‘Zero tolerance’ at U.S.-Mexico border is filling child shelters

HOUSTON — Family separations on the southern border due to President Donald Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy increased the number of immigrant children in government shelters 22 percent during the last month, officials said.

As of Wednesday, 10,852 migrant children were being held at shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services, compared with 8,886 at the end of last month, said agency spokesman Kenneth Wolfe. The average time such children spent at government shelters has also increased, from 51 to 56 days.

The new zero-tolerance policy piloted in Arizona and west Texas last year was extended borderwide last month. Under the policy, migrants who enter the United States illegally face misdemeanor charges in federal criminal court, felony charges if they have crossed illegally before, parents are sent to federal detention, their children to shelters. In the past, such cases were often handled administratively, not in criminal court.

Trump tweeted inaccurately over the weekend that a “horrible law” was prompting the migrant family separations. Immigrant advocates insisted the administration was to blame for pursuing criminal charges against migrants, instead of handling their cases administratively.

Health and Human Services has 100 shelters in 14 states and “additional temporary housing is only sought as a last resort when current locations are reaching capacity,” said Wolfe, a spokesman for the department’s Administration for Children and Families.

That’s what’s happening now that the shelters are 95 percent full, Wolfe said. The agency has 1,218 extra beds reserved elsewhere, including several hundred at a government-owned building near an Air Force base in Homestead, Fla. Officials are also considering housing children at several military bases, as they did after an influx of Central American children in 2014.