Temporary care: Fairplex is still awaiting a federal contract to house minors detained at Mexican border

Immigration advocacy groups in Pomona are awaiting the arrival of about 2,500 migrant children who are expected to be sent from detention facilities along the U.S.-Mexico border to Fairplex, where they will be provided temporary shelter.

Los Angeles County officials announced April 9 that the children who crossed the border unaccompanied by their parents would arrive soon and would likely stay at Fairplex for about a month. Nearly two weeks after that an

nouncement, however, the children had yet to make their way to Pomona.

Fairplex does not yet have a signed contract with the Department of Health and Human Services, Fairplex spokeswoman Renee Hernandez explained Thursday. Once the contract is finalized, she said, the unaccompanied children will probably begin arriving in Pomona.

Hernandez said Fairplex is working with federal officials to provide a media tour of the areas where the children will be housed. Department of Health and Human Services officials said Thursday they had no updates regarding moving unaccompanied minors to Fairplex.

Fairplex is not the only center that has been tapped to house unaccompanied minors. A migrant shelter in San Diego is already serving about 500 teen girls, and a group of migrant children began arriving Thursday at the Long Beach Convention Center. The Long Beach facility is expected to house about 1,000 children, mostly young girls above age 5.

Immigration advocates in the Inland Empire say they have a number of concerns about the safety and welfare of the minors who will be housed at Fairplex. Claudia Bautista, associate director of the Pomona Economic Opportunity Center, said she hopes the children could be reunited with their families sooner.

“We’re also hoping they will get health care and mental health support and they will be treated as children,” she said, adding that there have been cases elsewhere where the children’s mobility had been limited.

Bautista’s organization is one of very few in the region that is accredited by the Department of Justice to perform donated legal immigration work.

“We would like to focus on legal intake support, if possible,” she said. “We’re concerned as well about the involvement of ICE and other agencies and to see what will happen to minors who turn 18 when they are being held there.”

Typically, an unaccompanied child who is taken into custody by Customs and Border Protection officials is brought into a facility and processed for transfer to the Department of Health and Human Services, which then holds the child for testing and quarantine. A child is then sheltered at a government facility until they are placed with a sponsor. According to the department, in more than 80% of cases, the child has a family member in the United States, and in more than 40% of the cases, that family member is a parent or a legal guardian.

Security at Fairplex will also be a matter of concern, said Javier Hernandez, executive director of the Ontario-based Inland Coalition for Immigration Justice.

“The Fairplex is a large facility and there are multiple buildings,” he said. “Who will be in charge of security? We are also worried about anti-immigration activists. How will these children be protected?”

The issue of housing migrant children also sheds light on the need to devise long-term strategies and solutions to migration, Hernandez said.

“The trend of migration is not new,” he said. “There should be conversation about long-term solutions and addressing the root cause for this migration at the federal level.”