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.

“The Border Patrol caught me a week ago crossing the river near Piedras Negras,” Morales said, referring to a city in northern Mexico across from Eagle Pass, Texas. He said U.S. authorities held him in jail for the last seven days before deporting him.

In Washington, Trump’s lawyers asked U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee in Los Angeles, to modify a 1997 court ruling to allow the indefinite detention of families.

The ruling, known as the Flores settlement, requires that children must be released from the custody of immigration enforcement authorities within 20 days. After that, they are to be transferred to the care of a family member or placed in the custody of a licensed, government-sponsored shelter for children.

The Justice Department said the only way to prevent migrant children from being separated from their parents - while still enforcing laws against illegal entry into the country - would be to detain entire families. It seemed to suggest that the practice of separating families could resume at some point if the judge refused the request to alter the 1997 ruling.

But it also echoed a 2016 argument by the administration of President Barack Obama during a similar migrant surge across the Southwest border. The judge, and an appeals court, denied the requests by the Obama administration lawyers.

In 2014, the Obama administration briefly sheltered migrant children at military bases in Texas, California and Oklahoma, establishing emergency housing for a steep increase in unaccompanied minors crossing the border. Around 7,000 children were temporarily housed on the bases for about three months until the number of migrants ebbed.

At the time, officials said the government was responding to a sharp spike in the number of unaccompanied children crossing the Southwest border without parents or relatives, fleeing violence in Central American countries. During the Obama administration, the military’s role was limited to housing and giving base access to officials from the Department of Health and Human Services.

It was unclear Thursday whether the military would play a more central role in Trump’s plan. He made no public comment on how his executive order was being implemented.

He also resumed angrily lashing out at “extremist, open-border Democrats” following his own retreat on the issue of separating families, and again falsely blamed them for the political crisis that continues to roil his administration and was amplified in recent days by images and recordings of young children crying for their parents.

Choosing hard-edge remarks at a Cabinet meeting hours before the House was scheduled to vote on overhauling immigration laws, Trump begged for Democratic lawmakers’ support on the legislation even as he said they were causing “tremendous damage and destruction and lives.” And he repeated his false claim that Democrats forced family separations.

“They don’t care about the children. They don’t care about the injury. They don’t care about the problems,” Trump said, a scowl on his face and his arms crossed. “They don’t care about anything.”

In a stream-of-consciousness commentary, the president also attacked Mexico for what he claimed was a failure to help stop illegal immigration into the United States.

“Mexico is doing nothing for us except taking our money and giving us drugs,” he said.