Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Kids program ‘a moral disaster’
Decades after the U.S. stopped institutionalizing kids because large and crowded orphanages were causing lasting trauma, it is happening again. The federal government has placed most of the 14,300 migrant toddlers, children and teens in its care in detention centers and residential facilities packed with hundreds, or thousands, of children.
As the year draws to a close, about 5,400 detained migrant children in the U.S. are sleeping in shelters with more than 1,000 other children. About 9,800 are in facilities with 100-plus total kids, according to confidential government data obtained and cross-checked by The Associated Press.
That’s a huge shift from just three months after President Donald Trump took office, when the same federal program had 2,720 migrant youth in its care; most were in shelters with a few dozen kids or in foster programs. Some of the children may be released sooner than anticipated, because last week the administration ended a portion of its strict screening policies that had slowed the placement of migrant kids with relatives in the U.S.
The AP has obtained data about the number of youths held at each facility overseen by the Office of Refugee Resettlement showing the number of children in individual detention centers, shelters and foster care programs for nearly every week over the past 20 months, revealing in detail the expanse of a program at the center of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
The data shows the degree to which the government’s approach to migrant youth has hardened, marking a new phase in a federal program originally intended to offer safe haven to vulnerable children fleeing danger across the globe. It’s been taking at least twice as long, on average two months rather than one, for youth held inside the system to get out, in part because the Trump administration added more restrictive screening measures for parents and relatives who would take them in.
That changed Dec. 18 when the administration ended a policy requiring every adult in households where migrant children will live to provide the government with fingerprints. All still must submit to background checks, and parents themselves still need to be fingerprinted. Nonetheless, officials said they could now process some children more rapidly, and hoped to shorten shelter stays that had dragged on so long kids sometimes wondered if their parents had abandoned them for good.
Experts say the deep anxiety and distrust children suffer when they’re institutionalized away from loved ones can cause long-lasting mental and physical health problems. It’s dangerous for all but worse for younger children, those who stay more than a few days and those who are in larger facilities with less personal care.
“This is not a perplexing scientific puzzle. This is a moral disaster,” said Dr. Jack Shonkoff, who heads Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child. “There has to be some way to communicate, in unequivocal terms, that we are inflicting punishments on innocent children that will have lifelong consequences. No matter how a person feels about immigration policy, very few people hate children — and yet we are passively allowing bad things to happen to them.”
Administration officials said increased need has driven them to expand the number of beds available for migrant children from 6,500 last fall to 16,000 today. Mark Weber, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees ORR, said sheltering children in large facilities, while not preferable, is a better alternative than holding them for long periods at Border Patrol stations ill-suited to care for them.
“This is an amazing program with incredibly dedicated people who are working to take care of these kids,” he said.
The kids in government care range in age from toddlers to 17. The vast majority crossed the border without their parents, escaping violence and corruption in Central America, but some were separated from their families at the border earlier this year.