New map shows where migrant kids are staying

24 children housed in Pennsylvania

A federal map obtained by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette shows where the 2,047 immigrant children who were separated from their families at the southern U.S. border in recent months are located in the United States.

The map, put together by the Department of Health and Human Services and provided by a source, demonstrates what anecdotal evidence has suggested: Most of the children — 1,370, or 66 percent — are housed in facilities in the border states of Texas, Arizona and California.

But — like the kids staying at Holy Family Institute in Emsworth, reported two weeks ago by the Post-Gazette — the map also shows that 477, or 23 percent, have been taken more than a thousand miles from the border to eight states in the Northeast and Upper Midwest.

New York state is home to 327 of the children separated from their families under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy.

In all, 16 states house at least some of the children, with as few as two each in Connecticut and New Jersey.

Though the map does not specify in what city or in which facilities the children are housed, reporting around the country has detailed where many of them are staying, including outside of Philadelphia.

The map indicates that 24 kids are staying in Pennsylvania, not more than 50 as was previously thought.

The Post-Gazette reported multiple times that Holy Family was housing 50 children separated from their parents at the border.

But when asked about the 24 children reported on the map, Sister Linda Yankoski, CEO of Holy Family, said Wednesday that was the result of “the challenges of providing information about this issue.”

“I never said we had 50 children. I said that was our capacity” in an interview with the Post-Gazette, she said. “And I never said all the children were separated from their families.”

She said she was not able to say how many children who were separated from their families at the border are staying at Holy Family now.

For questions like that, she said, “we’ve been asked to refer you to” the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees the children.

As for when these children will be reunited with their families, Sister Linda said that although immigration attorneys may believe there is no way to get them back together without the parents being deported first — and maybe not even then — she said: “That’s not what I’m hearing.”

“I feel positive that they are going to find a way to reunite the kids with their families,” she said.