Biden must keep detention center for children closed

Almost two years after immigration advocates poured blood, sweat and tears into shutting down a detention camp for migrant children in Homestead, the Biden administration announced that it’s moving to reopen the facility.

This facility was a flashpoint for community outcry. Advocacy organizations, grassroots community members, faith leaders, lawmakers and presidential candidates came together at one point or another throughout what would become a long-standing campaign to eventually end the detention of migrant children at the site.

At the time, I was the political director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, a statewide nonprofit organization that advocates for immigrant communities, and along with some incredible colleagues and organizations, I helped lead efforts to shut down this detention camp. When I learned earlier this week that the site was going to reopen, I was disgusted and horrified.

Why would the Biden administration make this awful decision to reopen a facility that symbolizes some of the most horrific practices of family separation and child detention under the Trump administration? Added to this, Homestead has faced multiple reports of child sexual-abuse, neglect and dangerous living conditions, per a report by Amnesty International.

Immigration detention is a business, and for-profit contractors have made a lot of money from depriving immigrants of their freedom. During the Trump era, the Miami Herald reported that the Department of Health and Human Services had awarded Comprehensive Health Services a no-bid $341 million contract to manage the Homestead detention facility. This did not include a $600,000 “qualified target-industry” tax-incentive package awarded by former Florida Gov. Rick Scott just as the company was getting ready to pay a $3.8 million settlement to the U.S. Department of Justice over a medical-fraud claim.

It’s unclear who will manage the facility now but it’s fair to question if these for-profit companies have lobbied for these sites to reopen as they stand to make large profits if it happens.

To be quite frank, I am appalled that the Biden administration has chosen to reopen a detention camp where children have consistently faced abuse and neglect. No human being should ever be put in the type of danger that the Biden administration is actively choosing to put hundreds to thousands of children in right now.

I was there and helped coordinate the former Democratic presidential candidates visiting the site during the first primary presidential debate in Miami in June 2019. I was sick with the flu that week and I remember feeling the hot Florida summer sun pounding my head as I watched the candidates go through the motions of political campaigning. Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Bill De Blasio, Pete Buttigieg, Kristen Gillibrand and others went and spoke to the media and outraged community members, some candidates feeling more invested than others and some even demanding to tour the facility or speak to administrative staff.

Those candidates need to speak out now just like they spoke out then. Some current and former Democratic lawmakers have already spoken out and the Miami-Dade Democratic Party has issued a statement voicing their concerns, but this isn’t enough. We need the Florida Democratic Party to speak out now just like it spoke up then.

President Biden vowed to protect immigrant communities, vocalizing his disgust with the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant cruelty these past four years and the policies that allowed children to be ruthlessly ripped from their mothers’ arms and thrown in cages. Reopening Homestead for unaccompanied minors may not mean parental separation by our government, but it will still cruelly subject children to more pain and trauma.

Many of the children who arrive as unaccompanied minors have guardians and other family members in the U.S. whose care they can and should be released to.

The Biden administration has full discretion to prioritize these family ties. Homestead should be shut down for good and the Biden administration urged to use every tool at its disposal to release immigrants from detention and reconnect these children with loved ones and guardians already living in the United States.