New facilities crop up to ease crowding of migrants – By Adriana Gomez Licon and Amy Taxin (Associated Press) / April 18 2021
For the third time in seven years, U.S. officials are scrambling to handle a dramatic increase in children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border alone, leading to a massive expansion of emergency facilities to house them as more kids arrive than are being released to close relatives in the United States.
More than 22,000 migrant children were in government custody as of Thursday, with 10,500 sleeping on cots at convention centers, military bases and other large venues likened to hurricane evacuation shelters with little space to play and no privacy. More than 2,500 are being held by border authorities in substandard facilities.
The government failed to prepare for a big rise in the number of children traveling alone as President Joe Biden ended some of his predecessor’s hard-line immigration policies and decided he wouldn’t quickly expel unaccompanied kids from the country like the Trump administration did for eight months.
So many children are coming that there’s little room in long-term care facilities, where capacity shrank significantly during the coronavirus pandemic. As a result, minors are packed into Border Patrol facilities not meant to hold them longer than three days, or they’re staying for weeks in the mass housing sites that often lack the services they need. Lawyers say some have not seen social workers who can reunite them with family in the U.S.
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