Two hours west of San Antonio, in an isolated patch of South Texas near the U.S.-Mexico border, is a federal facility made up of trailers, tents, and dormitory buildings, called Carrizo Springs. For the past year and a half, the complex was vacant. The Trump Administration closed it in July, 2019, a month after opening it as a temporary shelter for children who had crossed the border without their parents. At the time, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (O.R.R.), an agency in the Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for the care of the children while it finds and vets relatives in the U.S. with whom to place them, was running out of space. That May, more than eleven thousand unaccompanied children had arrived at the border. The numbers were high, but manageable. The real problem was a series of harsh new H.H.S. policies that made it much more difficult for sponsors to claim the children from the government; as a result, there was a processing backlog. Minors were spending longer than usual in custody, and the available shelter space was filling to capacity.
During the Trump years, Carrizo Springs was one of three so-called influx facilities, provisional shelters used in cases of emergency. (Unlike permanent shelters, they are typically not licensed at the state level.) Another was a tent encampment near El Paso, in a town called Tornillo. The Trump Administration had opened the Tornillo facility in June, 2018, in response to another crisis of its own making: the Department of Homeland Security had officially begun separating children from their parents at the border, and H.H.S. needed more room to house them. Some seven months later, in January, 2019, Tornillo was closed. The third site was a complex near Miami, known as Homestead, which, beginning in March, 2018, had held more than fourteen thousand unaccompanied minors, making it, at one point, the largest housing facility for children in the country. By August, 2019, Homestead, too, was emptied out. The Trump Administration said that it no longer needed the temporary facilities. But the closures underscored how the use of such facilities could have been avoided in the first place. “There should never be an influx facility,” one advocate told Vice News at the time, if the government “properly managed the release of children.”
In 2019, this was a justifiable sentiment, because the Trump Administration was plainly acting in bad faith. But what about now? Late last month, the Biden Administration announced that it was reopening Carrizo Springs; the facility will be able to hold around seven hundred minors between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. Two weeks ago, after the first group arrived, President Biden told Univision, “Our hope and expectation is that it won’t stay open very long, that we will be able to provide for every kid who comes across the border safely to be housed in a facility that is licensed.” The backlash among progressive Democrats was swift. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, “This is not okay, never has been okay-no matter the administration or party.” Her Twitter thread coincided with claims from activists and concerned citizens that went viral on social media accusing the new President of putting “kids in cages.” A headline in the New York Times read “Thousands of Migrant Children Detained in Resumption of Trump-Era Policies.”
Lawyers and advocates who’ve spent years working to defend immigrant children were stunned—more by the general confusion than by the situation that gave rise to it. “It’s emotional,” Jennifer Podkul, a vice-president of Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), a legal-advocacy group that specializes in the rights of immigrant children, told me. When it comes to immigrants, H.H.S. is tasked with a much different job than D.H.S., a distinction that’s frequently missed. The facilities in question are meant to serve as shelters, not as detention centers. O.R.R., the H.H.S. agency that is supposed to care for the children, “serves a protective purpose, not a punitive purpose,” Podkul said. When children arrive at the border, the first government agency they encounter is Customs and Border Protection (C.B.P.), but officials there aren’t trained to deal with minors, and their facilities are not designed to hold them. Federal regulations prohibit placing children in C.B.P. custody for more than seventy-two hours; the agency is supposed to immediately transfer them to O.R.R.
The Trump Administration, as it did with many government agencies, warped the office’s mission and its reputation. In an unprecedented step, O.R.R. started to share information about undocumented sponsors, so that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could target them for arrest when they came forward to claim the children. “O.R.R is not a law-enforcement entity. It’s a social-service provider,” Robert Carey, a former head of the office, once told me. The distinction matters because O.R.R. vets sponsors not to police them but to protect the children. Between 2013 and 2015, tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors from Central America arrived at the border, on a scale that overwhelmed federal authorities. To release the children faster, the Obama Administration relaxed the usual background checks. In 2016, the Senate issued a report detailing more than a dozen cases of children who were sent to abusive sponsors.
