Don’t reopen center’

In America, approximately 13,000 minors are now in custody of immigration enforcement. By law, these children should be transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement within 72 hours. That is not happening. Instead, they are held in a legal limbo in ill-equipped, haphazard centers with bright lights, barbed wire, bars and concrete floors. The government calls them “holding facilities” when they are really prisons for children. Homestead Detention Center is one such facility.

The government is looking at reopening Homestead, which is privately owned and generates profits for Caliburn International, which in turn is owned by DC Capital Partners. This is a for-profit child prison owned by a publicly-traded private equity investment firm whose website lists its Board of Advisors as “well respected senior diplomatic, intelligence and military officials.” If that doesn’t make you uneasy, Homestead would cost Florida taxpayers the extravagant sum of $775 per day per child.

Even more disturbing, as a private facility Homestead is not subject to federal oversight for acceptable standards of care. It has been well-known to actively restrict outside oversight. There are no requirements for nutrition or adequate safety or shelter. As such, children are held alone in dirty, inadequate, crowded, dangerous facilities, and Homestead guards have been accused on multiple occasions of physically and sexually assaulting children under their care.

As physicians, we cannot express strongly enough how much we oppose this kind of facility. We cannot have children in for-profit prisons. It is an abhorrent concept.

Let’s remind ourselves why children come alone to our country in the first place: Because the danger and poverty in their own countries is so terribly extreme that it’s worth the risk. These are refugees, not criminals. They are innocent children. How we deal with them will define who America is as a nation.

Lorena Del Pilar Bonilla, Weston