If Biden reopens Homestead detention facility, vulnerable migrant children must be safe, not sorry | Editorial
The Biden administration is awfully tight-lipped about any plans to reopen the controversial Homestead Migrant Child Detention Facility to house young people — children among them — who crossed the southern border into the United States by themselves, unaccompanied by a biological parent, according to an exclusive story by the Miami Herald. The purpose is to catch the overflow of young people in order to facilitate COVID-19 distancing at other detention centers.
But even the Biden administration’s straight-shooting press secretary, Jen Psaki, has clammed up. Once she’s more forthcoming about plans for the Homestead facility — renamed the Biscayne Influx Care Facility — here’s what this community wants to hear:
- That the young migrants will be treated humanely. Yes, they are here illegally, but they are not criminals. They are unaccompanied minors, children and young teens who should be treated with dignity and respect. They should receive an education. Miami-Dade Public Schools provided that during the bad old days when the Homestead facility, under the Trump administration, housed a similar population.
At that time, the facility housed about 1,600 minors between 13 and 17 years old. Many crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without an adult. Others came with their parents, but were separated from them under Donald Trump’s heavy-handed zero-tolerance policy that allowed adults to be criminally prosecuted for crossing into this country illegally.
Reunite families
- That reunifying these young people and their families is top priority. Obviously, easier said than done. But, in his push to fulfill a campaign promise, President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Feb. 1 establishing a task force to reunite migrant families separated under his predecessor’s policy.
That administration separated more than 5,000 children from their parents at the border between July 2017 and June 2018. According to the ACLU, at least 1,000 of those families remain separated. In some instances, many parents are back in Honduras, Guatemala and other Central American countries, while their children live with relatives in the United States.
- That the young people will be shielded from physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Keeping these children and teens safe — from staff and from each other — must not become a partisan sticking point as it did during the Trump administration. In fact, the Homestead facility opened during President Obama’s second term in 2015 to shelter unaccompanied minors. And, as NPR reported in 2019, at such detention centers across the country, “The federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is in charge of caring for under-age immigrants, received more than “4,500 allegations of sexual abuse and sexual harassment between 2015 and 2018.”
The NPR report said most of the allegations involved one child abusing another, but 178 were directed at staff members and ranged from “inappropriate romantic relationships between children and adults, to touching genitals, to watching children shower.”
About 1,300 of those complaints were deemed serious enough for the FBI to investigate. Though the majority were considered unfounded, some were not.
But they all should serve as a warning: Greater safeguards and oversight should be built into the new system.
Full transparency
- That any private contractor vying to operate Homestead has no record of allowing such reprehensible, and criminal, behavior. But already, troubling names are in the mix. According to the Herald story, by Monique O. Madan and Alex Daugherty, one company planning to submit a proposal, Serco Inc., is “a U.K. contractor that has faced allegations of abuse and sexual assault in Britain and Australia. That’s a red flag if there ever was one.
And is Caliburn, the private company that operated the facility during the Trump administration, in the running? The Biden administration should steer clear of a company that waived background checks — with the federal government’s OK — on workers at the facility.
- That the Biscayne Influx Care Facility will operate transparently and that appropriate community stakeholders, including elected officials, will have ready access to the center. Under the Trump administration, several elected leaders — especially if they were Democrats — were denied entry. That only led to only increased suspicions last time. If the facility has nothing to hide, it should welcome oversight under an established structure, perhaps from social service agencies or immigrant advocates rather than political figures.
- That there’s a hurricane-evacuation plan. That was the reason given for shutting down the facility in August 2019.
This community is expecting night-and-day differences should the Homestead detention facility reopen. Clearly, the Biden administration is going to have to change far more than just the facility’s name.