Unaccompanied migrant kids could go to tent cities

Trump administration considering sites on military posts

Washington — The Trump administration is looking to build tent cities at military posts around Texas to shelter the increasing number of unaccompanied migrant children being held in detention.

The Department of Health and Human Services will visit Fort Bliss, a sprawling Army base near El Paso in the coming weeks to look at a parcel of land where the administration is considering building a tent city to hold between 1,000 and 5,000 children, according to U.S. officials and other sources familiar with the plans.

HHS officials confirmed that they’re looking at the Fort Bliss site along with Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene and Goodfellow AFB in San Angelo for potential use as temporary shelters.

The aggressive plan comes at the same time child shelters are filling up with more children who have been separated from their parents. The number of migrant children held in U.S. government custody without their parents has increased more than 20 percent as Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen rolled out the administration’s new zero tolerance policy that separates children from their parents who now face prosecution.

More than 10,000 migrant children are being held at HHS shelters, which are 95 percent full.

The Trump administration has blamed Congress for allowing loopholes that require federal authorities to release illegal immigrants to await hearings for which many don’t show up.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at a roundtable last month with Trump charged that those loopholes also prevent the administration from quickly deporting unaccompanied children.

“It can take months and sometimes years to adjudicate those claims once they get into the federal immigration court system, and they often fail to appear for immigration proceedings,” Rosenstein said.