The prison camp for migrant children in Tornillo, Texas, has surged from approximately 1,500 children last month, to 2,324 children this month, all of them unaccompanied minors, or kids who came to the U.S. by themselves, oftentimes fleeing violence and other danger. Now this so-called “temporary tent city,” the Associated Press reports, “shows every sign of becoming more permanent.” In fact, it has already been extended at least three times:
A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Mark Weber, said no decisions have been made about whether Tornillo will close by year's end as scheduled.
"Whatever it is we decide to do, in the very near future, we'll do a public notice about that," he said.
In their rush to continue jailing the record number of migrant kids in U.S. custody (which is of the administration’s own doing), officials have also put these kids at dire risk by nixing background checks for staffers at Tornillo. What could ever go wrong? Something already has, because BCFS, contracted by the administration to run the prison camp, “has filed more than 30 reports on ‘significant incidents’ at Tornillo since June, some involving interactions between children and staff, but none of a sexual nature.” Oh, that’s comforting.
One Honduran teen who had been detained there earlier this year told the AP that "the few times they let me call my mom I would tell her that one day I would be free, but really I felt like I would be there for the rest of my life. I feel so bad for the kids who are still there. What if they have to spend Christmas there? They need a hug, and nobody is allowed to hug there." No children belong in there, because kids belong with their families. Yet, the AP reports, “more people are detained in Tornillo's tent city than in all but one of the nation's 204 federal prisons, and construction continues.”