Union officials who visited a Texas Border Patrol facility while hundreds of unaccompanied children were still being held inside said they were heartbroken to find notes on children’s mattresses that portray the plight of parentless kids being held in custody.
Two senior officials from the National Border Patrol Council’s El Paso chapter told the Washington Examiner they saw the handwritten notes on the sleeping cots during a visit to the Clint, Texas, facility with health officials in early June.
The union had brought in doctors from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention weeks earlier to examine the psychological and physical effects on agents and migrants at this and other facilities. The local union is independent of Border Patrol, and it advocates for agents’ welfare and the upholding of detention standards.
During the CDC’s two-day visit, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Health Hazard Evaluation formally evaluated how agents were handling occupational health issues.
“One of the things that really struck him [the behavioral doctor] was we toured that facility and the little cots they have there, and children would write little messages to other children coming in — really heartbreaking stuff,” said Wesley Farris, second vice president of NBPC’s Local 1929 Chapter.
“The one message that made the guy cry was, ‘Don’t worry. God will get you through this,’ written in Spanish,” Farris said. “It was just soul-crushing, and that hit him really hard when we read that.”
Photos provided to the Washington Examiner show names, messages in Spanish, hearts, flowers, and other scribbles on cots.
Farris said the local chapter released the photos so the public can get a better understanding of what it is like for children who have been stuck in Border Patrol custody while they wait for beds to open up at Health and Human Services facilities.
“This is what Border Patrol agents are living with every day. And we’re human,” he said. “There’s only so long you can be surrounded by suffering until it starts to affect you.”
The chapter’s president, Joe Frescas, also confirmed seeing the notes, but did not comment further. One of the CDC officials on site told the Washington Examiner he was “unable to discuss an ongoing health hazard evaluation” and could not comment on his visit.
The Clint facility is located 20 miles southeast of the city and is one of 11 Border Patrol stations in the West Texas/New Mexico region. At the time of the messages, Border Patrol had been shuffling most unaccompanied children taken into custody in the area to this one station.
Agents in this region have seen four times the number of unaccompanied children arriving at the international border this fiscal year compared to the previous year. More than 13,200 children traveling without parents have shown up in El Paso between October and May versus 3,100 in the same period last year.
The station was singled out in a recent Associated Press report because lawyers who toured the facility said kids were in sub-standard holding conditions and were being kept too long in Customs and Border Protection custody rather than being transferred to the Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement for care.
Federal agencies are required to release minors as quickly as possible and hold them in the least restrictive environment possible, according to a mandate in the 1997 court settlement in Flores v. Reno. Children who arrive at the border without parents must be transferred to Health and Human Services, which will then find a family member within the United States to release them to.
Due to the high volume of children arriving on the southern border, the Office of Refugee Resettlement does not have enough bed space available to accept the number of children Border Patrol continues taking into custody. Adults are supposed to be released from Border Patrol custody within three days and children are to be moved out even quicker.
Farris said the union made recommendations on several occasions during the spring on how to improve conditions inside the facility, but that, ultimately, Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector leadership, which is responsible for how children are housed and cared for, did not respond to the feedback.
