in January on behalf of migrant children by immigrant rights groups accuses the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement of instituting “opaque and arbitrary” bureaucratic hurdles as it processes the release of the children.
One Guatemalan boy, identified only as E.A.R.R., entered the US in July last year and was held at Homestead for five months, the lawsuit said.
His father applied to be his sponsor in July and fulfilled a myriad of requirements set by caseworkers, such as giving the boy a separate room and even moving at one caseworker’s request, the lawsuit alleges. His son was released shortly after the lawsuit was filed.
“At one point, E.A.R.R. suffered from a headache so severe that he broke out in screams and was taken to a hospital,” the lawsuit said. “He has become anxious and depressed, and has begun mental health treatment and medication.”
While some of the children detained in federal facilities over the past year were separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border as part of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy on illegal immigration, most crossed alone, often planning to reunite with a parent or close relative.
The number of unaccompanied children crossing the border is not out of line with previous years, but children are spending far longer in federal custody, government data show. The average length of stay for migrant children in Department of Health and Human Services custody for the first four months of fiscal 2019 was 89 days, compared with 60 days in fiscal 2018 and 41 days in fiscal 2017, according to the data.
As of Feb. 13, 11,500 children were in Department of Health and Human Services custody, down from a record of nearly 15,000 in mid-December, partly because of a change in fingerprinting policy — but still it was nearly 80 percent higher than a year ago, the data show.
“We don’t think most of these kids need to be detained at all,” said Mary Bauer, deputy legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project. “These are kids who have for the most part loving family members who want them.”
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