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The Trump administration wants an additional $190 million in our money to continue detaining migrant children in a prison camp in Texas and other facilities, Congress member Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut said, to which she offered an unequivocal response. “’The White House has had the audacity to ask Congress for more money, even though we are done with appropriations for the year,” she said during a press call, according to The Hill. “Over my dead body will we provide another nickel for these folks to do what they’re doing."
The administration is calling for more cash as it continues to detain a record number of migrant children, the vast majority of them unaccompanied minors, or kids who came to the U.S. by themselves. Officials could release these kids to sponsors, but have instead increased the size of the Tornillo prison camp, at ongoing physical and emotional risk to children who were already escaping great physical and emotional harm. According to a government watchdog, a top Health and Human Services (HHS) official waived FBI background checks for Tornillo employees. Now, officials want more cash?
Unfortunately, they could still get it. “In the HHS appropriations package signed into law earlier this year, the agency was given authority to transfer more unallocated funds from elsewhere in HHS to pay for housing migrant children.” DeLauro, though, could soon end this practice. The Hill reports that she’s “set to become head of the House Appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), starting in January.”
DeLauro was also among the Democratic leaders calling for Tornillo’s closure, which currently detains about 2,300 children but could hold as many as 3,800. “We are now in the business of routinely incarcerating children in our country,” said Congress member-elect Veronica Escobar, who recently made history as one of the first Latinas to represent Texas in Congress. “And the costs are exorbitant and outrageous and those are dollars that obviously should be going toward family reunification and toward more humane approaches to this.”