Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Sites for migrant kids raise safety concerns
McALLEN, Texas — The U.S. government has stopped taking migrant teenagers to a converted camp for oil field workers in West Texas as it faces questions about the safety of emergency sites it is quickly setting up to hold children crossing the southern border.
The converted camp has faced multiple issues in the four days since the Biden administration opened it amid a scramble to find space for migrant children. More than 10% of the camp’s population has tested positive for covid-19 and at least one child had to be hospitalized.
An official working at the Midland, Texas, facility said most of the Red Cross volunteers staffing the site don’t speak Spanish, even though the teenagers they care for are overwhelmingly from Central America. When the facility opened, there weren’t enough new clothes to give to teenagers who had been wearing the same shirts and pants for several days, the official said. And no case managers were on site to begin processing the minors’ release to family elsewhere in the U.S.
Taking in teenagers while still setting up basic services
“was kind of like building a plane as it’s taking off,” said the official, who declined to be named because of government restrictions.
U.S. Health and Human Services notified local officials in Midland on Wednesday that it had no plans to bring more teenagers to the site, according to an email. Health and Human Services spokesman Mark Weber said the outlet was on “pause for now.” There were still 485 youths there as of Wednesday, 53 of whom had tested positive for covid-19.
The government Wednesday took about 200 teenagers to another emergency site at the downtown Dallas convention center, which could expand to up to 3,000 youths. Health and Human Services will not open a facility for children at Moffett Federal Airfield near San Francisco, Democratic Rep. Anna Eshoo of California said.
President Joe Biden’s administration has been sharply criticized for its response to a surge in border crossings by unaccompanied migrant children. As roughly 4,500 children wait in Border Patrol facilities that are unequipped for long-term detention, with some sleeping on floors, Health and Human Services has rushed to open holding sites across the country and tried to expedite its processes for releasing children. About 9,500 youths are in the department’s custody.
In addition, the U.S. has seen a sharp increase in Central American families arriving at the border who are fleeing violence, poverty and the effects of a destructive hurricane. Biden has kept intact an emergency measure enacted by the Trump administration during the pandemic that allows the government to quickly expel them to Mexico, though families with young children are generally allowed to enter through South Texas.
The Biden administration is not expelling migrant children unaccompanied by a parent or legal guardian. Several hundred a day are crossing the border, going first to often-packed Border Patrol stations while they await placement in the Health and Human Services system.
The department has turned to the American Red Cross to care for teenagers in both Midland and Dallas, a departure from the standard practice of having paid, trained staff watch over them. Red Cross volunteers sit outside portable trailers in Midland to monitor the teenagers inside. Staff from Health and Human Services and the U.S. Public Health Service are also at both sites.
Neither Health and Human Services nor the Red Cross would say whether the volunteers had to pass FBI fingerprint checks, which are more exhaustive than a commercial background check. Both agencies have declined repeated requests for interviews.
The waiver of those background checks at another camp in Tornillo, Texas, in 2018 led to concerns that the government was endangering child welfare. Health and Human Services requires caregivers in its permanent facilities to pass an FBI fingerprint check, and the agency’s inspector general found in 2018 that waiving background checks combined with not having enough mental health clinicians were “serious safety and health vulnerabilities.”
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there was not sufficient mental health care at the Midland camp for children who typically have fled their countries of origin and undergone a traumatic journey into the country.
In a statement earlier this week, Health and Human Services said it was rushing to get children out of Border Patrol custody and that emergency sites “will provide a safer and less over-crowded environment where children are cared for and processed as quickly as possible.”
The Red Cross says its volunteers in Midland and Dallas “have received intensive training in sheltering operations and covid-19 safety” and had all undergone background checks. The agency declined to say how many hours of training each volunteer received.
U.S. Rep. August Pfluger, a Republican who represents Midland, was allowed to visit the site soon after it opened and saw the portable units that serve as rooms for each teenager.
“It’s a professional facility that was intended for workers,” he said.
But Pfluger and other Midland officials said the Biden administration wasn’t answering their questions or giving them assurance that officials would keep the surrounding community safe. Health and Human Services opened the Midland site without notifying some top local officials who say many of their questions aren’t being answered.
