Nearly 13,000 migrant children are being held in federal shelters, the New York Times reported on Wednesday night, representing more than five times the number of children who were in custody in the spring of last year, 2,400.
Most of the 12,800 children being held in the shelters are unaccompanied minors who crossed into the United States on their own. The influx of these children has placed pressure on resources: Since May, the NYT reports, shelters have been operating at around 90 percent capacity, as opposed to 30 percent last year. That doesn’t leave much room for any unanticipated surges.
Under the system, unaccompanied minors are sent to live with sponsors, who can be family members or family friends already living in the United States. When sponsors can’t be found, the children are sometimes sent into foster care. President Donald Trump’s so-called no tolerance policy added more confusion to the equation this summer, as it led to more than 2,500 children being taken from their parents and being placed in federal shelters alongside the unaccompanied minors. The policy sparked outrage and a flurry of legal challenges. As of last month, 550 of the separated children had still not been reunited with their parents.
But this is an older problem, one that Oklahoma Republican Tom Cole, who is in charge of HHS funding in the House as chairman of the relevant appropriations subcommittee, noted on Wednesday evening that federal shelters have faced in the past, such as in 2014.
“This is not something that’s fundamentally different than we were dealing with Obama,” Cole told THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “I think the problem there is we didn’t really create much infrastructure to deal with the next surge. We just sort of hung everything together with band-aids and baling wire instead of recognizing this as a problem we’re going to continue to have. It’s going to take more capacity than we built into the system.”
Yet NYT’s Caitlin Dickerson writes that the recent spike of children being held in detention stems from a different cause than the surge of arrivals in the early 2010s:
A vetting process for sponsors exists in order to prevent children from being trafficked, but it was not always followed by the Obama administration when officials were scrambling to deal with the crisis — to horrifying results in some cases. Recently, due to the Trump’s administration’s stricter requirements, the vetting process has slowed significantly: Dickerson reports that monthly placements of migrant children have gone down by two-thirds since last year.
Cole brushed off the idea that Trump’s beefed-up vetting system might be causing the issue, though, arguing instead that it is a matter of infrastructure. The senior appropriator said he has discussed the situation with HHS Secretary Alex Azar, adding that he hopes to get answers concerning the agency’s requirements for funding and flexibility in order to deal with the matter. “I think they’re very mindful that they’re going to need resources, but it’s extremely difficult to predict,” said Cole.
“It’s not enough just to have the right laws, but you really need to be able to keep people in a safe environment while things are worked out as to what their final status is going to be.”
