The Biden administration is holding unaccompanied children who show up at the border in a facility used during the Trump administration, drawing criticism from both the Left and the Right.
Progressive Democrats are upset that the Department of Health and Human Services’s Office of Refugee Resettlement this week reopened an overflow facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas, to house children between the ages 13 to 17 who show up on the U.S.-Mexico border without a guardian or parent.
“This is not okay, never has been okay, never will be okay – no matter the administration or party,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, wrote on Twitter.
Republicans are infuriated, saying President Biden is held to a different standard than former President Donald Trump, given he is holding children in federal custody.
“Under Trump administration= Kids in cages. Under Biden administration= Kids in migrant facilities. This is the problem with life in America right now,” Trump’s U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley wrote in one example of outcry from conservatives.
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Here are answers to common questions about the news:
What is the facility?
HHS opened a temporary facility on a 66-acre plot of land in Carrizo Springs this week because other HHS facilities were overwhelmed with migrant children. This same Carrizo Springs facility was temporarily used in 2019 under the Trump administration for the same reason as now: because the federal government is taking into custody more children at the border than the 8,000 beds it has available to house them until they can be released to a sponsor in the United States.
Many immigrant advocates want migrants in government custody for as short a time as possible and prefer programs that allow detainees to be released and monitored within the U.S.
Is this the same as the “cages” that critics accused Trump of using to house child migrants?
No. What were called “cages” under Trump is a different department’s facility (more on that below). Carrizo Springs is a large campus where children can go outside and play on basketball courts and are not confined.
“It’s a facility that has open air and playgrounds,” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, immigration and cross-border policy director for the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington.
Then where were those “cages” that became infamous under Trump?
The facility that was labeled as “cages” by Democrats is a single facility in McAllen, Texas. It is maintained by the Department of Homeland Security’s Border Patrol, not HHS.
Sometimes, the Border Patrol holds children in custody before transferring them to HHS facilities, like the one in Carrizo Springs, for longer-term care.
The facility in McAllen, a border town in the Rio Grande Valley, is a massive Central Processing Center, built in the Obama years, where more than 1,000 people can be detained while being booked into the system. Any person arrested on the border is taken into custody by Border Patrol then supposed to be transferred to other agencies, depending on his or her age. Children without parents are sent directly to HHS.
The facility is divided inside with chain-link fencing to keep demographic groups separate — that is, unaccompanied children with other unaccompanied children, single men with single men, and so on. The appearance of children kept behind fencing led to the accusation that they were being caged.
The facility is currently being remodeled to remove the fencing inside.
In the meantime, Border Patrol has put up two large tents to process and hold the adults, families, and children before they are transferred to other agencies. Because the large Border Patrol center is closed, no one is being held in “cages” anymore.
Why is this happening?
Legally, the U.S. government has the ability to send all unaccompanied children back to Mexico during the coronavirus pandemic, which it has continued to do with adults. However, after taking office in January, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas directed CBP not to send any single child south of the border, choosing instead to stick along the lines of a 2007 trafficking law that protected most single children from being deported.
Mayorkas’s decision prevents children from automatically being sent back to Mexico, but it means children must be taken into custody and held by the government for a short period. Immigrant advocates are concerned about the government’s ability to care for children properly.
Brown said the alternative to holding minors in the tents and HHS facilities is releasing them out of the backdoors of Border Patrol stations and that that was not going to happen under any administration because releasing children by themselves in a new country would put the child in danger. Amnesty International USA’s refugee and migrant rights researcher Denise Bell said the government has a responsibility to care as best as possible for people in custody.
Then, how is what Biden doing different from what Trump did?
Biden is making use of holding facilities for migrants just as Trump and former President Barack Obama did. One major difference, though, is that Trump pursued a “zero-tolerance” policy of prosecuting adults for illegal entry that had the effect of more migrant children being separated from families. The policy, the administration admitted, was undertaken to deter families from attempting to come over the border.
“Intention matters,” said immigration policy analyst Cris Ramon. “Anybody who’s saying that this is the same as Trump really aren’t paying attention to the intentionality.”
Biden is using facilities to hold children because he has chosen not to turn them away immediately and must take them into custody for processing in order to release them to family in the U.S later.
“[Biden has] to do something with [children] when they arrive, and that’s where things are getting stuck because HHS, because of COVID, is at reduced capacity at facilities that it owns and operates,” said Brown.
What are Biden’s options?
In the meantime, Bell said, Biden can order HHS to rely on state-licensed facilities and providers to house children, echoing a call from Ocasio-Cortez. That would mean, for instance, that Carrizo Springs would be run by an outside provider, as it was in 2019, rather than by HHS.
But the pandemic further complicates HHS’s ability to house children because rooms must have more space so not to spread the highly contagious virus.
Seven hundred children are being held at the Border Patrol tent facility because the Carrizo Springs facility and its others do not have room for more children. As of earlier this week, HHS reported its 8,000 beds for children were at 90% capacity, and more children are being taken into custody each month. Carrizo Springs opened Monday as an overflow shelter to hold 700 more children.
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With no indication that the arrival of unaccompanied children on the border will decline any time soon, Brown said, the Biden administration should be planning how to hold more children in additional facilities so that it does not have to overcrowd existing tents.
