The Border Patrol is holding more than 4,200 migrant minors who crossed the border alone, according to government data reviewed by CBS News.
About 3,000 of these children and youth had been detained for more than 72 hours (or three days, the legal limit), according to figures updated on Sunday.
This figure represents an increase of 31% compared to last week, when there were 3,200 minors retained;
in the case of children who have been in custody for more than three days, the previous figure is doubled.
Many of the migrant children who cross the border alone and are in a detention center under the control of Customs and Border Protection (CBP, in English) say they
have
hardly
seen "the sky
.
"
Some say the only time they see it is when they bathe.
And several have gone six days without doing so.
["There are many extortions and rapes there": migrants tell how desperation and terror pushed them to cross the border at night]
About twenty immigrant minors told Leecia Welch, director of child welfare for the National Center for Youth Law (NCYL), the conditions in which they live in Donna's center, according to the news portal Buzzfeed. News.
All those interviewed were under CBP control for at least five days.
"Many of these children have been on a dangerous journey for a long time, crossing a river, and they especially need to be able to shower," Welch said.
Unaccompanied minor asylum seekers from Central America are separated from other migrants by Border Patrol agents after crossing the Rio Grande into the United States from Mexico on a raft in Peñitas, Texas, March 14, 2021. REUTERS / Adrees Latif
Other children said they are only allowed outside on some days and for 20 minutes.
Some said they sleep on the floor because there are not enough mats.
The kids, especially the youngest ones, were very scared and confused about where they were and where they will go next, Welch said.
Most were upset that they could not call their family or that they had been separated from their siblings, as CBP separates children into different areas based on their sex.
"None of the children I spoke to had ever had access to the phone,"
Welch said.
The director of the organization was surprised by the number of such young children in this center and how many of them have direct relatives in the country.
Humanitarian crisis at the border
Minors must enter the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is part of the Department of Health (HHS), upon leaving Border Patrol facilities.
But, in response to the increase in the number of minors who cross the border alone, and after the saturation of the CBP facilities, the Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS, for its acronym in English), Alejandro Mayorkas, ordered this Saturday to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) support to receive, house and safely transfer these children and adolescents.
FEMA will work over the next 90 days with the Department of Health to study all available options to rapidly expand the physical capacity of adequate housing for minor migrants.
For days, the Joe Biden government resisted calling the growing arrival of migrants to the border a crisis.
But this Sunday the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, said that she believes that the arrival of unaccompanied children to the southern border in recent months represents "a humanitarian crisis."
"What I know is that the Biden Administration is trying to fix the broken system inherited from the Trump Administration," Pelosi added.
In order to allow these children to finally meet their parents, the government announced urgent measures last week.
One is the cancellation of an immigration policy of his predecessor, Donald Trump, which endangered those immigrants who appeared before the Department of Health to try to take in minors (mostly relatives) who had crossed the border alone at risk of deportation. border and had passed into federal custody.
Trump allowed the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) to collect information on the immigration status of those who came to look for unaccompanied minors and thus be able to deport them.
Pro-immigrant lawyers assure that with the agreement the minors will spend less time in detention, as their protectors "will not be afraid" of claiming them.
In February alone, the Border Patrol detained
9,457 unaccompanied minors
, and so far this fiscal year, that number has reached nearly
30,000.
And, according to DHS estimates, some 117,000 migrant children will cross the border alone in 2021.
Likewise, Biden announced the reactivation of the Program for Central American Minors (CAM), which allows immigrant children and young people fleeing violence in Central America to request refugee status without having to risk their lives by emigrating to the United States. to ask for asylum at the border.
The program was launched by former President Barack Obama in 2014 (Biden was his vice president) during a crisis at the border due to the arrival of thousands of undocumented minors, similar to the one now beginning to register again, but it was closed under the Donald Trump Administration within its policies to limit immigration.
With information from Buzzfeed News and CBS News.