Growing Number of Undocumented Adolescents Warehoused in Tents, Denied an Education
Do you remember the thousands of migrant children detained at the border? It is easy to get distracted these days by crisis after crisis in the federal government and forget about important issues. When I found myself wondering recently whether there are still children and adolescents being detained, I realized I didn’t know whether or how this had all ended or been dragged on. Then I read yesterday’s NY Times.
Caitlin Dickerson reports: “In shelters from Kansas to New York, hundreds of migrant children have been roused in the middle of the night in recent weeks and loaded onto buses with backpacks and snacks for a cross-country journey to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in West Texas. Until now, most undocumented children being held by federal immigration authorities had been housed in private foster homes or shelters, sleeping two or three to a room. They received formal schooling and regular visits with legal representatives assigned to their immigration cases. But in the rows of sand-colored tents in Tornillo, Tex., children in groups of 20, separated by gender, sleep lined up in bunks. There is no school: The children are given workbooks that they have no obligation to complete. Access to legal services is limited. These midnight voyages are playing out across the country, as the federal government struggles to find room for more than 13,000 detained migrant children—the largest population ever—whose numbers have increased more than fivefold since last year.”
The children being moved to the tent city in Texas are not toddlers or pre-schoolers: “Most of the detained children crossed the border alone, without their parents. Some crossed illegally; others are seeing asylum. Children who are deemed ‘unaccompanied minors,’ either because they were separated from their parents or crossed the border alone, are held in federal custody until they can be matched with sponsors, usually relatives or family friends, who agree to house them while their immigration cases play out in the courts.”
Dickerson adds that the rapid growth in the number of young people in custody—fivefold Continue reading; Growing Number of Undocumented Adolescents Warehoused in Tents, Denied an Education | janresseger