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Migrant Children Moved Back to Troubled Texas Border Facility ‘We’re in a Dark Place’: Children Returned to Troubled Texas Border Facility
(about 1 hour later)
CLINT, Tex. — At the squat, sand-colored concrete border station in Texas that has become the center of debate over President Trump’s immigration policies, a chaotic shuffle of migrant children continued on Tuesday as more than 100 were moved back into a facility that days earlier had been emptied in the midst of criticism that young detainees there were hungry, crying and unwashed.CLINT, Tex. — At the squat, sand-colored concrete border station in Texas that has become the center of debate over President Trump’s immigration policies, a chaotic shuffle of migrant children continued on Tuesday as more than 100 were moved back into a facility that days earlier had been emptied in the midst of criticism that young detainees there were hungry, crying and unwashed.
The station in Clint, Tex., sits in the middle of a farm town of fewer than 1,000 residents, framed by high fencing and a tall communications tower. In recent weeks, it has become a temporary home to hundreds of migrant children as the government has run out of space to place the large numbers of migrants continuing to flow into the country from Central America. The transfer came just days after 249 children originally housed at the station in Clint, Tex., had been moved to other facilities to relieve overcrowding. The continuing movement of children and confusion over housing of the Border Patrol’s youngest detainees pointed to an increasingly disorganized situation along the southern border and an agency struggling to maintain minimal humanitarian standards amid an unprecedented influx of migrant families.
Lawyers who visited the facility said they found it stretched beyond its capacity, with hundreds of minor detainees having gone for weeks without access to showers, clean clothing or sufficient food. [Read here for the story behind a photo of two migrants found dead in the Rio Grande.]
But in a press call on Tuesday, a Customs and Border Protection official said that the agency was able to send about 100 children back to the station because overcrowding there had been alleviated. The official disputed the lawyers’ accounts of conditions at the facility, insisting that migrant detainees housed by the agency were given access to periodic showers and were offered unlimited snacks throughout the day. “We’ve dipped far below the standard of care into the realms of just utter darkness,” said State Representative Terry Canales of Texas, a Democrat who contacted Border Patrol officials to ask what he and his staff could do to help. “We’re in a dark place as a nation, and it just breaks my heart.”
The continuing movement of children and confusion over the situation at Clint demonstrated the increasingly disorganized situation along the southern border and the government’s struggle to maintain minimal humanitarian standards amid an unprecedented influx of migrant families that only recently has begun to show any signs of slowing. In Clint, a farm town about 20 miles southeast of El Paso with fewer than 1,000 residents, there was consternation and dismay among residents at reports from lawyers who visited the border station recently, who said they found that children as young as 5 months old had been housed with filthy clothes, dirty diapers and inadequate food.
The agency’s acting commissioner, John Sanders, will step down in early July as the government’s primary border enforcement executive, a federal official said Tuesday, a development that comes as the agency faces continuing public fury over the treatment of detained migrant children. “Almost like a concentration camp,” said Juan Martinez, who works at the Pride Fitness gym in Clint and heard about what was happening at the nearby station from news reports. “I mean, they’re not killing them, but they’re treating them like animals. They need basic hygiene.”
[Read more about Customs and Border Protection’s acting chief stepping down.] From across the country, donations of diapers and other supplies began flowing in — though Customs and Border Protection agents said they could not accept outside supplies and initially refused the growing stockpile. More than a dozen people drove into South Texas from as far away as the West Coast to deliver aid and launch protests.
Mr. Sanders announced his resignation in an email to colleagues shortly after it was reported by journalists. He has led the agency since Mr. Trump tapped the former Customs and Border Protection commissioner, Kevin McAleenan, to replace Kirstjen Nielsen as homeland security secretary. Mr. Sanders specialized in developing technology for national security initiatives and previously served as the chief technology officer for the Transportation Security Administration. “It’s about getting people aware and creating a space for people to be outraged,” said Kris Brockmann, who traveled 17 hours from Palo Alto, Calif., to protest outside a Border Patrol facility near Clint on Tuesday night.
The official who confirmed his resignation, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter, said it was not clear whether the impending resignation was connected to recent criticism over the agency’s management of a large influx of migrant families along the border. The Clint facility houses only a fraction of the tens of thousands of migrants who have been crossing the border each month, mostly Central American families fleeing poverty and violence in their homelands. But the lawyers’ observations of the conditions there, shared with journalists last week, offered a rare view into a system that has been deteriorating for the most part out of sight of the public.
