Gov’t sends migrant girls to new Fla. facility

MIAMI — The Trump administration is sending migrant girls who have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border to a new Florida facility run by a nonprofit organization under a government grant.

The teenage girls arriving in Lake Worth, Florida, will receive classroom education and mental health and legal services until they are reunited with relatives in the U.S., said Annette Scheckler, spokeswoman for the organization, the Virginiabased U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants.

Up to 141 girls can be housed in a building in apartment-style units with two or four beds each, Sheckler said. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Department, which funds the facility, said there are 38 teenage girls currently staying in the shelter, which is located in an unused section of a nursing home complex.

The facility, which sits just south of West Palm Beach and only 9 miles away from President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, opened amid scathing criticism from lawmakers and migrant advocates about poor conditions at migrant facilities in Texas and the treatment of teenagers at a detention center in Homestead, Florida. Some of the girls at the Lake Worth shelter arrived as transfers from Homestead, the Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement.

Their arrival also began mere weeks after local leaders in Florida reacted with alarm to a U.S. Border Patrol notification that 1,000 migrants could be sent on a weekly basis to Palm Beach and Broward counties. Trump eventually denied the reports, saying there were “no plans to send migrants to northern or Coastal Border facilities.”

The girls come mostly from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.