For Biden, there’s also the pandemic to consider. O.R.R. has more than thirteen thousand available beds for unaccompanied children, but to limit the spread of the virus the government is using only sixty per cent of them. According to H.H.S., there were seven thousand seven hundred unaccompanied children in its facilities as of late last week. The use of influx facilities is never ideal, Podkul told me, but, under the circumstances, the other options struck her as worse. Releasing children into the U.S. without a sponsor would be dangerous. And, if O.R.R. did not secure extra space, children would likely be forced to spend more time in holding cells run by C.B.P. “Those are the actual cages,” Podkul said.
At the start of the pandemic, last March, the Trump Administration created a further hindrance. Under pressure from the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention invoked an obscure authorization known as Title 42, which, in the event of an emergency involving communicable diseases, allows the government to immediately expel asylum seekers at the border. Scientists at the C.D.C. pointed out the specious logic of that ruling: tens of thousands of other travellers were crossing into the U.S. daily without restrictions, and the virus had already spread across the country. The Associated Press later reported that, after the C.D.C.’s top doctor refused to sign off on the authorization, because “there was no valid public health reason,” Mike Pence personally instructed the head of the agency to do so anyway. Multiple former Administration sources told me that Stephen Miller had been pushing to invoke public health as a pretext for ending asylum since 2017. (He never succeeded in making the scientific case, so he proceeded to dismantle the asylum system in other ways.) Between the issuance of the order, in March, and last fall, the Administration expelled more than two hundred thousand migrants, including some thirteen thousand children. After Biden took office, the new Administration left the broader Title 42 order in place, but decided to accept unaccompanied children for humanitarian reasons. “On this front, they’re moving heaven and earth to accommodate the kids who’ve been turned away,” Jennifer Nagda, a lawyer at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, in Chicago, told me. “Trump turned thousands of children away, and the Biden Administration is bringing them back in.”
The Biden team did try to prepare for the arrival of minors. In the fall, members of the transition team met to discuss the dilemma of caring for children at the border during the pandemic. But Trump’s political appointees at H.H.S. and D.H.S. refused to meet with them, deliberately sabotaging their ability to plan ahead, according to two people with knowledge of the situation. “November and December were lost months for the incoming team,” Nagda said. Around that time, a member of the Biden transition told me that it preferred not to waste time drawing public attention to Trump’s obstructionism. “We didn’t think that calling them out would get us the information we needed,” the person said.
The current situation at the border is confounding from a policy perspective. Central America is reeling from the pandemic; two devastating hurricanes struck last fall, displacing thousands; and a regional exodus that has been under way for years continues apace. Before the pandemic, tens of thousands of asylum applicants were stuck for months in dangerous Mexican border cities, while they waited for hearings in U.S. immigration courts under a policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols (M.P.P.). After the issuance of Title 42, all the existing cases were suspended indefinitely, which stranded more than twenty-five thousand people in northern Mexico.
Inside the Biden Administration, a common refrain is that “all the options are bad.” For example, Biden’s advisers had criticized Trump for using Title 42 for political, rather than public-health, reasons. Yet the Administration has not relinquished what could be a useful tool: under Title 42, the government will continue to expel single adults. The President is desperate to manage the increasing flow of migrants, while D.H.S. rebuilds its capacity for processing new arrivals. Understandably, this has frustrated many immigrants-rights advocates. Eleanor Acer, of Human Rights First, told me, “You either believe in asylum or you don’t. I understand there are political challenges. But the Biden Administration should be following the asylum laws enacted by Congress, not the policies devised by the Trump Administration to evade those laws.”
The President has insisted that he does believe in asylum, but that he can only save the program if he slowly phases it back into operation. “Some of the tools the new Administration is going to have to use to build our capacity back up are going to look a lot like things associated with Trump,” the transition official told me. There was another resemblance, as well—to Obama-era policies. In 2014, the first wave of unaccompanied children from Central America caught the Obama Administration off guard, and H.H.S. was forced to use emergency facilities. This time, the facilities are part of the plan.
Last month, the Biden Administration began unwinding Trump’s M.P.P. policy. So far, more than eleven hundred asylum applicants who’d been forced to wait in Mexico have been allowed to enter the U.S. A complex choreography is now unfolding from Tijuana to Matamoros, as more wait to be admitted.