That assertion from Customs and Border Protection that children were being well cared for ran contrary to what the lawyers, from some of the nation’s top law schools, said they were told by children. During a court-ordered visit to the facility earlier this month, some children said they had not been allowed to shower in nearly a month, and were so hungry that it had been hard for them to sleep through the night. The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general has recently reported on facilities that it found to be dangerously overcrowded, where there was standing room only, and where lights had been kept on 24 hours a day in rooms where people had been left to sleep on concrete floors. But reporters have rarely been allowed into the facilities to document the conditions first hand.
[Read about the conditions migrant children were held in at Clint.] Mr. Trump refused to take responsibility for the conditions facing migrant children and families at border facilities. “You know, they were built by President Obama, they are really not designed so much for children,” Mr. Trump said in an interview in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “But you know, children can be there because we have no choice because of the laws, the laws are so bad.”
Asked if his administration’s policies were to blame, Mr. Trump said the conditions existed because Democrats in Congress would not agree to policy changes that would stanch the flow of migrants across the border. “All I can say is that if they change the law, you wouldn’t have it,” Mr. Trump said. “The cartels are making the money, are they using children’s — it’s virtual slavery. And if we could get a change, a very simple change it would go so quickly, so easily with the Democrats, we would be able to solve that problem very easily.”
The station in Clint was built in 2012. It was meant to temporarily house adults, not children, and not for a month at a time, as has happened under the Trump administration.
Local Democratic lawmakers on Tuesday were demanding an immediate improvement to conditions for detainees along the border, with Representative Joaquin Castro, a Democrat from Texas who is chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, announcing that the caucus would lead an inspection of the facility at Clint next week.
Amid the outrage over the conditions at Clint, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, John Sanders, announced he would step down in early July as the government’s primary border enforcement executive, the latest in a series of personnel changes within the federal border enforcement agencies that have come down since April, when Mr. Trump asked Kirstjen Nielsen to resign from her position as homeland security secretary.
[Read more: Customs and Border Protection’s acting chief will step down.]
A C.B.P. spokesman said that the agency was able to return 100 children to Clint because the previous overcrowding had been alleviated, but he also said that no additional resources were being provided to them. He disputed the accounts of the lawyers, including some from the nation’s top law schools, who after a court-ordered visit to the facility earlier this month said they had observed children who had not been allowed to shower in nearly a month, and were so hungry that it had been hard for them to sleep through the night.
They found children as young as 8 caring for infants they didn’t know, and toddlers who had relieved themselves in their clothes because they had not been put in diapers.
[Read about the conditions migrant children were held in at Clint.
“I personally don’t believe these allegations,” the Customs and Border Protection official, who spoke on the condition he not be identified, told reporters.“I personally don’t believe these allegations,” the Customs and Border Protection official, who spoke on the condition he not be identified, told reporters.
The lawyers’ accounts prompted a significant public backlash, after which all but 30 of the roughly 300 children who were being housed in Clint were transferred elsewhere. Some 249 were placed in a shelter network for children run by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, while others were moved to a tent facility in El Paso run by Customs and Border Protection. Volunteers who began trying to deliver donated supplies to the facility in Clint starting over the weekend were originally turned away and told that outside donations would not be accepted. A C.B.P. spokesman on Tuesday followed up, telling reporters that the agency was reviewing its donations policy to see if it could legally accept any supplies from the outside — though he also disputed the idea that any needed supplies were running low.
But on Tuesday, the C.B.P. official said that those moves had alleviated overcrowding in Clint, and allowed for the return of more than 100 children there. The spokesman said that no additional resources had been provided to the children who were sent back. Mr. Canales, the Democratic state representative, said his office had been contacted by more than 1,000 people in the last week who were looking for ways to help the children in Clint.
After the lawyers’ accounts about Clint were made public, volunteers from around the country began to mobilize, hoping to deliver supplies such as diapers, soap and food to the facility. But those who arrived there were not allowed in and their donations were not accepted, according to local media reports. As evening approached on Tuesday, activists from places including California, New York and Washington, D.C., began their demonstration.
[Meet the Justice Department lawyer who didn’t want to promise a toothbrush to migrant children.] “I’ve become increasingly aware of the enormous pipeline from Central America and all of the things that make it unlivable there,” said Heather Hadlock, a professor of musicology at Stanford University in California. ”Those things are not trivial or optional.”
On the call with reporters on Tuesday, the Customs and Border Protection official said that the agency was reviewing its policy for accepting outside donations, but the official also disputed the idea that supplies were running low.
“We are looking at the possibility of using some of those donations going forward but those items, it’s important to note, are available now,” the official said.
Federal officials had previously told the office of Representative Terry Canales, a Democrat from Texas who requested a list of needed supplies, that the agency would not be able to accept outside donations, according to Curtis Smith, Mr. Canales’s chief of staff.