Official: Youth tent city to close

An official for the company running a tent city in the Texas desert expects the site for migrant children to close within weeks.

The official with Baptist Child and Family Services, the shelter operator now called BCFS, said late Sunday that the expectation was that by Jan. 15, all 2,500 children in the encampment in Tornillo, Texas, would be on their way to parents or sponsors in the United States.

“By mid-January, the children should be all released,” said the official, who was not authorized to talk with the news media and spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We’re not extending our contract with the government.”

Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, said Sunday that the chief executive of BCFS had told him that minors were no longer being admitted to the Tornillo facility, which sits in his district on a barren patch of land about 35 miles from El Paso.

For critics, the tent city has come to symbolize the mass detention of migrant children by President Donald Trump’s administration.

The official said BCFS’ contract would expire Dec. 31 but that it would be extended daily until all the children were released from the Tornillo shelter. Some children at Tornillo have been there since it opened in June. Minors at other shelters have been stuck for about a year.

In shutting the shelter, BCFS would disassemble tents, take down power lines and cart away the furnishings — including bunk beds, washers and dryers, and medical equipment — that had turned the site into a mini-city for adolescents. Most of the migrants had traveled to the United States from Central America.

However, even if BCFS folds up the tent city at Tornillo, the government could try to find another operator to erect a shelter there.

Evelyn Stauffer, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, did not confirm that the tent city would close. In response to questions, she said in a statement that the agency was working for the release of the minors “as soon as possible.”

“Our focus is always on the safety and best interest of each child,” the statement said. “These are vulnerable children in difficult circumstances, and HHS treats its responsibility for each child with the utmost care.”

During a visit to Tornillo on Sunday with dozens of demonstrators, O’Rourke said the BCFS executive, Kevin Dinnin, had explained that only the lack of space on flights during the holiday travel season was preventing hundreds of minors from more quickly joining their families.

O’Rourke said that since opening in June, the tent city had cost taxpayers $144 million, a figure the shelter official did not dispute. The price of sheltering a minor at Tornillo is about $400 a day, compared with about $200 in brick-and-mortar locations.

In revealing that the children would be released, O’Rourke said they have been “in a tent in the middle of the desert, in a kind of purgatory or limbo, not knowing when or if” they would see their families again.

The impending dispersal of the children at Tornillo follows a recent policy reversal by the Trump administration that is designed to speed up the release of about 15,000 minors who have been held for months in about 100 shelters across the country.

On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the care of migrant children through its Office of Refugee Resettlement, announced that it would no longer require fingerprints for all members of a household where a migrant child is to live. Instead, fingerprints will be required only of the adult who is sponsoring the minor.

The agency said modifying the policy was in the best interest of the minors, and a senior agency official said the government made “lousy parents.”