The email the department sent to local officials this week details the haste with which government officials opened the site. It says officials identified the camp March 12 and signed a contract the next day. The first group of teenagers arrived Sunday night.
“People don’t trust what they’re doing. They don’t feel secure,” Pfluger said. “The lack of transparency only serves to magnify that problem.”
Separately, Republicans overseeing their party’s efforts to elect senators and governors trekked to the Arizona-Mexico border Friday and laid blame for a surge in migrants at the feet of Biden as the GOP looks to weaponize the influx against Democrats.
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and Florida Sen. Rick Scott said Biden’s decision to relax some of former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies has been a magnet for migrants.
“The system is broken,” Ducey told reporters after flying over the border region near Douglas, Ariz. “Joe Biden has broken our border.”
Ducey demanded that Biden “state clearly that our borders are not open and our amnesty law has not changed,” asked for better covid-19 testing of detained migrants and called for Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to visit the border.
Mayorkas had announced plans hours earlier to visit a migrant processing center in El Paso, Texas.
RELEASES POSE PROBLEMS
Meanwhile, as the Biden administration thaws an immigration system that had largely been frozen over the past year, towns along the 1,954-mile border are bracing for what federal officials warn will be a sharp increase in releases of migrants in their communities in the coming weeks.
It is already happening in some places, prompting some mayors and other local officials to appeal for federal help. Aid workers who are operating shelters to help migrants along their way say they are feeling the strain on medical resources and their own facilities, although they discount fears that the newcomers are a threat. Most, they say, are eager to reunite with their family members elsewhere in the country and do not want to get in any trouble that would delay them.
Eagle Pass, a Texas city of 29,000 people, is seeing as many as 100 migrants arriving every day, largely from Haiti, Cuba and Ecuador. In Yuma, a city of 96,000 in southwest Arizona, Mayor Douglas Nicholls said border authorities had released more than 1,300 migrants in his city since mid-February. In Del Rio, Texas, a town of 36,000 about 145 miles west of San Antonio, more than 1,300 migrants have arrived so far in March, up from fewer than 500 in February.
Earlier this week, eight migrants who were in the country illegally were killed outside Del Rio after they were involved in a high-speed chase with authorities and the pickup they were riding in struck another vehicle head-on.
“I have only four deputies working for a 3,200-squaremile county and 110 miles of border,” said Val Verde County Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez, whose department patrols the border lands around Del Rio. “It’s just unsustainable.”
Officials from U.S. Customs and Border Protection have been informing elected officials and nonprofit leaders along much of the border that the agency is preparing for even larger releases of migrants, basing assessments on shelter capacity in larger cities and on rules that require the agency to release migrants near where they are arrested and processed.
The warnings have prompted many to fear a repeat of the mass releases that strained border communities in 2019. The Trump administration largely shut down processing of new asylum claims along the border during the pandemic last year, and officials in cities along the border worry that the latest plan to get the system going again will present them with burdens they are not ready to take on.
“I would call it a crisis with an exclamation point,” said Don McLaughlin Jr., the mayor of Uvalde, a town of 16,000 about 60 miles northeast of Eagle Pass. “We changed administrations, we changed the policies, and it’s like the floodgates have opened.”
Federal officials have said they are doing the best they can to smoothly handle the growing number of migrants at the border and are working to expand the available space in federal shelters. The Federal Emergency Management Agency this week made $110 million of funding available to local nonprofit and government organizations that have helped to care for released migrants.
“The situation at the southwest border is difficult,” Mayorkas said in a statement this week. “We are working around the clock to manage it, and we will continue to do so.”
The overall numbers of released migrants are still relatively small, but volunteer groups along the border are preparing for a bigger influx after Mayorkas warned that the administration is expecting the largest number of migrant apprehensions in 20 years.
Most single adults and families are being quickly expelled under an emergency health order invoked by the Trump administration as a protection against the coronavirus. Migrant families, Mayorkas said, are being allowed to enter the United States when Mexico does not have the capacity to house them at its shelters — a situation that accounts for most of the releases in border towns in recent weeks.
The numbers could go far higher when, as expected, the Biden administration eases the pandemic-related border restrictions and many more migrants are able to pursue asylum petitions.