Border Patrol
Keep areas inside the Donna tent facility.
Lawyers who visited a Texas Border Patrol tent for minor immigrants and minor children who recently crossed the border said some of the children were detained in cloudy areas for up to eight days without showers or the ability to call their families.
Leecia Welch, senior director of child welfare at the National Center for Youth Law and another attorney at the organization, interviewed 20 children currently being held by Border Patrol in Donna, Texas. All the children were under the supervision of the border enforcement agency for at least five days, over the three day limit they may be in CBP supervision under legislation.
“The end result is that these children are being held in CBP longer than they should have been,” Welch told BuzzFeed News.
CBP, the parent agency of Border Patrol, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Welch said she and her colleague, Neha Desai, were not allowed by the Justice Department to tour the facility themselves, but that they could talk to children held at the Donna tent site.
The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A 1997 settlement, known as the Flores Agreement, sets the standards by which immigrant children can be detained. As part of the agreement, attorneys can visit sites where immigrant children are detained to ensure they are not in violation of the standards. In 2019, visits to the border patrol facility revealed that children were being held in dirty, overcrowded and unhygienic conditions.
The Biden government has said it is trying to move children from the border patrol to the Refugee Refugee Office (ORR), which houses immigrant children, as soon as possible, despite the growing number of minors arresting them.
As of this weekend, there were 4,200 unaccompanied children in immigrants in the border patrol, compared to 3,700 on Thursday. Nearly 3,000 of them over the three-day limit they can keep in Border Patrol, according to government statistics reviewed by BuzzFeed News.
In response to an increase in the number of underage minor children crossing the border through overwhelming border patrol facilities, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has instructed FEMA to help the children receive, shelter and transport. Government officials have also announced the opening of a new emergency center for unaccompanied immigrant children to facilitate overcrowded conditions at Border Patrol Stations.
Some of them are kept in the 185,000-square-foot facility and told Welch that they are only allowed to go outside every twenty minutes every few days.
“A lot of the kids told me they did not see ‘el cielo,'” Welch said. “That the only time they saw the sun was when they showered.”
Some of the children said they went without a shower for six days, while others said they could shower, but not as often as they wanted.
“Many of these children have long been on a dangerous journey across a river and they especially need the opportunity to shower,” Welch said.
The children slept on rugs on the floor, and if there were not enough rugs for everyone, some children reported that they had to sleep on the bare floor or benches, Welch said. It is unclear how often this has happened, as the population of minor minors at the Donna tent facility has changed frequently, Welch said.
Some children said they were hungry, but told Welch that they ate three meals a day and that they could get snacks if they asked.
The children, especially the younger ones, were very scared and confused about where they were and where they would go next, Welch said. Most children were upset because they could not call family or could not see a brother or sister with whom they crossed the border, because children of different genders are being held in different areas.
“They were in the dark about the process,” Welch said. “None of the children I spoke to had access.”
Some of the children said they could make a call just as they were leaving the border patrol facility to go under the supervision of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), where immigrant children are housed, Welch said.
“What we really noticed was how many very young children there are in Donna and how many of them have immediate family members in the US,” Welch said. “There needs to be a way to release children directly from Donna to family, rather than transporting them to ORR.”
It will be a challenging process, Welch said, but it will also help with the capacity problem facing Border Patrol when it comes to unaccompanied minors.
The Biden government said Friday that it has revoked a Trump-era agreement that allows HHS, the parent agency ORR, to hand over fingerprints and other information from sponsors to DHS. The agreement led to the arrest of sponsors who came forward to take unaccompanied minors out of government custody. The agreement and the subsequent arrests of these sponsors – mostly because they were not documented – led to a cold effect and reduced the number of adults who could supervise unaccompanied children.
Hamed Aleaziz reported.