Hundreds of Migrant Children Are Being Ripped From Foster Homes and Bussed Overnight to Texas Tent Cities – With Almost No Notice – Every Week

The Trump administration is currently housing more than five times the number of migrant children than it was just one year ago. And it is scrambling to make room for more.

The New York Times reports that hundreds of migrant children who have been placed in foster homes or shelters across the country are being ripped from their new homes and shipped to tent cities in Texas. Tent cities that sound more like concentration camps than, as one Fox News anchor earlier this year called them, “summer camps.”

To make matters worse for the already psychologically scarred children, most of whom don’t know where their parents are and have not spoken with them for months, is they are being given at most a few hours notice that they are about to be “deported” to a new home – that’s more like a prison.

And federal officials are doing all this under cover of darkness, not allowing the children to say goodbye to any new friends or support systems they may have been able to create.

“In shelters from Kansas to New York, hundreds of migrant children have been roused in the middle of the night in recent weeks and loaded onto buses with backpacks and snacks for a cross-country journey to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in West Texas,” The New York Times reports.

Advocates are warning “that moving children to the tent city without providing enough time to prepare them emotionally or to say goodbye to friends could compound trauma that many are already struggling with.”

The Tent Cities Are Unregulated

Upon arrival to the tent cities – for which taxpayers spend $750 per night per child – the migrant children receive no schooling and have limited access to any legal representation.

“Hundreds of children are being shipped from shelters to West Texas each week, totaling more than 1,600 so far.”

Currently, the federal government is housing over 13,000 migrant children.

The Dept. of Health and Human Services is tasked with housing all the migrant children separated from their undocumented parents as part of Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy. That policy may have permanently separated families – it’s been revealed there was never any plan to reunite the children with their parents and siblings, and now the feds are scrambling under court orders.

While the Health and Human Services Dept., headed by Secretary Alex Azar – a former big pharmaceuticals executive – showed exactly zero planning after Trump implemented his zero tolerance policy, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is part of HHS, has acted on a disturbing premise, and shown exactly where its priorities lie.

In what Slate is describing as a “budgeting exercise,” Secretary Azar’s Office of Refugee Resettlement is planning for a surge in migrant children being separated from their parents. The ORR has a plan to house 25,400 migrant children by the end of the year. And it is paying for the program by gutting another: The Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, according to internal Office of Refugee Resettlement documents.

“The documents,” Slate reports, “indicate that HHS plans to pay for child separation by reallocating money from the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, which, according to its website, ‘provides a comprehensive system of care that includes primary medical care and essential support services for people living with HIV who are uninsured or underinsured.’ Per the documents, the process of transferring those HIV/AIDS funds has already begun.”

HHS will also ask Congress for additional funds, and “plans to reallocate $79 million from programs for refugee resettlement, a move that could imperil social services, medical assistance, and English language instructions for refugees in the U.S., as well as programs for torture survivors.”

ORR says it will need $1.3 billion more to house migrant children, to cover the last three months of the year – that’s the entire amount allocated for all of 2018.

The Trump administration promised that it knew where all the children who were separated from their undocumented parents under its “zero tolerance” policy of splitting kids from their parents were. A federal judge ordered all migrant children separated at the Southern border be reunited with their parents and families, and gave the administration until Tuesday to reunite children five years and younger with their parents.

According to Talking Points Memo, the administration has successfully reunited just two children under five with their parents. It is not expected to meet Tuesday’s deadline.

“Southern District of California Judge Dana Sabraw held off on giving them an extension, and is instead demanding that they come back to court on Tuesday to explain how many families were reunited, why the government failed to reunite the rest by the deadline, and how much more time it will need for those cases,” TPM’s Alice Ollstein reports.

Justice Department attorney Sarah Fabien says she believes the administration will be able to reunite barely more than half of those the court had ordered returned to their parents, by the deadline. That would be just 56 in total, out of 102.

The ACLU has offered to help the government in its search for the parents of the children stolen from their parents.

Somewhere between 9 and 19 parents of children 5 or younger have already been deported.