Meanwhile, the number of unaccompanied children being held at the border has tripled in the past two weeks, to more than three thousand two hundred and fifty. More than thirteen hundred of them have been in C.B.P. custody longer than the seventy-two-hour limit prescribed by law. Government documents, quoted by the Times on Monday, projected that H.H.S. is thirteen days from reaching “maximum capacity.” But “these aren’t brand new cases of people setting out for the U.S.,” Podkul told me. “These are kids who’ve been waiting at the border, in some cases for more than a year.” C.B.P. has also arrested thousands of other migrants, among them large numbers of families from Central America. Biden Administration officials announced a new plan to turn D.H.S.-run detention centers in South Texas into “rapid-processing hubs” for families with young children. There the government will administer COVID tests and set court dates for immigration hearings, then release the families into the U.S. This is the definition of “catch and release”—watchwords for border hawks in both parties—but Biden wants to avoid detaining families for extended periods. In this, he’s breaking from both the Trump and Obama Administrations.
“What’s the real way to hold Biden to account?” the columnist Greg Sargent recently asked in the Washington Post. Public misunderstanding about what the President is doing, and why, he wrote, “makes it harder to actually hold the administration accountable.” Immigrants-rights advocates told me that they planned to monitor two issues in particular at the reopened Carrizo Springs facility. The first was how rapidly the Biden Administration moves children into the care of family sponsors. In the final year of the Obama Administration, the average time that children spent in O.R.R. custody was around a month, about a third of what it became under Trump last year. Now Biden is trying to expedite the process by having the government help pay the travel expenses involved in placing children with sponsors. (Previously, families used to incur those costs themselves.)
Advocates at KIND and the Young Center have given further guidance on influx facilities, which, so far, the Administration appears to be following. Podkul said that it “has to make sure the right kinds of kids are there”—meaning, teen-agers as opposed to young children, and Spanish and English speakers rather than those who speak indigenous languages. (More vulnerable populations are better served at permanent shelters with more resources.)
The second source of concern are the actual conditions inside Carrizo Springs. Because influx facilities are typically not licensed, there tends to be less oversight and reduced educational, as well as recreational, services. Carrizo Springs is run by a nonprofit called B.C.F.S. Health and Human Services, one of the largest contractors that work with O.R.R. At the group’s permanent shelters, where there is more routine oversight, monitors have flagged dozens of infractions in the past decade, from delays in conducting mandated medical exams to failing to run timely background checks on staff. Advocates gave the Administration a list of standards that should be imposed at Carrizo Springs, which approximate the conditions required at fully licensed facilities.
More troubling are reports that the Administration is planning to reopen the Homestead facility, in Florida. This was a privately run shelter operated by a subsidiary of the Virginia-based government contractor Caliburn International, and it occupies land near a Superfund site. Local advocates had complained about subpar conditions at the facility for months before the Trump Administration closed it. I asked one advocate why Biden would risk a public-relations fiasco by choosing a site with such negative associations. “This is always the problem,” she said. “For temporary facilities, in emergencies, the government has to look for locations that are already owned by the federal government. Anything else would require state licensing, and that takes time. The options are limited.” It isn’t immediately clear how a new Administration can address entrenched, structural flaws in the system in the middle of a developing crisis. (A spokesperson for H.H.S. told me, “An extensive list of requirements and standards must be met, including environmental assessment prior to children entering any care provider facility in our network.”)
Earlier this winter, lawyers at KIND received a phone call concerning an urgent situation in Mexico. Three Honduran siblings—aged three, seven, and nine—were stuck in Piedras Negras, where they’d been since December; their mother had died unexpectedly, and a family took them in. Their grandmother, who lives in the U.S., wanted to bring them across the border, but the logistics seemed impossible. The Biden transition had begun, but Trump was still in office. There was confusion about what was happening at ports of entry. Florence Chamberlin, a lawyer who works with Podkul, began making phone calls to C.B.P. officials. “People cannot safely approach a port of entry,” Chamberlin said. “You can be stopped by Mexican authorities, or by criminals. And we didn’t want to have them blocked, turned back, or expelled.” Eventually, two nuns accompanied the children to the border in late February, in the middle of a winter storm that paralyzed much of Texas.
For the advocates, the priority was getting the children into the care of O.R.R. Prompted by Chamberlin, C.B.P. quickly transferred them to O.R.R. custody in California, where they remain while the government makes preparations to reunite them with their grandmother. Podkul told me, “I’ve seen the conditions in Mexico and in C.B.P. holding cells at the border, and children aren’t safe in either of them.”
