Border Patrol
Retention areas within the Donna tent facilities.
Lawyers who visited a Texas Border Patrol tent for unaccompanied minors who recently crossed the border said some of the children were held for up to eight days in crowded areas, with no showers or the ability to call their families.
Leecia Welch, senior director of child welfare at the National Center for Youth Law and another lawyer for the organization, interviewed 20 children currently detained by the Border Patrol in Donna, Texas. All children have been in the custody of the border security agency for at least five days, over the three-day limit that they are allowed to be in the custody of CBP under the law.
“The bottom line is that these children are being kept in CBP for much longer than they should have been,” Welch told BuzzFeed News.
CBP, the parent agency of the Border Patrol, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Welch said she and her colleague, Neha Desai, were not authorized by the Justice Department to visit the facility alone, but were able to speak with the children held in Donna’s tent.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A 1997 court settlement known as the Flores Agreement sets the standards under which immigrant children can be detained. As part of the agreement, lawyers can visit places where immigrant children are kept to ensure that they are not kept in violation of standards. In 2019, visits to the Border Patrol facilities revealed that the children were being kept in dirty, overcrowded and unhealthy conditions.
The Biden government said it is trying to get children out of custody of the Border Patrol to the Refugee Resettlement Office (ORR), which houses immigrant children, as quickly as possible, despite the increasing number of minors they are taking into custody. .
This weekend, there were 4,200 unaccompanied immigrant children in the custody of the Border Patrol, against 3,700 on Thursday. Almost 3,000 of them, over the three-day limit, could be in custody of the Border Patrol, according to government statistics analyzed by BuzzFeed News.
In response to an increase in the number of unaccompanied minors crossing the border that overloads Border Patrol facilities, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) instructed FEMA to help receive, shelter and transport children. Government officials also announced the opening of a new emergency entrance center for unaccompanied immigrant children to help ease overcrowding conditions at border patrol posts.
Some of them detained at the 185,000 square foot facility, told Welch that they were only allowed to leave every few days for about 20 minutes.
“Many children told me that they had not seen ‘el cielo’, the sky,” said Welch. “That the only time they saw the sun was when they showered.”
Some of the children said they had not showered for six days, while others said they were able to shower, although not as often as they would like.
“Many of these children have been on a dangerous journey for a long time, have crossed a river and are particularly in need of an opportunity to take a bath,” said Welch.
Children sleep on rugs on the floor, and when there are not enough rugs for everyone, some children reported having to sleep on the bare floor or on benches, Welch said. It is unclear how often this happened, as the population of unaccompanied minors in Donna’s tent changed frequently, Welch said.
Some children said they were hungry, but they told Welch that they ate three meals a day and could buy snacks if they asked.
The children, especially the younger ones, were very scared and confused about where they were and where they were going, Welch said. Most of the children were upset that they couldn’t call the family or that they couldn’t see a brother they crossed the border with, because children of different genders are kept in different areas.
“They didn’t know about the process,” said Welch. “None of the kids I talked to had access to the phone.”
Some of the children reported being told they could make a phone call just as they were about to leave the Border Patrol facilities to go into the custody of the Refugee Resettlement Office (ORR), which houses immigrant children, Welch said.
“What really impressed us was how many very young children are in Donna and how many of them have close relatives in the United States,” said Welch. “There must be a way to release the children directly from Donna to the family, instead of being transported to the ORR.”
It would be a challenging process, Welch said, but it would also help with the capacity problem that the Border Patrol faces when it comes to unaccompanied minors.
On Friday, the Biden government said it had rescinded a Trump-era deal that allowed HHS, the parent agency ORR, to deliver fingerprints and other information from sponsors to DHS. The deal led to the arrest of sponsors who went ahead to remove unaccompanied minors from government custody. The agreement and subsequent arrests of these sponsors – mainly because they had no documents – led to a frightening effect and decreased the number of adults who could take custody of unaccompanied children.
Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting.