CBP closes Mcallen facility for migrants
WASHINGTON — U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials have shutdown them call en warehouse where chain-link enclosures were deplored as“cages” during the Trump administration’s crackdownon migrant families and children.
The facility will undergo renovations until 2022, CBP officials said.
The chain-link partitions will be removed, and the warehouse will be redesigned to provide detained migrants with more humane conditions, CBP officials said.
The renovations will take 18 months or longer, leaving border agents without a large-volume facility if a new migration surge occurs next year.
“The new design will allow for updated accommodations, which will greatly improve the operating efficiency of the center as well as the welfare of individuals being processed,” said Thomas Gresback, a spokesman for the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley sector.
The Obama administration opened the facility in 2014 after a record number of Central American families and children began streaming into South Texas, leaving U.S. agents and border stations dangerously overcrowded.
CBP acquired a large warehouse and hastily converted it into a clean, air-conditioned processing center to accommodate the surge. Inexpensive chain-link fencing was used to create partitions in the cavernous space, but its grim appearance came to symbolize the dehumanizing treatment of migrants in U.S. custody.
The warehouse has been mostly empty this year as CBP implemented emergency public health measures in March that allow agents to quickly “expel” more than 90 percent of border crossers back to Mexico.
Last week, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to halt the practice of expelling underage migrants.
During prepandemic times, migrant families and children who were taken into custody in the Rio Grande Valley after crossing illegally into the United States typically were taken to the Central Processing Center warehouse.
Their personal and biometric information was recorded into government databases, and they sometimes would spend several days or more inside the facility, sleeping on mats as they waited for authorities to determine whether they would be transferred to a longer-term detention facility, returned to Mexico, or released into the United States.
The partitions were used to separate different groups — such as keeping teenage boys apart from mothers with infants.
The renovation likely will replace the chain link with plastic dividers, and officials said the facility will provide more recreation and play areas for children, as well as more permanent kitchen, infirmary and shower facilities.
The CPC’S capacity will be reduced from 1,500 to 1,100, Gresback said.