Teens to be housed at Dallas convention center
The U.S. government plans to house up to 3,000 immigrant teenagers at a convention center in downtown Dallas, as it struggles to find space for the surge of migrant children at the border who have strained the immigration system just two months into the Biden administration.
American authorities encountered people crossing the border without legal status more than 100,000 times in February, a level higher than all but four months of Donald Trump’s presidency. The spike in traffic poses a challenge to President Joe Biden at a fraught moment with Congress, which is about to take up immigration legislation, and has required the help of the American Red Cross.
The Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center will be used for up to 90 days beginning as early as this week, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press that was sent Monday to members of the Dallas City Council. Federal agencies will use the facility to house boys ages 15 to 17, according to the memo, which describes the soon-to-open site as a “decompression center.”
The Health and Human Services Department is rushing to open facilities across the country to house immigrant children who are otherwise being held by the Border Patrol, which is generally supposed to detain children for no more than three days. The Border Patrol is holding children longer because there is next to no space in the HHS system, similar to the last major increase in migration two years ago.
A tent facility operated by the Border Patrol in Donna,
some 500 miles south of Dallas, is holding more than 1,000 children and teenagers, some as young as 4. Lawyers who inspect immigrant detention facilities under a court settlement say they interviewed children who reported being held in packed conditions in the tent, with some sleeping on the floor and others not able to shower for five days.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Saturday directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help manage and care for children crossing the border.
“I am incredibly proud of the agents of the Border Patrol, who have been working around the clock in difficult circumstances to take care of children temporarily in our care,” Mayorkas said in a statement. “Yet, as
I have said many times, a Border Patrol facility is no place for a child.”
Asked about housing migrant teens at the convention center, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday that the administration has been looking for additional facilities for unaccompanied children but that she would have to look into the specifics of the arrangement in Dallas.
“Certainly we would ensure that we’re meeting the standard that we have set out,” Psaki said.
Biden has delighted proimmigration advocates by backing a bill to offer a path to citizenship to all of the estimated 11 million people in the U.S. illegally. He also suspended several Trumpera policies to deter asylum, including one that forced them to wait in Mexico for
court hearings in the U.S.
Republicans have seized on the numbers to portray the border spinning out of control.
“This crisis is created by the presidential policies of this new administration,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Monday while leading a large congressional delegation to El Paso, Texas. “There’s no other way to claim it than a Biden border crisis.”
Biden has kept pandemic-related powers in place that allow him to immediately expel people who enter the country without legal status, denying them an opportunity to seek asylum. Biden aides have yet to say when they may lift that authority. It does not extend to children who cross the border alone.
U.S. authorities encountered
children traveling alone 9,457 times in February, nearly double the amount in January and the highest since May 2019, when the number encountered neared 12,000 during the peak of a Trump-era surge.
The memo sent to Dallas City Council members says the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the HHS will “be responsible for providing shelter management and contracts” for food, security, cleaning, and medical care at the convention center. Dallas previously offered space to the HHS during the 2014 surge of crossings of immigrant children.
Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax said in a statement that “collective action is necessary, and we will do our best to support this humanitarian effort.”
He referred questions to the HHS, which did not respond to requests for comment Monday.
The HHS also has said it will house immigrant youths in Midland. Teenagers began arriving Sunday at a converted camp for oilfield workers, where volunteers from the American Red Cross will care for them. BuzzFeed News first reported the opening of the Midland facility.
The Red Cross has sent about 60 volunteers to the facilities in Midland and Dallas, and expects to deploy more in the coming days, said Greta Gustafson, a spokeswoman for the group.
The surge at the U.S.-Mexico border has presented a major test for Biden’s administration, which promised to break from the more restrictive measures against migrants enacted by Trump. Biden has left in place some Trump policies, notably the expulsions of immigrant adults and families under the public-health declaration citing the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden declined to reinstate public-health expulsions of children, and his administration has also been unable to expel many families in South Texas, due to policy changes in Mexico’s Tamaulipas state, across from the Texas Rio Grande Valley.
Border agents are apprehending more than 400 children a day on average, far more than the number of children that the HHS is processing and releasing to sponsors. The Biden administration has announced several policy changes to try to expedite releases, but experts and immigration lawyers say the government could do more to speed up the process, particularly of releasing children to their parents in the U.S.
The Vatican declared Monday that the Catholic Church won’t bless same-sex unions, since God “cannot bless sin.”
The Vatican’s orthodoxy office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued its formal response to a question about whether Catholic clergy have the authority to bless gay unions. The answer, contained in the two-page explanation published in seven languages and approved by Pope Francis, was “negative.”
The note distinguished between the church’s welcoming and blessing of gay people, which it upheld, but not their unions. It argued that such unions are not part of God’s plan, and that any sacramental recognition of them could be confused with marriage.
The note pleased conservatives, disheartened advocates for LGBT Catholics, and threw a wrench in the debate within the German church, which has been at the forefront of opening discussion on hot-button issues such the church’s teaching on homosexuality.
Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, which advocates for greater acceptance of gays in the church, predicted the Vatican position would be ignored, including by some Catholic clergy.
“Catholic people recognize the holiness of the love between committed same-sex couples and recognize this love as divinely inspired and divinely supported and thus meets the standard to be blessed,” he said in a statement.
The Vatican holds that gay people must be treated with dignity and respect, but that gay sex is “intrinsically disordered.”
Catholic teaching says that marriage is a lifelong union between a man and woman, is part of God’s plan, and is intended for the sake of creating new life. Since gay unions aren’t intended to be part of that plan, they can’t be blessed by the church, the document said.
“The presence in such relationships of positive elements, which are in themselves to be valued and appreciated, cannot justify these relationships and render them legitimate objects of an ecclesial blessing, since the positive elements exist within the context of a union not ordered to the Creator’s plan,” the response said.
God “does not and cannot bless sin: He blesses sinful man, so that he may recognize that he is part of his plan of love and allow himself to be changed by him,” it said.
Francis has endorsed providing gay couples with legal protections in samesex unions, but that was in reference to the civil sphere, not within the church. Those comments
were made during his 2019 interview with a Mexican broadcaster, Televisa, but were censored by the Vatican until they appeared in a documentary last year.
While the documentary fudged the context, Francis was referring to the position he took when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires. At the time, Argentine lawmakers were considering approving gay marriage, which the Catholic Church opposes. Then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio instead supported providing legal protections for gays in stable unions through a so-called “law of civil cohabitation.”
Francis told Televisa, “Homosexual people have the right to be in a family. They are children of God.”
Speaking of families with gay children, he said, “You can’t kick someone out of a family, nor make their life miserable for this. What we have to have is a civil union law; that way they are legally covered.”
In the new document and its accompanying unsigned
article, the Vatican said questions had been raised about whether the church should bless samesex unions in a sacramental way in recent years, and after Francis had insisted on the need to better welcome gays in the church.
It was an apparent reference to the German church, where some bishops have been pushing the envelope on issues such as priestly celibacy, contraception and the church’s outreach to gay Catholics after coming under pressure by powerful lay Catholic groups demanding change.
In a statement, the head of the German bishops’ conference, Bishop Georg Bätzing, said the new document would be incorporated into the German discussion, but he suggested that the case was by no means closed.
“There are no easy answers to questions like these,” he said, adding that the German church wasn’t only looking at the church’s current moral teaching, but also the development of doctrine and the reality of Catholics today.
Bill Donohue, president of the conservative Catholic League, praised the decision as a decisive, non-negotiable “end of story” declaration by the Vatican.
“The Vatican left nothing on the table. The door has been slammed shut on the gay agenda,” Donohue wrote on the League’s website, calling the document “the most decisive rejection of those efforts ever written.”
In the article, the Vatican stressed the “fundamental and decisive distinction” between gay individuals and gay unions, noting that “the negative judgment on the blessing of unions of persons of the same sex does not imply a judgment on persons.”
But it explained the rationale for forbidding a blessing of such unions, noting that any union that involves sexual activity outside of marriage cannot be blessed, because it is not in a state of grace, or “ordered to both receive and express the good that is pronounced and given by the blessing.”
And it added that blessing a same-sex union could give the impression of a sort of sacramental equivalence to marriage. “This would be erroneous and misleading,” the article said.
Esteban Paulon, president of the Argentine Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transsexuals, said the document was proof that for all of Francis’ words and gestures expressing outreach to gays, the institutional church wouldn’t change.
“Saying that homosexual practice — openly living sexuality — is a sin takes us back 200 years and promotes hate speech that unfortunately in Latin America and Europe is on the rise,” Paulon said. “That transforms into injuries and even deaths, or policies which promote discrimination.”
A similar note was echoed in the Philippines, Asia’s largest Roman Catholic nation, where gay-rights leader Danton Remoto said it simply wasn’t worth it to fight an old institution. “I keep on telling LGBTQIs to just have their civil unions done,” Remoto said. “We do not need any stress anymore from this church.”
Other critical commentators noted the Catholic Book of Blessings contains blessings that can be bestowed on everything from new homes and factories to animals, sporting events, seeds before planting and farm tools.
Juan Carlos Cruz, a Chilean survivor of sexual abuse who is gay and close to Francis, said the document was out of step with Francis’ pastoral approach and was tone-deaf to the needs and rights of LGBT Catholics.
“If the Church and the CDF do not advance with the world ... constantly rejecting and speaking negatively and not putting priorities where they should be, Catholics will continue to flee,” he warned.
In 2003, the same Vatican office issued a similar decree, saying that the church’s respect for gay people “cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behavior or to legal recognition of homosexual unions.”
Doing so, the Vatican reasoned then, would not only condone “deviant behavior,” but create an equivalence to marriage, which the church holds is an indissoluble union between man and woman.
Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of the U.S.-based NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice and an advocate for greater LGBTQ inclusion in the church, said she was relieved the Vatican statement wasn’t worse.