The accelerated pace with which children are arriving adds stress to the system and leaves them in prison-like facilities for longer periods of time. As of Sunday, around 4,200 unaccompanied children were in border protection custody.
After the children are placed under Border Patrol custody, they will be handed over to the Department of Health and Human Services, which is charged with caring for migrant children. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, however, the department tried hard to accommodate the influx, as the emergency shelters had limited capacity until recently. Over the weekend, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help with receiving, housing, and transferring children.
“I am grateful for the exceptional talent and responsiveness of the FEMA team,” Mayorkas said in a statement. “I am incredibly proud of the Border Patrol agents who have worked around the clock in difficult circumstances to temporarily look after children in our care. But as I have said many times, a Border Patrol facility is not a place Child.”
A Homeland Security official previously told CNN that the surge in children arriving at the border has drawn a lot of attention and that the meetings are taking place “at the highest level”.
“It will be very difficult to stop this,” said the official.
The government’s race to house migrant children is a critical early test of President Joe Biden, who took office to reverse the cruel policies introduced by former President Donald Trump that made it difficult for people fleeing poverty and violence to get to the US US.
Now Biden is working to strike a balance between promoting a more humane approach to immigration while sending the message to potential migrants who are not supposed to come.
At the height of the border crisis in 2019 – when overcrowded facilities and children slept on the floor – around 2,600 unaccompanied children were in border custody, a former CBP official told CNN earlier.
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