Unaccompanied migrant children are being sent to a repurposed warehouse in Arizona and military bases in California, Texas and Oklahoma.
AP Photo/The Monitor, Gabe Hernandez
After declaring an "urgent humanitarian situation" last week, the federal government is scrambling to find housing for thousands of unaccompanied migrant children apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border by sending them to temporary shelters in various states across the country.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it plans to use a facility in Oklahoma to house up to 1,200 minors, the state's Gov. Mary Fallin said Friday. About about 1,000 more were sent to a Border Patrol station in Nogales, Ariz., over the weekend.
Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin said Homeland Security officials told her office they would use Fort Sill, in Lawton, to house the minors, who are mostly from Central America and said to be fleeing violence and poverty in their countries of origin.
A marked increase in the number of unaccompanied minors crossing the border illegally in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas prompted the Obama administration last week to step up its efforts to provide the youths with housing, food, and medical help, led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The administration and advocates predict over 60,000 will cross this year, up from less that 10,000 annually a few years ago.
Obama's Director of Domestic Policy Cecilia Muñoz said last week that more and younger children were arriving without an adult companion from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. The number of girls traveling alone was also on the rise, she said.
Overwhelmed by the number of children coming, officials started housing them last month in a repurposed building on a San Antonio air force base. Another temporary shelter at a naval base in Ventura County, Calif., opened last Friday.
On Thursday, the conservative website Breitbart.com published what it said were leaked photographs showing hundreds of people, many of them children, packed into processing facilities in Texas.
from BuzzFeed - Breaking http://ift.tt/1oABuCh
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