Immigrant kids taken far from border, their parents
Some taken to NYC, where they’ll wait to be reunited with parents
NEW YORK – When Hilda Mendoza learned that undocumented Central American children separated from their parents at the southern U.S. border were at a Manhattan social service agency, she felt called to action.
The foster care mother went to the Cayuga Centers facility Thursday, hoping to add one of the children to the 15-month-old boy and 8-monthold girl she’s already parenting.
“I’m willing to give at least one child a home for a little bit of time, so they won’t suffer,” said Mendoza, 59, a resident of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “I would try to make it as normal as possible. I would put them in school until they can get reunited with their parents.”
She approached the building but left without success.
As New York City police officers provided safety patrols, young children came and went from the facility. Many wore homemade masks that made it impossible to tell which had been removed from their parents by federal officials.
Located across the street from an East Harlem site used to park nearly a dozen city Department of Sanitation trucks, the Cayuga facility has become one of the latest flashpoints in a national debate over the thousands of undocumented immigrants who have massed across the border with their families. The debate has sharpened after the federal government’s recent decision to send some of the undocumented children thousands of miles away while their parents are detained for immigration hearings.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Wednesday that temporarily ended the removals. As he continued to blame Washington Democrats and years of ineffective U.S. immigration policies for the problem, some near the Manhattan facility blamed the White House.
“This is not right. This is America,” said Winston Richard, 69, while working at the mechanic shop next door to the Cayuga facility.
More than 350 children – including one 9 months old – have been brought thousands of miles from the southern U.S. border to the facility run by Cayuga Home for Children, a nonprofit social services agency that provides foster care and other services under federal government grants.
In all, 239 of those children were under the care of Cayuga employees on Wednesday, when New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio met with a few of the youngsters. Afterward, he recounted meeting “a young man named Eddie, nine years old, from Honduras,” who “was sent here 2,000 miles on a bus, to this location, and does not know when he’s going to see his mother again.”
“Imagine for any of us, that we are ripped away from our parents, and sent thousands of miles away with no one we knew,” de Blasio said. “These kids are suffering from that.”
Additionally, de Blasio said Cayuga employees told him other migrant children sent to the facility from the U.S. border with Mexico arrived with lice, bed bugs, chicken pox and other “physical challenges.”
The state’s Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance said refugee officials have had no contact with Cayuga regarding the company’s federally funded programs across New York.
Central American undocumented immigrant children similarly separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border or who entered the country alone also were being cared for in at least two other New York-New Jersey facilities.
A small number of youngsters aged 12 to 17 were at Children’s Village, a youth services facility in Hastings-on-Hudson, a northern suburb of New York City. Peter Swiderski, the village’s mayor, said the facility may be “close to capacity.”
The Center for Family Services in Camden, New Jersey, has serviced 90 children, most of whom entered the U.S. without a parent, said Jen Hammill, a spokesman for the social services agency. The agency currently provides housing for 27 under a contract with the federal government. The agency has 17 “safe homes” in southern New Jersey, Hammill said.
“We do not have foster homes; we have shelter homes,” she added. “We have various levels of care, emergency housing to permanent supportive housing to shelter home.”
The New York and New Jersey facilities are among dozens of nonprofit, religious and other companies and organizations that have provided services to the undocumented immigrant children separated from their parents. Many have been local mainstays of refugee services for years.
The companies are working with the Administration for Children and Families, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, federal contract records show. Collectively, they have been awarded billions of dollars in recent years, including for their work on behalf of the undocumented immigrant children separated from their parents.
One of the highest-compensated is Southwest Key, an Austin, Texas-based company that runs dozens of shelters for migrant children in Texas, Arizona and California. The nonprofit has made nearly half a billion dollars from federal government work in the last decade, The Dallas Morning News reported.
Cayuga, an Auburn, New York-based nonprofit, was paid nearly $44.5 million during the 2018 fiscal year by the Administration for Children and Families, contract records show.