Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Inside a shelter:
Dade facility is housing young children, even two newborns.
At a shelter south of Miami, immigrant children as young as 4 are waiting to be reunited with their parents.
They spend their days at Catholic Charities’ Msgr. Bryan Walsh Children’s Village, a complex tucked away in a residential Cutler Bay neighborhood hundreds of miles from the southwest U.S. border.
The children can call their parents when they get scared. Soccer goals and playground equipment offer a chance for fun. The children recently took a field trip to the Miami Seaquarium.
Two teenage girls live there with their newborn infants.
Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, toured the facility Monday. She said the children never should have been sent there, calling the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown that put them in the shelter “outrageous,” “sadistic” and “demonic.”
“Our country has to do better than this,” she said.
People caught entering the country illegally could be released and monitored electronically to make sure they show up for their court dates, Wasserman Schultz said.
Most of the separated children at the Cutler Bay facility — which was formerly known as Boystown — appeared to be elementary school age and were mostly from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, Wasserman Schultz said.
With an 81-bed capacity, 70 children are at the facility, including 22 who were separated from their parents as part of Trump’s zero tolerance policy, said Mary Ross Agosta, a spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Miami, the organization that administers the facility.
“Our whole goal is to put them back in the arms of a family member,” she said.
About 10 children have already been reunited, and several relatives looking for their children are in contact with the staff, Agosta said.
Wasserman Schultz and Miami Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo, who also toured the facility Monday, said the children appeared to be well cared for.
“The children were smiling. They were happy,” Curbelo said. “We were able to ask them questions, and they all expressed that they were happy and at peace at this facility.”
Since 1958, the Archdiocese of Miami has sheltered immigrant children, including 14,000 Cuban youths who came to South Florida during the Operación Pedro Pan exodus in the early 1960s.
On Saturday, Wasserman Schultz and U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson toured the Homestead Shelter for Unaccompanied Children, which is holding more than 1,000 migrant children, including about 70 who were separated. The shelter initially denied entry to the lawmakers, and federal officials told them they needed to provide at least two-weeks notice to tour the facility. U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio and reporters toured the shelter on Friday.
His House Children’s Home in Miami Gardens, a 232-bed facility, also is holding separated children, development director David Castrillon told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
He said he was barred from saying exactly how many separated children are in the facility.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services oversees shelters for immigrant children. The head of that agency — Alex Azar — will testify today before the Senate Finance Committee.
Two immigration protests are planned this weekend for South Florida. One will be near Trump’s Mar-aLago estate in Palm Beach, and the other will be near the Diplomat Resort & Spa in Hollywood.