‘I’m very sad every day’: migrant children spend long periods in temporary shelters, lawyers say

(CNN) – The migrant children who crossed the border alone between the United States and Mexico continue to spend extended time in temporary government facilities. This raises concern among lawyers who say conditions are unsuitable for children, according to a court file released Monday.

During the spring, the Joe Biden administration scrambled to remove record numbers of migrant children from Border Patrol detention facilities, which are more like jails, and into temporary facilities, which lawyers admitted are better equipped for children but still have shortcomings. In more than a dozen statements filed Monday, children reported varying conditions in shelters, from receiving undercooked food to limited access to showers.

A team of attorneys had access to speak to the children because they are monitoring the government’s compliance with the 1997 Flores agreement, which governs the conditions under which US officials can detain immigrant children. The lawyers visited the shelter and interviewed children in most of the emergency facilities, which were initially intended for short stays.

Plaintiffs are increasingly concerned about the prolonged detention of thousands of children in facilities [de admisión de emergencia] unlicensed and without standards that, at best, are suitable for short-term emergency care and are inherently incapable of caring for children as required by the Agreement, ”the presentation reads.

As of Sunday, there were 14,467 children in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), many of whom were staying at emergency intake sites. Hundreds of children have spent 60 days or more in these shelters, says the presentation released Monday. The delays caused confusion among the children, who reported they felt desperate to be reunited with their families in the United States.

«Every day I feel very sad. I keep seeing other children leave, “said a 16-year-old from Guatemala in a statement released Monday. The teen has been in an emergency admission shelter in Pecos, Texas, for 62 days, waiting to meet an uncle in Maryland.

“There are other children who have been here around the same time as me, and there is a lot of sadness between us,” the statement said.

This is the facilities where the minors are

HHS, which takes care of unaccompanied migrant children, has a licensed capacity of about 13,500 beds, equipped with a wide variety of services, such as education and recreation, but given the capacity constraints related to the pandemic of coronavirus, the department has had to rely on temporary shelters.

In general, the makeshift facilities for receiving migrants took the form of emergency shelters, which provided basic necessities but failed to provide other services – such as education and case management – to the hundreds of children housed. Conditions in emergency admission shelters can vary, and change regularly, but in some cases, the rapid pace at which shelters were established contributed to their shortcomings.

CNN previously reported on a facility in Texas which the lawyers compared to a “storage” of children. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra told reporters in late May that the Fort Bliss site, like other emergency facilities, allowed the administration to quickly move children from Border Patrol facilities. to a location that could better meet their needs, and contradicted concerns about conditions at the facility.

But attorneys who visited Fort Bliss in early June found that problems persist there. “For example, the children in the Fort Bliss EIS sleep in rows of bunks in giant tents with hundreds of other children, have no privacy, receive almost no structured education, have little to do during the day, and lack care mental health program to address the severe anxiety and distress of children surrounding their prolonged detention, “reads Monday’s presentation.

The lawyers also found problems in other large shelters, where hundreds of children live in confined spaces.

A 17-year-old girl from Guatemala shared her experience sleeping in a tent with 300 other girls at the Fort Bliss site. “We sleep in bunk beds. I used to sleep upstairs, but now I’m downstairs due to my anxiety. I was afraid of falling. The bunks are quite low. I can’t sit on my bunk without hitting my head, ”says her statement.

Children generally reported being allowed outdoor recreation for “just one hour a day,” having little or no privacy, sleeping during the day to pass the time, and having limited calls with family, says the document.

Closed shelters

In Houston, a shelter set up by the National Association of Christian Churches, which had been helping house children, abruptly closed shortly before lawyers visited, according to Neha Desai, immigration director for the National Center for Youth Law. Since then, they have located more than a dozen girls who were at the scene.

The girls described fainting, inadequate or lack of food, lack of clean clothes and restrictions that prevented them from using the bathroom after 10 p.m., according to statements.

“The food was horrible. There was chicken that was boiled and when we opened the chicken it was raw inside, ”says a statement from a 17-year-old Honduran girl.

“During the day and night, they told us that we had to stay in our beds and that we could only get up to go to the bathroom and shower. We had to eat in our beds because there was no other place to eat, ”says a statement from a 17-year-old girl from El Salvador.

She also describes wearing the same clothes for 15 days and that staff members instructed the girls to “wear the same underwear and just turn it inside out, because there were no machines to clean our clothes.”

“HHS is committed to ensuring the well-being of the children in our care. We proactively closed the Erie and Houston facilities because they did not meet our standard of care and we are working tirelessly with contractors to ensure those standards are met in the shelters that operate today, ”an HHS spokesperson previously told CNN in a statement, referring to the emergency shelter established in Houston and another in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Another major challenge in emergency shelters is the lack of case management, usually built into the already established Office of Refugee Resettlement shelters. Case managers work with children to relocate them with sponsors, such as parents or other relatives in the United States while they continue with their immigration procedures.

While the administration has tried to speed up releases in some cases, attorneys found that case management services are still lacking, leading to children staying in the facility for longer periods. The children reported a number of issues, such as case management delays and interruptions, not being able to request a meeting with a case manager, and case managers being removed or replaced without notice or explanation, the presentation says.

Carlos Holguín, one of the attorneys who visited the intake shelters, said in a file that “the stressor most frequently reported by children at Fort Bliss was not knowing how long they would be separated from their loved ones.”

“The children I spoke to seemed visibly distressed as they recounted how they felt to see more and more children with whom they had come to Fort Bliss released, leaving them wondering if they had simply fallen through the cracks and been forgotten” he said in a statement.