Amid criticism of the reopening of a child-migrant facility in the Trump era, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said it was a ‘difficult choice’ to reopen the Carrizo Springs, Texas, but the best option.
The administration has opened a facility to house up to 700 immigrant teens after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, without parental guidance. The first teens arrived at Carrizo Springs on Monday, according to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which was transformed into a holding facility under former President Donald Trump two years ago. The facility has been closed since July 2019.
“Are these children in containers instead of children in cages?” Peter Doocy of Fox News asked Psaki.
“We have a number of minor minors entering the country without their families,” Psaki replied. “What we are not doing is what the last government did, which separated the children from each other, tore them from the arms of their parents at the border.”
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Psaki said there are limited options for dealing with children arriving at the border alone: to send them back on a “dangerous journey”, to place them quickly with families and sponsors who have not yet been checked , or to reopen those detention facilities.
A growing number of children have been arrested in recent days among migrants along the southern border, hampering the government’s ability to house them.
Psaki added that the new facilities for child migrants have been opened to make room for social distance. She emphasized that the detention facilities were managed by HHS and that they had been ‘refurbished’ and equipped with teachers and a medical team.
Doocy also questioned Psaki about reports that hundreds of children had been detained by the Customs and Border Patrol for more than 72 hours in a temporary facility, the legal limit before they had to be transferred to an HHS facility. Psaki said there were delays due to weather and a lack of capacity to look after the influx of children. “Unfortunately, some have stayed four days, five days or longer, but the goal is to move them to an HHS-sponsored facility as soon as possible.”
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Progressive people tore up the new migrant facility. “It’s not good, it’s never been good, it’s not going to be good either – regardless of the administration or party,” said rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, DN.Y., wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.
She added: “It’s only been two months in this manager and our loaded, unfair immigration system will not change in that time. That’s why bold imagination is so impossible. DHS should not exist, agencies should be reorganized, ICE must go, ban for-profit detention, create climate refugee status and more. “
Biden said his immigration agenda would “take time” to implement to prevent a boom at the border. Weeks in office, he signed executive orders to set up a task force to reunite divorced families and launch a review of the Trump-era program that requires migrants to stay on the southern border in Mexico while their asylum claims are processed.
The Trump administration has instituted a ‘zero tolerance’ policy that has led to family separation, meaning that anyone caught crossing the border illegally would be prosecuted, even if they had little or no previous conviction. The policy has led to thousands of family separations and reports that some families have not found each other today.
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Under this policy, adults were taken to court for criminal proceedings while their children were separated from them. If the charges took longer than 72 hours to process, children from the Customs and Border Protection care would be sent to the Department of Health and Human Services.
However, Trump has signed an order to stop family divorces in 2018.
Fox News’ Brooke Singman contributed to this report.