The Trump administration is proposing a sprawling shelter facility that can detain up to 3,000 unaccompanied migrant children who arrived in the U.S. without a parent or guardian. Officials are seeking potential contractors and service providers for the project as federal agencies escalate efforts to detain and remove tens of thousands of people from the country, including children, while effectively closing off the U.S.-Mexico border to people seeking asylum. Unaccompanied immigrant children — currently housed in more than 150 shelter facilities across the country — could be held inside an “emergency influx facility” staffed with physicians, teachers and other “humanitarian care” providers as the administration responds to “surges” at the southern border, according to a call with prospective service providers on Tuesday.
The proposed facility must hold up to eight children per room, and up to eight children would share one toilet, shower and sink. Recreation areas would not necessarily need to be outside. The facility also would need to be surrounded by an eight-foot perimeter fence.
Officials have not yet determined a location for the project but appear ready to move quickly once contracts are awarded by the end of this year. The government typically requires at least one acre of recreation facilities per 100 children, but that “does not need to be a single continuous plot,” according to the administration. Contractors would be required to provide “rapid site mobilization” with “phased ramp-up” that can detain a minimum of 400 children within 30 days of a government contract.
The Independent has requested comment from the Administration for Children and Families. The proposal comes as the Trump administration faces growing scrutiny over its care of immigrant children in a mass deportation campaign that is increasingly targeting families with children far beyond the southern border. Since Trump returned to the White House, immigration judges have issued more than 10,000 removal and voluntary deportation orders for immigrant minors each month, an explosive surge that has vastly outnumbered orders from even Trump’s first term, according to ProPublica.
Last year, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement dismissed widespread reports among immigration lawyers and advocates that it was launching a wider effort to deport migrant children, lawyers and shelter workers scrambled to prevent what they feared are imminent attempts to deport them. Attorneys for unaccompanied migrant children successfully blocked a middle-of-the-night operation to deport Guatemalan minors in government custody after a series of harrowing affidavits described their fears of abruptly returning to their home country. Lawyers for the children, who are now in government-supported foster programs and long-term shelters, subsequently accused the Trump administration of trying to get them to self-deport through “misinformation, coercion, threats and fear.” Unaccompanied immigrant children are in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement through the Health Department’s Administration for Children and Families.
The federal government is legally required to facilitate their legal counsel. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act requires the government to “ensure, to the greatest extent practicable,” that all unaccompanied minors receive legal counsel “to represent them in legal proceedings” and to “protect them from mistreatment, exploitation and trafficking.” Roughly 20,000 immigrant children effectively lost that representation overnight when a long-standing contract with the Acacia Center for Justice ended last month. Texas-based Burke Law Group, which does not appear to have any experience representing unaccompanied children, recently withdrew from consideration for a government contract after the Department of Health and Human Services announced plans to award the firm $150 million.
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