Investigators question where migrant children moved from Homestead shelter are
When a high-level congressional delegation arrived at the Homestead shelter for migrant children Monday, they discovered that the federal government had suddenly, and sharply, reduced the number of teens held there — down 42% in 12 days.
Congressional investigators already had a litany of questions about the way the shelter is operating and how it’s spending money.
The new, paramount question: Where did the children go?
Numbers
As of June 14, the facility had 2,460 migrant children, ages 13 to 17, an 80 percent increase from when it first opened in the first quarter of 2018.
As of July 3, there were 2,252 children at the shelter.
And on Monday morning, there were 1,309.
Children housed there crossed the southern border without a parent. The agency responsible for the shelter, the Department of Health and Human Services, says none of the children at Homestead were separated from their parents by the government at the border.
The shelter is a piece of the struggle between Democrats and the president over the Trump administration’s policies on immigration and treatment of people who attempt to enter the U.S. at the southern border.
They don’t even see eye to eye on
how to describe the Homestead facility. Democrats call it a detention center. The Trump administration calls it an emergency care center or emergency influx center.
Questions
After two-and-a-half hours inside the facility, the leader of the congressional delegation, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., chairwoman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, said she wanted to know if the children were matched with family members or sponsors — or simply moved to other shelters?
U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, a member of the Appropriations Committee, has made several visits to the shelter. Sometimes she’s been allowed in; sometimes she’s been barred from entering.
“What the heck. From July 3 until July 14th, suddenly they’re able to drop 1,000 kids here when they couldn’t do that as quickly before? Where did they go?” she wondered.
Answers
Nobody is saying if the shelter is going to close.
Two things began happening on July 3:
The facility went on “admittance stop so no new children have come in since then.”
The Department of Health and Human Services began “releasing kids as quickly as possible.”
That information comes via email from a spokeswoman for Caliburn International, the parent company of Comprehensive Health Services, the contractor that operates the shelter.
The Caliburn representative provided numbers that answer part, but not all, of the questions from DeLauro and Wasserman Schultz.
From Friday through Monday morning, the company said, 448 children were released from the shelter, mostly categorized as “reunifications to a sponsor,” with some transfers to other shelters.
Starting with a population of 1,757 on Friday and ending with 1,309 as of Monday morning, Caliburn said 376 were reunified and 70 were transferred. One turned 18 and aged out of the facility and there was an “age redetermination” for another, meaning the operator realized the person was over 18.
Members of Congress raised suspicion that their planned visit — they had to give advance notice or risk being denied entry — played a role in the quick reduction in the number of children there.
Caliburn said the change resulted from “policy changes” implemented by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. For example, grandparents, adult siblings and caregivers who have provided care to a minor over a period of time no longer have to go through fingerprinting.
Mark Weber, a deputy assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, said via email that Homestead is “an emergency influx shelter for use when the standard shelter system is near capacity” and that quicker unification of children with parents, other relatives or sponsors has opened up space at standard shelters.
Hurricane plan
Wasserman Schultz expressed frustration over difficulty getting information about the shelter’s hurricane evacuation plan if a storm heads toward Miami-Dade County.
In an email last month to U.S. Rep. Debbie MucarselPowell, a Miami Democrat whose district includes the shelter, federal officials said all migrant children in their care would be evacuated and given “safe transportation” to a temporary shelter.
Her efforts to get details about evacuation plans resulted only in an email with six bullet points broadly summarizing what would happen in case of an emergency.
Wasserman Schultz said Monday that members of Congress have been denied the ability to see whatever hurricane evacuation plan exists, with officials citing the need to prevent disclosure of the places that would receive children from Homestead.
The congresswoman did not buy that as an excuse; she said the destinations could be redacted. She said Monday that access to the plan was still being denied, but that members of Congress were told they could get a briefing on the plan.
On Tuesday, MucarselPowell said on Twitter that she still has “not seen a hurricane evacuation plan for the Homestead facility, and as long as they continue to hold children during hurricane season, this is an extremely dangerous form of neglect.”
What’s next
Mucarsel-Powell said that when she visited the facility in June, it was preparing for expansion. “It seems plans have changed.”
In an email, the communications office in the Health and Human Services Department’s Administration for Children and Families said the Homestead shelter is not taking any more children in “right now.”
And the Caliburn representative was “not sure for how long” the no-admissions policy would stand.
The shelter opened in June 2016 during the Obama administration, closed in April 2017, and reopened in February 2018. Weber, from the Department of Health and Human Services, said it is “premature to speculate” about whether the shelter is going to close or not.
In a series of Twitter posts on Tuesday, Mucarsel-Powell wrote that the Homestead center is moving “in the right direction but we must continue pushing for a complete shutdown. The [Trump] Admin has proved that quality care for migrant children isn’t a priority at these shelters. #CloseTheCamps.”
Later she added that, “We won’t stop until every child is safely placed & this center is shut down.”
On July 24, the DeLauroled subcommittee plans a hearing about the unaccompanied children program run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. After touring Homestead, she warned agency officials to show up with answers to the congressional delegation’s questions.
Information from the News Service of Florida was used in this report.