On Saturday, approximately 450 unaccompanied migrant girls, ages 13 to 17, were abruptly transferred to a U.S. housing center in Houston, less than three weeks after it opened.
Authorities have been largely narrow about the closure, reports, but an immigrant advocate says it was due to some sort of incident there Friday night.
On Friday night, ambulances and police vehicles were seen outside the facility, located near Bush Intercontinental Airport, the lawyer told The Associated Press, citing information he received from an employee of the group he leads.
Then on Saturday morning, buses arrived to transport the girls, other reports said.
“There seemed to be a lot of confusion as to what was going on,” Cesar Espinosa, director of the FIEL Houston advocacy group, who told the AP about the employee’s information about Friday night, told AP. “The people who were there seemed to have a sad posture, a little upside down and it seemed like the tears were fading.”
The Houston Chronicle reported Saturday that the closure followed reports of overcrowding at the facility and that an adult member of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had died there Friday night in an incident. which had nothing to do with the transfer of the girls.
The girls at the Houston facility had been there since April 1st. The site was called Emergency Entry Place for Unaccompanied Children and was operated by the National Association of Christian Churches (NACC), according to the AP.
Espinosa told the AP he toured the facility and found that the girls lived in crowded conditions, despite the coronavirus pandemic.
“There was really no room for social distancing. … They were only allowed to get up from the crib to use the toilet and shower, “he said.” Everything they carried was temporary. The showers were temporary, they carried temporary bathrooms, so this space it was not equipped to accommodate anyone, much less children.
But Pastor Jose Ortega, president of the NACC, answered Espinosa’s claims, saying the girls were withdrawn due to disagreements over contractors and the young men were well cared for.
“The girls were excited. The girls had a great time. The girls took a shower, they were taken care of, ”the pastor told KHOU-TV in Houston.
The pastor told KPRC-TV of Houston that he did not know the closure plans until Saturday morning.
“In fact, we found out when we started seeing these buses arrive this morning,” Ortega said, according to KPRC.
HHS announced on Saturday the news of the shutter of the Houston facility, the AP reported.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, a Democrat, said the Biden administration told him Saturday that the facility was being closed because it was no longer needed, KHOU reported.
The HHS disclosure came less than two weeks after Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott asked the Biden administration to close a San Antonio facility over allegations that children in the area they were being sexually abused and were not eating enough. The San Antonio facility has more than 1,600 young immigrants, according to the AP.
“The Biden administration is now presiding over child abuse,” Abbott told reporters earlier this month while notifying Texas state officials of the allegations in federally sanctioned locations.
However, no sexual abuse was suggested in Houston in Saturday’s reports.
In March, the U.S. government stopped accepting migrant teens at a facility in Midland, Texas, over security issues there and elsewhere, the AP reported.
In a statement, HHS said the site was intended as temporary accommodation for the girls.
HHS said about 130 of the girls would be placed with sponsors, such as parents, and that HHS’s Refugee Settlement Office (ORR) would find sponsors for the rest of the girls.
Attempts by the AP to reach out to Houston police and the National Association of Churches regarding the closure of Houston were not immediately successful.
HHS has been quick to find accommodation for migrant children in the U.S.-Mexico border region, amid the increase in migrants that came with the start of the Biden administration.
Neither President Biden nor Vice President Kamala Harris, assigned last month to manage the Biden administration’s response to the migrant crisis, have traveled across the border region since taking office in January.
Harris ’recent trips have included stops at a catering business in Oakland, California; a bakery in Chicago and a boys and girls club in Connecticut.