Houston prepares to house hundreds of migrant children
Houston is the latest Texas city to take in migrant children as the Biden administration scrambles to find space for thousands of unaccompanied minors who have crossed the southern border in recent weeks.
The Houston-based National Association of Christian Churches will shelter 500 girls who began arriving Friday. The group joins a growing network of sites where the federal government is sending children as it works to get them out of crammed U.S. Customs and Border Protection facilities and find sponsors to care for them in the United States.
The situation at the border — especially the influx of unaccompanied children — has emerged as the first major political dilemma of President Joe Biden’s term as Republicans say it is a “crisis” of his creation. They say Biden’s move to end some of the stricter immigration policies of his predecessor sent a message that the border was open, even as the president and his administration have said repeatedly it is not.
The Biden administration has said it inherited the mess, accusing the outgoing Trump administration of stalling on setting up shelters to house children until just days before former President Donald Trump left office — despite a growing number of unaccompanied minors arriving at the border beginning late last year.
Officials from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security were at the shelter Friday morning as the Na
tional Association of Christian Churches prepared the undisclosed site. The association is a nonprofit that provides relief services and responds to local, national and international disasters.
Local leaders including U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, praised the organization and its leader, Pastor Jesus Ortega, for opening its doors. “We are grateful that community leaders like Pastor Ortega have stepped forward to provide a safe place for children and youth,” Jackson Lee said.
But advocates were voicing concern about the group, with one saying he was turned away as his organization offered volunteers Thursday.
Cesar Espinosa, director of FIEL Houston, a nonprofit that has worked on immigrant advocacy and civil rights in Houston since 2007, said he went to the NACC shelter site Thursday to offer help in the form of translators, volunteers or any advice FIEL could give.
“We have never heard of this organization dealing and doing any of this type of work with immigrants, let alone children,” he said. “So we are worried that they don’t have the experience to deal with this.”
Espinosa also said he was worried about where and how the children would be housed given that the shelter is a warehouse. Espinosa, however, said he saw only the outside of the building.
“They brought portable showers and portable restrooms,” he said. “But we really don’t know if they are even properly equipped to deal with children.”
U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, DHouston, visited the facility Friday afternoon and said it “looks like a lot of others” based on her experience visiting more than 15 shelters as a member of the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship. This is the first time she said she’s visited a shelter without the children there yet.
A bus arrived at the emergency shelter about 6:30 p.m. Friday. After entering the property, the bus disappeared into a loading dock.
A representative of the church resource group declined to provide any information to the Houston Chronicle.
Border Patrol reported 9,457 encounters with unaccompanied children in February alone, a record for that month. That figure was in line with surges in 2014 and 2019, which saw between 7,000 and 9,000 apprehensions of unaccompanied children a month, with peaks above 10,000.
More than 18,700 children were in federal custody Thursday, the most recent data reported by HHS shows. The Biden administration was sending children to sites in Dallas, San Antonio, El Paso, San Diego and elsewhere.
The administration reported more than 5,300 children were still in Border Patrol facilities, including a tent facility in Donna, where pictures from inside have shown small children sleeping on mats on the floor and packed into holding rooms.
At least another 13,359 children had been transferred to sites like the NACC one and others run by Health and Human Services, where they will stay as the Office of Refugee Resettlement works to reconnect them with family members or find sponsors to take them in.
HHS said in a statement it has about 13,500 beds for children and “additional capacity is urgently needed.” Over the last 30 days, HHS was transferring an average of 443 children from Border Patrol to HHS facilities.
Republicans have sought to keep a focus on the cramped Border Patrol facilities, where the Biden administration until this week had refused to allow reporters access to document conditions.
U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn of Texas led a group of 19 Republican senators to the border last week, and many of them tweeted out pictures from inside the intake sites.
“These are the pictures the Biden administration doesn’t want the American people to see,” Cruz wrote in a tweet with four images showing small children sleeping on mats on the floor and with their hands pressed against windows in doors they were being kept behind.
Garcia said surges of children coming to the border, mainly from Central America, have become cyclical. The problem now, she said Friday, is that the Trump administration dismantled the network of immigration services and the capacity for the government to deal with the situation.
Cornyn, meanwhile, was in Houston on Tuesday to tour a shelter for unaccompanied immigrant girls operated by Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, which he said was “night and day” from the conditions at the Border Patrol facilities the senators saw last week.
“I’m not here to criticize any of the people who are trying to help,” Cornyn said. “It’s almost like everybody is working together in the neighborhood to put out a fire, but the fire is overwhelming the capacity of the neighborhood to put it out.”