Democrats: Children held in shelter are OK
But kids must be reunited with parents, pols say
After touring a center for immigrant children in Homestead on Saturday, Democratic elected officials said the “barracks-like” facilities appeared clean and the children in good spirits, but they expressed concern over reuniting them with their parents.
“The absolutely critical thing that we have to have is making sure the administration immediately adopts a policy that helps these children, particularly those who were involuntarily separated from their parents at the border, to be reunified with their parents,” said U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, DWeston. The Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children houses 1,179 children between the ages of 13-17. Although the vast majority arrived in the United States without relatives, the facility holds about 70 who had been separated from their families at the Mexican border under President Donald
Trump’s zero-tolerance policy on illegal immigration.
The president rescinded the child-separation policy Wednesday, after bipartisan outrage over the practice, but Democrats are criticizing the administration for not coming up with a realistic plan for returning children to their parents.
“The facilities are nice,” U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson said at a news conference outside the Homestead center Saturday. “The children are being cared for. But the question is the reunification of the 2,300 children.”
The children each get two 10-minute calls with their parents each week, the senator said, and the vast majority appear to have been able to talk with their parents.
As they spoke, protesters were gathering in this city at the tip of the Florida peninsula for a late-afternoon rally in opposition to Trump’s immigration policies. By 4:30 p.m., thousands of protesters packed the streets, holding signs that read “What if it was your child?” “Keeping families together = American values” and “No more child abuse, No more Trump.” One sign showed an image of Mary holding the baby Jesus and said “I was a stranger.”
Escorted by police, which shut traffic on the southbound lane of 288th Street, the crowd marched and chanted, “Up up with immigration, down down with deportation. No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here.”
“I’m furious about what happened. I feel we have forsaken our American values and ideals,” said Helena Castro, 47, a public school teacher from Miami Lakes. “I am the daughter of two Cuban immigrants who fled communism 50 years ago. I owe it to them, my students who represent immigrants all over the world. It’s for them I am here today.”
Despite Trump’s decision to rescind his familyseparation policy, Teresita Gonzalez, who works for the Catholic Archdiocese of Miami, said she felt compelled to march.
“There’s still a cruel policy against people on our borders,” she said. “We’ve never been this cruel to immigrants and their stories.”
A half-dozen counter protesters heckled the crowd. “Go back to your country,” yelled one man in a red Make America Great Again hat, who declined to give his name. “This is my country.”
“How dare you?” responded Aumary Yuan, 21, of Miami, one of the protesters. “Hold your own rally.”
Arriving at the front of the Homestead center, where the children were being held, they piled small stuffed animals at the gates.
“Hey Trump,” they chanted. “Leave our kids alone.”
Some stood at the front yelling toward the facility, “Shame on you, shame on you.”
Trump pressed his tough immigration stance at a Nevada political convention Saturday, telling hundreds “we have to be very strong” to keep people, including violent gang members, from entering the country illegally.
In remarks to several hundred people attending the Nevada GOP Convention, Trump portrayed himself as tough against illegal immigration, saying at one point, “I think I got elected largely because we are strong on the border.”
But he excluded any mention of the public outcry, including from members of his own family, over the practice of separating families crossing into the country illegally. After the outcry, Trump on Wednesday ordered that migrant families be reunited. But confusion has ensued, with parents left searching for their children.
During the news conference, Wasserman Schultz said that the children lived in a clean but “regimented, military bare-bones style” housing, sleeping in bunk beds.
She sharply criticized comments on immigrants by Trump, who held a White House event Friday devoted to the families of people murdered by illegal immigrants, of whom the president said, “These are the American citizens permanently separated from their loved ones.”
Wasserman Schultz said, “For the president to continue to refer to these children and their families as an infestation in the United States, and to suggest that their parents are drug dealers, are criminals and are somehow coming across the border to harm Americans, is revolting.”
She said she couldn’t understand why she and Nelson were denied admittance five days ago.
“If this is really how it is run, there was no reason to refuse us entry,” she said. “I don’t know if they cleaned it up.”
Meanwhile, in Texas, 25 Democratic members of Congress toured a U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing facility in McAllen, where they described seeing migrant children sleeping behind bars, on concrete floors and under emergency blankets.
The lawmakers said that they are not convinced the Trump administration had any real plan to reunite immigrant families caught along the border, while demonstrators gathered to protest the separation of parents from their children by U.S. border authorities.
“There are still thousands of children who are out there right now untethered to their parents and no coherent system to fix that,” said Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., after the tour.
The lawmakers also said they believed border agents were handling the situation as well as could be expected at the facility for recently apprehended immigrants.
However, Rep. Barbara Lee of California called what she witnessed “shocking and outrageous” and said lawmakers saw no evidence children were receiving counseling or mental health care to cope with the stress of being in federal custody.
“It is, for all intents and purposes, a prison,” said Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif.