On Sunday morning, the US Border Patrol held more than 4,200 unaccompanied migrant children in short-term maintenance facilities, including prison-like stations unfit to house minors, according to government records reviewed by CBS News.
Almost 3,000 of the unaccompanied children in the custody of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) were detained for more than 72 hours. CBP is legally required to transfer the majority of unaccompanied minors to the Refugee Resettlement Office (ORR), the agency that oversees licensed shelters to house children, within three days after taking them into custody.
The number of unaccompanied children in CBP custody on Sunday represents a 31% increase in at the beginning of last week, when the agency maintained more than 3,200 minors. The number of children detained for more than three days has more than doubled.
According to government records analyzed by CBS News, an average of 565 unaccompanied minors entered CBP custody every day for the past week.
Records show that unaccompanied minors spend an average of 117 hours at a Border Patrol facility, which Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said “is not a place for children”.
Protection of US Customs and Borders
Collectively, the statistics highlight the humanitarian crisis emerging on the border of the United States with Mexico, resulting from a sustained increase in the number of unaccompanied children in custody and the lack of sufficient shelter to shelter them.
In February, nearly 9,500 unaccompanied children entered custody at the U.S. border, with more than 7,000 transferred to ORR, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Arrivals of Central American teenagers and children only increased in March.
With thousands of children held in short-term Border Patrol facilities, most of which were built to detain migrant men, conditions of detention were overcrowded, according to lawyers who interviewed minors in US custody.
Children interviewed on Thursday by lawyers who oversaw the process as part of a federal lawsuit reported sleeping on the floor; be hungry; bathe only once in up to seven days; and not being able to call family members.
“One of them shared that he could only see the sun when he showered, because you can see the sun through the window,” Neha Desai, a lawyer at the National Youth Law Center, told CBS News, citing interviews with nearly a dozen children , including an 8-year-old unaccompanied girl.
According to government data, the CBP sectors in the Rio Grande Valley and El Paso, Texas – as well as in Yuma and Tucson, Arizona – are all full with regard to space to house unaccompanied children. With more than 2,500 unaccompanied minors in custody, the Vale do Rio Grande sector currently has 363% capacity.
Protection of US Customs and Borders
Representatives from CBP and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not respond to requests for comment.
DHS has repeatedly admitted that it is struggling to sue the large number of families of migrants and children in the department’s custody.
“We are working in partnership with HHS to address the needs of unaccompanied children, which is made even more difficult by the protocols and restrictions needed to protect public health and the health of the children themselves,” Mayorkas said in a statement announcing this Saturday. o deployment of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) employees to help prosecute migrant minors.
With approximately 9,000 children in custody and their beds reduced by social distance measures, the refugee office has been struggling to find space for unaccompanied migrant children. The agency is considering hosting children at a military facility in Virginia, as well as at a federal airfield in California overseen by NASA.
On Sunday, HHS opened a new emergency unit in western Texas to house unaccompanied children, the department confirmed to CBS News. HHS called the facility in Midland, a former oil workers’ camp, a “temporary measure”, saying the goal is to get unaccompanied minors out of the custody of the Border Patrol.
BuzzFeed News reported for the first time about the inauguration of the facility, which will feature American Red Cross employees, contractors and HHS employees.
The refugee agency has released hundreds of migrant children to family members and other sponsors every week, but its rate of increase has been eclipsed by the number of minors taking custody across the United States’ border.
As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) allowed the refugee agency to relax social detachment policies and return to the pre-pandemic bed space, only 200 additional beds were made available, Biden government officials said on Friday. .
HHS also placed officials on the Border Patrol facilities to streamline the process of releasing minors and terminated a Trump-era agreement with DHS that allowed some information about child sponsors to be sent to immigration authorities – a measure intended to encourage undocumented families sponsoring children.