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.