» White House moving ahead on plans to house migrant children at Lackland, possibly Freeman.
Jbsa-lackland set for up to 350; Freeman eyed
The Biden administration is moving forward with plans to house thousands of migrant children at two temporary shelters in San Antonio — at Joint Base San Antonio-lackland, and possibly Freeman Coliseum, officials said on Thursday.
The Pentagon has not said how many children will be housed at Lackland or when they would arrive. In a tweet, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-texas, said as many as 350 children will stay at a Lackland dormitory and another 5,000 at Fort Bliss, near El Paso.
As many as 2,400 children will be housed at Freeman, he said. But that arrangement wasn’t a done deal. Ongoing negotiations between its owner, Bexar County, and the Department of Health and Human Services over using the near-downtown exposition hall have been met with doubts and flat-out opposition from some county elected officials.
Immigrant advocacy groups, meanwhile, said San Antonio should come up with a better way to welcome and care for detained children than housing them in a military barracks or corralling them in an arena.
“We’re getting close” to working out the Freeman agreement, said Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, adding, “The issue is we have several thousand kids over here in the United States without a place to be secure and taken care of. And I think from a humanitarian standpoint you want to provide the safest place you can for them.”
Sheriff Javier Salazar and county commissioners Tommy Calvert and Trish Deberry this week questioned the length of the county’s commitment and the extent of services it might be asked to provide. Commissioners’ approval is not required, officials said, because the federal agency can contract directly with the coliseum.
Deberry, in an online newsletter post linked to her Facebook page Thursday, expressed sympathy for migrant children coming to the border but said “we only continue to enable the crisis by agreeing to become a sanctuary.”
“I feel like this has kind of been forced down our throats,” Deberry, a selfdescribed moderate Republican and the only GOP member on the Commissioners Court, said in a later interview. “I’d love to be able to pump the brakes a little bit, so we can have better dialogue around this.”
Calvert said he wasn’t against the proposal but asked if the coliseum had enough remaining capacity to handle other disasters, like a flood, hurricane or spike in COVID-19 cases.
The San Antonio sites are among a slew of new facilities the administration
is standing up so it can more safely house children who arrived in the U.S. without parents, mostly from Central American countries, in a bid for asylum.
Administration officials say their goal is to quickly move children from crowded U.S. Customs and Border Protection sites.
“We can host and reunify children in a safe, orderly and humane manner,” a White House official said
Thursday. “We agree CBP is not a place for children and we are working 24/7 to bring beds online.”
The new facilities include convention centers in Dallas and San Diego, as well as sites in the Texas cities of Carrizo Springs, Midland and Pecos.
Salazar said this week that he didn’t have enough deputies to provide security at Freeman and wouldn’t want them associated with the kind of shelters that the government has run in the past, with what he called inadequate levels of care hidden from media scrutiny.
Asked about it at Wednesday’s daily coronavirus briefing, Commissioner Justin Rodriguez said it was his understanding that the federal government, not the county, would be responsible for security.
Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who this week said the flow of youngsters across the border should be met with “compassion and care,” added in a statement Thursday that “the city will have little, if any, role in the temporary sheltering process, but again, this is a humanitarian issue and it needs to be treated as such.”
The Immigrant Legal Resource Center, SA Stands, the Texas Organizing Project and National Lawyers Guild released a joint statement demanding that Bexar County officials develop a “community-centered model” that would use qualified local groups to care for the children and not have them “sleep on the floor of a crowded Freeman Coliseum.”
“This housing accommodation should also be accessible to or near all of the services that the children will need — food, clothing, a cellphone to remain in contact with social workers, legal, and health services,” said Jessica Azua of Texas Organizing Project.
Wolff said children at the Freeman won’t sleep on the floor. He said he’d be receptive if the advocates could offer “a better place to take them.”
“They will each have a cot and the bedclothes to go with it. I believe we’ve got about 250,000 square feet out there, so it’s a huge building, it’s climate-controlled,” Wolff said. “The facilities we got out there are ten times better than what they’re living (in) right now.”