The U. S. government will close 4 emergency centers set up to space a record number of young migrants crossing the Mexican border alone, but warned Tuesday that minors are still arriving.
The Department of Health and Human Services will close two services in Texas and two at conference centers in California through early August, Aurora Miranda-Maese, a children’s coordinator with the agency’s refugee resettlement office, said at a hearing on custody of migrant children. .
Four of the shelters will be opened on a large scale, adding one that has been criticized through immigrant advocates at the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso, Texas, he said. Others are in Albion, Michigan; Pecos, Texas; and Pomona, California, she says.
The U. S. government U. S. It has reported a recent decline in the number of youth detained in emergency facilities, adding a drop of more than 40% at Fort Bliss since mid-June. Miranda-Maese said more young people are being turned over to parents in the United States or sent to state-licensed shelters that provide a higher point of care.
Emergency sites were established through the Biden administration this spring to address an increase in the number of young people arriving alone at the southern border, many of them fleeing violence in Central America and to locate family members in the United States.
Henry A. Moak Jr. , the coordinator of the U. S. Customs and Border Protection miners. U. S. , He said it was unclear if that would replace despite the summer heat.
“It turns out the numbers keep going up,” he told the court. “I don’t know if the hot weather will deter him at all. “
Health and Human Services takes care of young people until they can be sent with their parents to the United States. The firm has about 15,000 dependent youth and fewer than 3,000 in emergency facilities, Miranda-Maese said. But he noted that the number of young people earned from the border government is highest over the next week.
“This is concerned because it’s a very complicated and complicated time to cross the border,” he said.
Miranda-Maese mentioned the difficult situations at Fort Bliss and said the facility was being reconfigured into a more child-friendly gondola formula with single beds instead of double beds. He said the government was also turning to the formula to assess family members more temporarily so that young people can simply live with them.
His comments came at a hearing in a Los Angeles federal court overseeing a long-standing regulation governing custody situations for immigrant children.
In recent court documents, more than a dozen young people have described their desperation to get out of emergency facilities. In one account, a teenage girl said she had been at Fort Bliss for about 60 days and could get some sleep at night. because the lights were on and she only had to eat ice pops and juice because the food was infected.
Carlos Holguin, a youth attorney, said advocates feared well-run services like the Long Beach Convention Center would be closed while Fort Bliss remained open. It was also unclear which youths had been sent to state-approved shelters, which were governed by other rules, and who were sent to emergency sites.
Authorities are expected to register updates with him in July. Another hearing is scheduled for August.
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Taxin reported in Orange County, California.
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