Some immigrant teens say they've waited weeks or months in massive facilities and don't know when they'll be released to relatives in the United States.
Five months after the Biden administration declared an emergency and raced to set up shelters to house a record number of children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border alone, kids continue to languish at the sites, while more keep coming, child welfare advocates say.
When the Biden administration erected the emergency sites in March to ease dangerous overcrowding at border stations, they were meant to be a temporary fix. But months later, some wonder whether that’s still the case. U.S. border authorities reported more than 18,000 encounters with unaccompanied immigrant children in July, up 24% from a month earlier. The rise comes in the busiest month yet for the Biden administration on the border, with a total of nearly 200,000 encounters even though crossings are typically expected to slow during the summer.
“There are other ways to do this. They kind of stick their head in the sand and act like the emergency intake sites are the only game in town, and it’s just so far from the truth,” said Leecia Welch, senior director of legal advocacy and child welfare at the National Center for Youth Law and one of the attorneys representing children in the federal court case. “When you start at horrifying, and better is still awful, that’s just not OK.
Once the coronavirus appeared, the Trump administration largely shut down the Southwest border to asylum seekers under a pandemic-related measure, turning away many immigrants. Then, in November, a federal judgeTwo months later, President Joe Biden took office and the number of immigrant children seeking to cross began to rise.
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