On the same day that a 16-year-old migrant boy died while in U.S. custody, the Trump administration requested billions of dollars in “emergency funding” in order to have the capacity to detain tens of thousands of other migrant children. The federal government had a record 15,000 kids in custody at the end of last year, and is now demanding nearly $3 billion in order to balloon that record to as many as 23,600 children in the future.
“Even the Trump administration agrees that children who arrive at the border alone should live with parents or relatives in the United States while their immigration cases are decided rather than stay in government shelters,” Mother Jones reports. “Department of Health and Human Services assistant secretary Lynn Johnson put it bluntly in an interview with National Public Radio last year: ‘The government makes lousy parents.’”
Instead, the administration has in the past taken steps to keep more kids detained for longer periods of time, and in harmful and damaging conditions. Attorneys and experts who have permission to inspect children’s detention facilities as part of a years-old court agreement described the prison camp for migrant kids in Homestead, Florida, in chilling terms. “Some of them have been there for months on end,” said Neha Desai of the National Center for Youth Law, “with no freedom of movement, no privacy, no human contact.”
The new funding demand presumably addresses unaccompanied minors, such as the ones jailed at Homestead, but it could also be funding for family separation. Federal legislators who toured Homestead met kids who had been separated from relatives at the border but were still considered to be unaccompanied. “We spoke with a number of kids and they all said they came with someone,” said Rep. Sylvia Garcia of Texas. “But they were separated, so it’s still happening.”
The funding request also comes as the administration is set to soon begin closing international immigration offices in a supposed effort to save “millions of dollars every year,” in a move that a former official called “a great blow to the quality and integrity of the legal immigration system.” Yet billions of dollars doesn’t seem out of the question for the administration, and no one ever really seems to question who’s going to pay for that or where the money’s coming from. It’s coming from us, but it’ll be kids paying the price too.