The detention camp for migrant kids in Tornillo, Texas, was supposed to be gone by now. Set up as a temporary “emergency influx shelter” in June, when the government was running out of places to put the kids it was tearing from parents at the border, the camp, located in the desert forty miles southeast of El Paso, was originally scheduled to close on July 13th. But the government kept pushing back the deadline, in thirty-day increments, until recently disclosing that the facility will remain open at least through the end of the year.
The Times put the camp back in the news this week, reporting that the facility’s capacity was also recently increased, so that it could accommodate up to thirty-eight hundred kids—some ten times as many kids as it was housing in June. “[T]he intent is to use these temporary facilities only as long as needed,” Evelyn Stauffer, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the facility, told the Times. From the start at Tornillo, though, “as needed” has been less about outside forces than about the Administration’s own decisions and goals. The government has discussed Tornillo as if it’s a necessary response to a crisis “when it’s not a crisis,” Bob Carey, a former H.H.S. official, told me on Monday. Carey ran the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the branch of H.H.S. responsible for the care of migrant kids, during the final two years of the Obama Administration. Tornillo was, and is, “a consequence of the actions of the Administration,” he said.
President Trump put a halt to family separations in June, in response to the enormous public outcry and the humanitarian disaster that the policy produced. Yet, while public attention moved on, the number of kids in government custody has only gone up. As the Times reported, there are now more than thirteen thousand migrant kids in government facilities, five times more than a year ago, and those kids are spending an average of fifty-nine days in custody, twice as long as a year ago. While Tornillo was set up to make room for kids who had been taken from parents, most of the kids there now crossed the border alone. This isn’t a new problem—large numbers of kids crossed the borders by themselves in the last years of the Obama Administration. In response, O.R.R. used “emergency influx shelters,” with the idea to dismantle them as soon as demand waned. The goal was to place the kids with relatives or other sponsors around the country. “These facilities, none of them were intended as long-term care facilities,” Carey said. The Tornillo camp, for instance, doesn’t offer any systemized schooling to the kids there.
Recently, this work of processing kids out of government custody has begun to slow significantly. That’s reflected in the longer amount of time that the kids are spending in government facilities. “They’re treating these kids like criminals,” another Obama-era H.H.S. official told me. “That comes at a significant cost to the kids, to their mental health.” Part of the issue is that the government has given potential sponsors, who are often undocumented themselves, a real reason to fear coming forward to claim the kids. In June, as the Times reported, “federal authorities announced that potential sponsors and other adult members of their households would have to submit fingerprints, and that the data would be shared with immigration authorities.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement has acknowledged arresting dozens of people who came forward to be sponsors. With the way the numbers are trending, it’s hard to see how the need for the tent camp at Tornillo will end.
