WASHINGTON: Five months after the Biden government expressed an emergency and ran to establish a shelter to accommodate a number of children across the US-Mexico border, children continued to languish on sites, while more suggesting, said child welfare advocates.
More than 700 children spend three weeks or longer on government sites that are not licensed in mid-July, according to the declaration submitted with a federal court that oversees the condition of detention for immigrant youth.
Advocates say children must be released quickly to their relatives in the US or sent to licensed facilities.
In one of the submissions, a 16-year-old Salvadoran boy said children served raw meat.
It took more than a month for the boy, who said he spoke with his parents every week, to be released to his father in Georgia.
“When I wake up every day, I feel very frustrated.
From the young man that I arrived, I was the last one here,” the boy said in the declaration.
“I want to go home with my father now.” When Biden’s administration established an emergency site in March to relieve dangerous densities at the border station, they were intended to be a temporary improvement.
But months later, some wondered if it was still happening.
The border intersection by children without adults in July approached the same level they did in March despite summer heat.
“If you have a dinner party that you plan to have three people, and 30,000 people appear, you will have a problem,” US District Judge Dolly M Gee, who oversees the settlement agreement for decades that regulate prisoners.
Conditions for children, said a recent hearing.
“The infrastructure is not regulated for tens of thousands of people who come at a time, and somehow the paradigm must switch to finding ways to handle these numbers.” The US border authority reported more than 18,000 meetings with immigrant children who were not accompanied in July, up 24 percent from the previous month.
The rise came on the busiest but for the Biden government on the border, with a total of almost 200,000 meetings even though the crossings were usually estimated to be slow during the summer.
According to government reports in early August, the Ministry of Health and Human Services have nearly 15,000 children in their care but only 11,000 licensed beds for immigrant children.
Using large-scale facilities can fill this gap, although advocates say the government will do better by expanding a licensed shelter where children are given case workers, recreation and six hours of education on every working day.
The Ministry of Health and Human Services are assigned to treat children until they can be sent to live with other relatives or sponsors in the United States while they are waiting for Immigration Judges to decide whether they can live in the country legally.
While the agency has a network of licensed storage stores that can be expanded, sufficient space in foster care programs and large entrance facilities, what adhere to specific standards for staffing and conditions, it continues to turn to this emergency site.
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Advocates said emergency intake sites did not comply with existing agency standards and were inadequate and expensive choices, especially for young and vulnerable children who had overcome the trauma leaving home and made a dangerous trip north.
“There are other ways to do this.
They sort of put their heads in the sand and acting like an emergency intake site is the only game in the city, and so far from the truth,” said Leecia Welch, senior director of legal advocacy and welfare of children at the National Center Law of Youth and one of the lawyers who represent children in the case of a federal court.
“When you start with terrible, and it’s better still terrible, it’s not fine.” Advocates have asked Gee to order administration to follow standards on emergency sites as did for its maintenance facilities, which also aim to compensate for increasing arrival.
For example, springs Carrizo, Texas, facilities up to 1,000 children must provide care workers for every eight children when they wake up and at least one individual counseling session every week for each child.
The trial of this problem is scheduled for OCTPBER 1.
Officials at the Ministry of Health and Human Services do not answer questions from the Associated Press.