As of Sunday morning, the U.S. Border Patrol was hosting more than 4,200 unaccompanied migrant children. short-term retention facilities, including stations similar to prisons unfit to house minors, according to government records reviewed by CBS News.
About 3,000 of the unaccompanied children in Customs Custody and Border Protection (CBP) had been detained for more than 72 hours. CBP is legally required to transfer most unaccompanied minors to the Office of Refugee Resettlement Office (ORR), the agency that oversees shelters licensed to take in children, within three days of their arrest.
The number of unaccompanied children in CBP custody on Sunday represents a 31% increase over early last week, when the agency had more than 3,200 minors. The number of children detained for more than three days more than doubled.
According to government records reviewed by CBS News, an average of 565 unaccompanied minors were admitted to CBP custody each day during the past week.
Records show unaccompanied minors spend an average of 117 hours in a border patrol facility, which Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has said is “not a place for a child.”
US Customs and Border Protection
Collectively, the statistics show the humanitarian crisis emerging on the US-Mexico border as a result of a sustained increase in the number of unaccompanied children detained and the lack of shelter. enough to house them.
In February, about 9,500 unaccompanied children entered U.S. border custody, with more than 7,000 transferred to ORR, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Arrivals of Central American teens and children have only increased in March.
With thousands of children detained in short-term border patrol facilities, most built to detain migrant men, detention conditions have been saturated, according to lawyers who interviewed minors in U.S. custody.
The children interviewed Thursday by lawyers overseeing the process as part of a court case reported that they were sleeping on the floor; be hungry; only showering once every seven days; and not being able to call family members.
“One of them said he could only see the sun when he showered, because you can see the sun through the window,” Neha Desai, a lawyer for the National Center for Juvenile Law, told CBS News, citing interviews with nearly a dozen children, including an unaccompanied 8-year-old girl.
According to government data, the CBP sectors in the Rio Grande Valley and El Paso, Texas, as well as in Yuma and Tucson, Arizona, have a lot of capacity in terms of their space to accommodate unaccompanied children. With more than 2,500 unaccompanied minors detained, the Rio Grande Valley sector currently has 363% capacity.
US Customs and Border Protection
Representatives from CBP and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not respond to requests for comment.
DHS has repeatedly admitted that it is struggling to prosecute the large number of migrant families and children entering the custody of the department.
“We are working in partnership with HHS to address the needs of unaccompanied children, which only becomes more difficult given the protocols and restrictions needed to protect public health and the health of the children themselves,” Mayorkas said Saturday in a statement announcing the deployment of officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in help prosecute migrant minors.
With approximately 9,000 children detained and their beds reduced due to social exclusion measures, the refugee office has struggled to find space for unaccompanied migrant children. The agency is considering housing children at a military facility in Virginia, as well as a NASA-supervised federal airfield in California.
On Sunday, HHS opened a new emergency facility in West Texas to house unaccompanied children, the department confirmed to CBS News. HHS called the Midland facility, a former camp for oil workers, a “temporary measure,” saying the goal is to remove unaccompanied minors from border patrol custody.
BuzzFeed News first reported the opening of the facility, which will feature American Red Cross workers, contractors and HHS officers.
The refugee agency has released hundreds of migrant children each week to family members and other sponsors, but its dropout rate has been overshadowed by the number of children entering U.S. border custody.
Since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) allowed the refugee agency to relax social distancing policies and return to the pre-pandemic bed space, there were only 200 additional beds available, said Biden administration officials on Friday.
HHS has also deployed personnel to the Border Patrol facilities to expedite the process of releasing minors and terminated a Trump-era deal with DHS that allowed some information about child sponsors to be sent to law enforcement authorities. immigration, a measure designed to encourage undocumented families to sponsor children. .