How long before they're spirited away to detention in another country?The U.S. government has removed most children from a remote Border Patrol station in Texas near the border with Mexico following reports that more than 300 children were detained there and caring for each other with inadequate food, water and sanitation.
Only about 30 children remained at the station outside El Paso on Monday, Rep. Veronica Escobar said after her office was briefed on the situation by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection official.
Most of the infants, toddlers and teens who were held at the Border Patrol station in Clint, Texas, were scheduled to be transferred by Tuesday to shelters and other facilities run by a separate federal agency, the Office of Refugee Resettlement said.
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Although it’s unclear where all the children held at Clint were moved, Escobar said some were sent to another facility on the north side of El Paso called Border Patrol Station 1. Escobar said it’s a temporary site with roll-out mattresses, showers, medical facilities and air conditioning.
But Clara Long, an attorney who interviewed children at Border Patrol Station 1 last week, said conditions were not necessarily better there.
“One boy I spoke with said his family didn’t get mattresses or blankets for the first two nights, and he and his mom came down with a fever,” said Long, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch. “He said there were no toothbrushes, and it was very, very cold.”
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″(Unaccompanied children) are waiting too long in CBP facilities that are not designed to care for children,” ORR spokeswoman Evelyn Stauffer said. “These children should now all be in HHS care as of Tuesday.”
AP
Welcome to America.The Trump administration wants more money to build more child detention centers to hold even more children, citing these relatively higher numbers of border arrivals. It is urging Congress' swift approval of the Department of Homeland Security's supplemental budget request for this purpose.
But that ask glosses over the fact that more children are in immigration custody because over the last several years the government has slowed down the rate at which children are reunified with their families. The government has sought to use children in Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) facilities as bait to arrest and deport the family members who come forward to care for them, according to a report by advocacy groups The Women's Refugee Commission and the National Immigrant Justice Center.
Based on our interviews, officials at the border seem to be making no effort to release children to caregivers-- many have parents in the US -- rather than holding them for weeks in overcrowded cells at the border, incommunicado from their desperate loved ones.
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A second-grader we interviewed entered the room silently but burst into tears when we asked who she traveled with to the US. "My aunt," she said, with a keening cry. A bracelet on her wrist had the words "US parent" and a phone number written in permanent marker. We called the number on the spot and found out that no one had informed her desperate parents where she was being held. Some of the most emotional moments of our visit came witnessing children speak for the first time with their parents on an attorney's phone.
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Congress should take action -- not by approving more money for detention -- but by requiring immigration agencies to cease separating children from family members unless that's in the interest of the child, release and reunify children as soon as possible and cease using them as bait to arrest family members.
These unconscionable abuses against children are not what America should stand for.
CNN
UPDATE:
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