'A moral disaster': AP reveals scope of migrant kids program
Source: Associated Press
‘A moral disaster’: AP reveals scope of migrant kids program
By GARANCE BURKE and MARTHA MENDOZA
December 20, 2018
Decades after the U.S. stopped institutionalizing kids because large and crowded orphanages were causing lasting trauma, it is happening again. The federal government has placed most of the 14,300 migrant toddlers, children and teens in its care in detention centers and residential facilities packed with hundreds, or thousands, of children.
As the year draws to a close, about 5,400 detained migrant children in the U.S. are sleeping in shelters with more than 1,000 other children. Some 9,800 are in facilities with 100-plus total kids, according to confidential government data obtained and cross-checked by The Associated Press.
That’s a huge shift from just three months after President Donald Trump took office, when the same federal program had 2,720 migrant youth in its care; most were in shelters with a few dozen kids or in foster programs. Some of the children may be released sooner than anticipated, because this week the administration ended a portion of its strict screening policies that had slowed the placement of migrant kids with relatives in the U.S.
Democratic lawmakers introduced new legislation Thursday aimed at shutting down two of those mass detention facilities holding more than 4,000 migrant children in a tent city in the Texas desert and at an emergency detention center in the Miami suburbs.
The “Shut Down Child Prison Camps Act” introduced in the House and Senate orders the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to immediately close the two unlicensed facilities and is sponsored by California Democratic Rep. Judy Chu and Sen. Jeff Merkley.
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Read more: https://apnews.com/a857e04de9bc4871995b65784ed7ccd8
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