Border Patrol still holding children beyond legal time limit

Many of the nearly 2,000 unaccompanied migrant children being held in overcrowded U.S. Border Patrol facilities have been there beyond legally allowed time limits, including some who are 12 or younger, according to new government data obtained by The Washington Post.

Federal law and court orders require that children in Border Patrol custody be transferred to more-hospitable shelters no longer than 72 hours after they are apprehended. But some unaccompanied children are spending longer than a week in Border Patrol stations and processing centers, according to two Customs and Border Protection officials and two other government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the unreleased data. One government official said about half of the children in custody — 1,000 — have been with the Border Patrol for longer than 72 hours, and another official said that more than 250 children 12 or younger have been in custody for an average of six days.

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“I don’t have any beds, because we’re meant to be short-term processing — not even holding,” one CBP official said of the agency’s facilities here in the Rio Grande Valley, at which some children are sleeping on mats on the floor. “I have stools and benches, but I have no beds. . . . Our facilities are not built for long-term holding, and they’re certainly not built to house children for very long at all.”

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The Washington Post this week made a rare visit inside the [McAllen (Texas) Border Patrol station], where adults and their toddler children were packed into concrete holding cells, many of them sleeping head-to-foot on the floor and along the wall-length benches, as they awaited processing at a sparsely staffed circle of computers known as “the bubble.” Hallways and offices previously designated for photocopying and other tasks now held crates and boxes of bread, juice, animal crackers, baby formula and diapers. One cell held adolescent boys, many of whom stood in the small space, peering out through a glass wall. One stood urinating behind the low wall that obscured the toilet in back. In the adjacent cell, several boys who appeared to be of elementary school age slept curled up on concrete benches, a few clutching Mylar emergency blankets. Outside in the parking lot, a chain-link fence enclosure held dozens of women and children, many of them eschewing the air-conditioned tents to lie on the pavement.

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Border officials said the immigration system is so overwhelmed that the normal conduits meant to funnel children out of Border Patrol custody and into Department of Health and Human Services shelters have broken down. Migrants are arriving faster than Customs and Border Protection can process them.

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Border Patrol has apprehended nearly 45,000 unaccompanied children since October, according to government data. A spokesman for HHS, whose Office of Refugee Resettlement is tasked with providing longer-term shelters for those children, said border authorities had referred approximately 40,800 unaccompanied children to its custody as of the end of April. That marked a 57 percent increase from the previous year, and HHS said it is on pace to care for the largest number of unaccompanied minors in the program’s history this fiscal year.

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Border Patrol officials say there are 6,400 people in custody in the Rio Grande Valley, including 931 unaccompanied children. The facilities are so overcrowded that officials say roughly 40 percent of the sector’s 3,100 Border Patrol agents are working on processing new migrant detainees at any given time.

That has left fewer agents out in the vast and wild tangle of brush that stretches for hundreds of miles along the twisting Rio Grande.

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“It’s a daily battle,” said one agent who spoke on the condition of anonymity to comment candidly about the work at the border. “You catch a thousand people a day, and then you can only process 750 a day. The agents are working their tails off trying to get this squared away, but it’s a daily struggle with the amount of people we’re encountering.”

  WaPo

Perhaps we need more processing personnel on the job?

HHS officials said that the agency is aware that 2,000 children are detained and awaiting transfer and that it has space for them — but they said the agency’s responsibility for the minors begins only once they are delivered to the department’s custody. DHS officials at multiple agencies said HHS is not placing children in shelters fast enough.

Or finger-pointing. Finger-pointing usually gets things done, right?

Six children — five from Guatemala and one from El Salvador — have died after being taken into federal custody at the border since September. A teenager who had contracted the flu died last week in the Rio Grande Valley while in Border Patrol custody, leading agents to identify a small-scale flu outbreak.

UPDATE: