Govt uses ‘tender age’ shelters

in early May, more than 2300 children have been taken from their parents at the US-Mexico border, resulting in a new influx of young children requiring government care. The government has faced withering critiques over images of some of the children in cages inside US Border Patrol processing stations.

Decades after the nation’s child welfare system ended the use of orphanages over concerns about the lasting trauma to children, the administration is standing up new institutions to hold Central American toddlers that the government separated from their parents.

Three centres – in Combes, Raymondville and Brownsville – have been rapidly repurposed to serve the needs of children including some under 5. A fourth, planned for Houston, would house up to 240 children in a warehouse previously used for people displaced by Hurricane Harvey, Mayor Sylvester Turner said.

Turner said he met with officials from Austin-based Southwest Key Programmes, the contractor that operates some of the child shelters, to ask them to reconsider their plans.

Doctors and lawyers who have visited the shelters said the facilities were fine, clean and safe, but the kids — who have no idea where their parents are — were hysterical, crying and acting out.

‘‘The shelters aren’t the problem, it’s taking kids from their parents that’s the problem,’’ said South Texas pediatrician Marsha Griffin who has visited many. –

AP Young immigrants arrive with their parents at the Catholic Charities Rio Grande Valley after they were processed and released by US Customs and Border Protection in McAllen, Texas.