Young girls who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without parents and were taken into custody by federal agents have been held in a Border Patrol tent for three weeks due to space shortages at government health facilities, the Washington Examiner has learned.
Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat whose district straddles the U.S. border with Mexico, learned from Department of Health and Human Services officials Wednesday that the government is failing to move girls out of detention facilities quickly. But it has been able to transfer young boys to HHS custody quickly.
“What’s happening at Donna Border Patrol facility is they’re moving boys out, but they’re not moving girls,” Cuellar told the Washington Examiner Wednesday evening. “There are some girls there that have been there over 20 days, over 20 days, when they’re supposed to be there only 72 hours.”
Cuellar added that he did not fault the Border Patrol for neglecting to move the girls out of its pop-up facility in South Texas but that the federal agency is supposed to hand children over to HHS. Because the health department has not secured enough beds, the girls have no place to go. Boys and girls are not held in the same rooms at HHS facilities.
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“They can’t release them out in the streets,” said Cuellar, who is a father to two daughters. “People say, ‘Well, you got to get them to the families.’ Well, Border Patrol — that’s not their mission. They’re not going to do that. It’s the job of HHS ORR [Office Refugee Resettlement], and they have to move faster. And apparently, they’ve moved to set up facilities for boys, but now they’re going to move faster to move facilities for girls.”
Cuellar said HHS is planning to open up additional influx facilities in San Antonio, Texas, the closest major city to the south and central part of the state. Earlier Wednesday, HHS announced that up to 2,000 unaccompanied children would be held at the San Diego Convention Center in Southern California. It is the fifth emergency facility to be opened by the Biden administration as children increasingly show up on the southern border.
Last March, at the recommendation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Border Patrol began immediately returning all adults and children to their home countries in an effort to avoid filling detention centers with people amid the coronavirus pandemic. In January, President Joe Biden stopped sending single minors under the age of 18 back to their home countries. Since then, the number of children coming over the southern border has exploded.
Border officials expect 117,000 children will arrive without parents or guardians in 2021. The number is higher than the 68,000 taken into custody during the 2014 surge of unaccompanied children and the 80,000 who arrived during the humanitarian crisis at the border in 2019. As of Tuesday, CBP had nearly 5,000 children in its care and HHS, 11,500.
When children cross the border between land ports of entry where vehicles and pedestrians are meant to come over, they are taken by Border Patrol agents to regional stations for processing. The stations were built to hold adults for no more than three days before they are transferred to other agencies or returned south of the border. Children are to be quickly turned over to HHS, which oversees shelters where children will be held an average of one month while the government looks for adults based in the United States who can claim custody of the children.
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HHS and the Border Patrol have opened several influx facilities in Texas, in the form of buildings and tents, to accommodate the thousands being taken into custody each week. All children will go through immigration proceedings in court, but the process can take years due to a significant backlog.
CBP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
