US prepares housing for up to 20,000 migrant children on military bases
WASHINGTON - The United States is preparing to shelter as many as 20,000 migrant children on four American military bases, a Pentagon spokesman said Thursday, as federal officials struggled to carry out President Donald Trump’s order to keep immigrant families together after they are apprehended at the border.
The 20,000 beds at bases in Texas and Arkansas would house “unaccompanied alien children,” the Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Michael Andrews, said, although other federal agencies provided conflicting explanations about how the shelters would be used or who would be housed there.
It was unclear whether the military housing would also house the parents of migrant children in families that have been detained, and officials at the White House, Defense Department and Department of Health and Human Services said on Thursday they could not provide details.
The Pentagon announcement followed Trump’s executive ?order on Wednesday to keep families together after they illegally cross the Mexican border.
The president said he would end the administration’s practice of separating parents from children and called for detaining families at the same location.
Democrats questioned the 20,000-bed plan. “Is it even feasible?” Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York asked from the Senate floor.
Advocates for the migrants expressed concern about the prospect of vast settlements of families housed on military bases and described widespread uncertainty at the border.
“There’s conflicting instructions being given,” said Michele Brané, the director of Migrant Rights and Justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission. “It’s another example of this administration making these big, bold policy announcements with no plan for how they are going to implement them.”
“It’s adding to the chaos on the ground.”
Trump’s order directed Pentagon officials to provide “any existing facilities available for the housing and care of alien families” and to “construct such facilities if necessary and consistent with law.”
Just hours earlier, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis sidestepped questions about whether bases might be used as migrant camps, except to say, “We have housed refugees. We have housed people thrown out of their homes by earthquakes and hurricanes.”
“We do whatever is in the best interest of the country,” Mattis said Wednesday morning.
The tumult echoed the level of confusion among law enforcement agencies at airports after Trump banned travel of visitors from mostly Muslim countries a week after he took office last year.According to estimates, more than 2,300 children under the age of 12 - many of whom are toddlers and infants - are being held in special “tender age” shelters.
Initially, a Trump administration spokesman said Wednesday afternoon that the government would not reunite those children with their parents. But that was contradicted Wednesday night by a more senior official. On Thursday, Justice Department officials denied a report, apparently issued by officials in another agency, that prosecutions of immigrants traveling with families had been suspended.
Scrambling to adjust and comply with the president’s order, the Border Patrol temporarily stopped referring immigration cases for prosecution to the Justice Department, sparking rumors that they would be halted altogether.
That forced the Justice Department to insist in a statement that “there has been no change to the department’s zero-tolerance policy to prosecute adults who cross our border illegally instead of claiming asylum at any port of entry at the border.”
Two internal Customs and Border Protection emails supplied to the New York Times showed similar confusion.
They showed that at 9:54 p.m. Wednesday, a top Border Patrol official told agents they could continue prosecution referrals for one parent who entered the country illegally if there was another parent present.
But at 4:09 a.m. Thursday, the official, Chief Patrol Agent Brian Hastings, followed up with another email. It said agents should “maintain family unity for multi-parent/adult families, and suspend Section 1325 prosecution referrals.” That section of immigration law refers to illegal entry into the United States by foreigners.
But the confusion did little to change the plight of many migrant children being detained.
Last week, federal officials opened a tent city outside El Paso, Texas, to house up to 360 immigrant teenagers in custody. The temporary shelter site, at a border station in Tornillo, Texas, was still in use Thursday, and its capacity remains 360, officials said.
In the border city of Del Rio in South Texas, U.S. officials continued deporting unauthorized immigrants. One 20-year-old man, Luis Alexis Morales, of Veracruz state in eastern Mexico, was left in the middle of the long bridge that links Del Rio with Ciudad Acuña.
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